The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 มี.ค. 2024
- American policy is uniquely hostile to families. Other wealthy countries guarantee paid parental leave and sick days and heavily subsidize early childhood care - to the tune of about $14,000 per year per child, on average. (The United States, by contrast, spends around $500 per child per year (www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/up...) .) So it’s no wonder our birthrate has been in decline, with many people saying they’re having fewer children than they would like.
Yet if you look closer at those other wealthy countries, that story doesn’t entirely hold. Sweden, for example, has some of the most generous work-family policies in the world, and according to the most recent numbers from Our World in Data, from 2021, their fertility rate is 1.67 children per woman - virtually identical (ourworldindata.org/grapher/ch...) to ours.
Caitlyn Collins is a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of “Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.” To understand how family policies affect the experience of child-rearing, she interviewed over a hundred middle-class mothers across four countries with different parenting cultures and levels of social support for families: the United States, Sweden, Italy and Germany. And what she finds is that policies can greatly relieve parents’ stress, but cultural norms like “intensive parenting” remain consistent.
In this conversation, we discuss how work-family policies in Sweden frame spending time with children as a right rather than a privilege, how these policies have transformed the gender norms around parenting, why family-friendly policies across the globe don’t increase birthrates, how cultural pressures in America to be both an ideal worker and an ideal parent often clash, why many American parents feel it’s impossible to have more than one or two children, how cultural discourse has led younger women to “dread” motherhood and more.
Mentioned:
“Parenthood and Happiness: Effects of Work-Family Reconciliation Policies in 22 OECD Countries (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...) ” by Jennifer Glass, Robin W. Simon and Matthew A. Andersson
“Is Maternal Guilt a Cross-National Experience? (www.springerprofessional.de/e...) ” by Caitlyn Collins
If you're interested in this topic, we also recommend checking out this series from the New York Times Opinion:
“Would You Have Four Kids if It Meant Never Paying Taxes Again? (www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/op...) ” by Jessica Grose
“Are Men the Overlooked Reason for the Fertility Decline? (www.nytimes.com/2023/02/15/op...) ” by Jessica Grose
“If We Want More Babies, Our ‘Profoundly Anti-Family’ System Needs an Overhaul (www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/op...) ” by Jessica Grose
Book Recommendations:
Competing Devotions (www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978...) by Mary Blair-Loy
Mothering While Black (www.ucpress.edu/book/97805203...) by Dawn Marie Dow
Hope in the Dark (www.haymarketbooks.org/books/...) by Rebecca Solnit
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast (www.nytimes.com/column/ezra-k...) . Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-... (www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-...) .
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Jessica Grose and Sonia Herrero.
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At about the 50 minute mark it gets real. Yes, that’s why our borders remain basically open. We’ve found a lazy immoral way to maintain a cheap (and poorly treated) labor force. This way we maintain the illusion of a healthy and vibrant and growing economy.
Please help me understand your logic. Immigrants are trying desperately to cross the border and enter the US. They do this because they believe it is their best path to a better life. Far from being immoral, giving them a green card and a short path to citizenship would be the most moral thing we could do for them and for the long term interests of the US.
One of the women I worked with at the call center had to go on bedrest for her last 4 weeks of pregnancy. She had a baby with medical issues. She had 2 weeks of FMLA once the baby was born. She came back and they fired her 2 days later.
I left that job, and now we live in a co-op with 6 people, and yep. That's the move. Go find other people and work together.
Somewhere around the 35-minute mark, Klein made the comment that he cannot imagine having 8 months off to care for a child. I have been home a lot with my kids, and if you are a nursing mother, those eight months will fly! In our family, we try to be as environmentally conscientious as we can be. That meant using cloth diapers that I washed and hung out to dry. At the moment, I have bread rising in the oven not only because it's less expensive than store-bought bread and healthier, but also because there is no plastic used in packaging it. The list goes on and on. When I was home with my young children, household tasks ate up hours of my time while the children played in their mini-kitchens, with crayons, outside, etc. They often sat on the kitchen floor while I cooked. Yes, it's dull, but the internet has made life for stay-at-home parents wonderful -- so much content and learning can be done by listening online as I am doing now with the podcast while I exercise, do laundry and bake.
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My wife and I had twins in Berlin. I worked for a US university as a postdoc and she was working for a German company. I effectively took 8 months off because we just completed a giant project from the last 4 years and my supervisor let me work minimal hours and she had paid leave because she's in the German system. Even with this we were both barely surviving on 4hr-5hr sleep max for the entire time. Thank god we were able to take the time off because it's completely crazy for one parent to try to care for 2 babies. Parents also have twins in the US without these benefits.
@@ssun190 I often wonder how infants in day care are cared for. Everyone I've known who's had twins tells about how exhausting it is, yet ome states only require one caregiver for 5 (FIVE!) infants - that's like twins and triplets. Granted those people get to go home at night, nevertheless, it seems obvious that most infants must be neglected if they are put into daycare.
@@fromcolorado3367 So I think if they are > 1 year old and healthy the 1 to 5 ratio is fine. By then they crawl around and distract one another and can manage to get some food into their own mouth or hold a bottle. If they are only 3 months then absolutely no way.
This is very interesting, but I find that the parenting methods and roles discussed here are applicable to Yuppies. Most people are not Yuppies and do not parent like Yuppies.
European social democracy is still the best we got and I'm sure it'll continue to go strong.
love and solidarity to our Swedish neighbours from Vienna ✊☺️
It’s not hard to imagine a better way to both work and parent. A work culture that does not think a successful employee is someone who works 40 plus hours a week and/or is on call. I think we kid ourselves when we think people are more productive this way. Kids thrive when they have a combination of security, routine and guidance from parents, some time alone to learn to entertain to themselves and time with other kids where they can be creative and learn social skills. The US needs to return to building communities where kids and parents feel safe to let kids have more autonomy - walkable neighborhoods with local amenities where you can get to know your neighbors and have a supportive network.
Yes, the issue is definitely that we focus so much on the negatives of parenting and completely ignore yhe fun. And yes, Ezra! Tell us about the fun times you have with your son!
What does the data say about whether it has in fact become more unsafe for children to entertain themselves outside? What about policies in this area?
Cars. We need more spaces in most areas without cars, especially those monster trucks that limit sight lines. They make playing in neighborhoods, in streets, deadly.
@@oforde5072 Yes, exactly
Never had kids and have no regrets. 😊
The elephant in the room: race
They won’t talk about how Sweden is homogenous and white. It’s one of the reasons why people are very happy. When third world immigration increases significantly there their whole program will fall apart. I find this interview to be somewhat disingenuous.
If my experience, being a parent is way better anything I could get from work or anywhere else in life. It's just the best thing ever, as difficult and exhausting as it is. I just find the obsession with work, career, and materialism to be toxic. It's really hard to live in a world and culture like this. Having children grounds me in the reality of what life and existence and reality are all about. There's no tension between work and life for me. I'm here to live. I'm not a slave.
If women are not going to settle for a subservient role as unemployed mother, then the two person family as the norm has to be re-examined. It doesn’t work.
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