{"id":7951,"date":"2018-01-04T22:58:24","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T04:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=7951"},"modified":"2018-01-05T09:38:19","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T15:38:19","slug":"quiz-family-not-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/01\/quiz-family-not-family.html","title":{"rendered":"Quiz: when is a family not a family?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AHOUSEWIFE_IN_THE_KITCHEN_OF_HER_MOBILE_HOME_IN_ONE_OF_THE_TRAILER_PARKS._THE_TWO_PARKS_WERE_CREATED_IN_RESPONSE_TO..._-_NARA_-_558298.jpg;<\/p>\n

Answer:\u00a0 when it\u2019s a certain type of policymakers talking about women\u2019s earnings, employment, and retirement.<\/p>\n

They measure women\u2019s labor force participation<\/a>.\u00a0 They discuss the long-term costs of forgoing employment<\/a>, when their children are young.\u00a0 They worry that women have inadequate retirement savings<\/a>, and measure their assets relative to men\u2019s.<\/p>\n

These are all questions that are connected up not just with women being mothers, but being, still more often than not, for a significant part of their working (and parenting) lifetime, wives, who make finance-related decisions in partnership with their husbands and will generally consider \u201ctheir\u201d finances to be the family finances, rather than adding up their own income and assets as separate in any way from their husbands\u2019.\u00a0 How does that line go?\u00a0 \u201cWhat\u2019s yours is ours, and what\u2019s mine is mine\u201d \u2014 expressing the (stereo)typical money-management approach of at least an older generation like my parents, in which his income funded their daily needs, and her (part-time) income funded her splurges.\u00a0 (Well, I don\u2019t really know what they did in that respect \u2014 mom & dad had, and still have, a confusing combination of his, hers, and his & hers bank accounts, but I never had a sense that one or the other of them had more \u201cspending money\u201d for their hobbies or purchases than the other, other than them working out what was and wasn\u2019t in the budget.)\u00a0 And in the year 2018, well, I suppose this may have diminished somewhat \u2014 at least based on advice-columnist evidence, since periodically there are letters from women bemoaning that their husband makes more, and still demands that each of them pay into their joint expenses equally, and then he runs off on golf weekends.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say that I recall seeing such a letter from a mother, though, so I\u2019ve always assumed that separate finances disappear when the family finances include daycare, or when one party reduces hours or leaves work entirely, and that even if separate bank accounts are maintained for some practical reason or another, the couple still thinks of their assets as shared, rather than a husband saying, when his wife trudges off to work at the age of 75, \u201ctoo bad, so sad, guess you should have saved more for retirement.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Disclaimer:\u00a0 I can\u2019t find any data online regarding the actual frequency with which couples keep finances separate.)<\/p>\n

Now, granted, this isn\u2019t the case for all women.<\/p>\n

There are, after all, women who choose to have children regardless of whether or not they have gotten married.\u00a0 I\u2019m not talking \u2013 yet \u2013 about those who unexpectedly become pregnant, but those who seek motherhood, and who choose sperm donors, or treat the fathers of those children as if they were sperm donors, and have no more interest in having those men involved in their lives, or paying child support, as they would a sperm donor.\u00a0 This is your generic mother of a children\u2019s novel protagonist \u2014 at least it seems to me that a favorite set-up is the child who\u2019s never known his father and that\u2019s just fine with everyone involved.\u00a0 Such a woman, compared to a similarly-situated man, who is much less likely to seek out parenthood, will invariably be worse off financially; even though she presumably isn\u2019t dropping out of the labor force, she\u2019s likely to cut back hours, and be able to save less simply because, duh!, she has a child to support.<\/p>\n

But what is Society, or The Government, supposed to do about this?\u00a0 Do we have an obligation to \u201cmake her whole\u201d?<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the more usual case of single parents, with an identified father \u2014 and dad is indeed supposed to be paying child support that\u2019s the equivalent to half the cost of raising a child, adjusted for income levels.\u00a0 Not sure that the government should be doing anything more to make things \u201cfair.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which leaves married parents.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s where it bugs me that policymakers want to treat husbands and wives as two separate individuals who just happen to be living in the same household.<\/p>\n

In part, they say, women need to advance in their careers as aggressively as men, and build up assets they own individually, so that someday when the marriage dissolves, they can continue on as individuals with no financial harm.\u00a0 And they\u2019re not wrong when they say that women are at risk of financial harm befalling them if their husbands trade them in for younger models, or mistreat them in such a manner that, however committed they are to the institution of marriage, they need to leave their own marriage, and that such events are not predictable or avoidable just by being religious enough or committed enough or a \u201cgood enough\u201d spouse.<\/p>\n

But the solutions on offer for women \u2014 which basically work out to \u201clive your life as if your husband will leave you at any time\u201d \u2014 just don\u2019t work for families in their day-to-day life.\u00a0 It\u2019s like asking someone to buy insurance, but at a price that\u2019s so high that it up-ends their life.<\/p>\n

The majority of families with young children choose to have a family member, not a paid professional, care for their children at least most of the time.\u00a0 The latest data reports that, of married mothers with children under age 1, only 39% work full-time, with the remainder working part-time (fewer than 35 hours) or not at all.\u00a0 The rates, not surprisingly, climb for mothers of older children;<\/p>\n

42% of mothers with children age 1 year,<\/p>\n

46% of mothers with children age 2 years,<\/p>\n

45% of mothers with children aged under 6 years (yeah, I don\u2019t know why there\u2019s the drop),<\/p>\n

and 56% of mothers of children above age 6 work full-time.\u00a0 (Women with no children at home were less likely to work full-time, presumably because they are more likely empty-nesters who are making their way into retirement.)<\/p>\n

(Surprisingly, the rates were only\u00a0a percentage point or two lower for the split out of married mothers \u2014 presumably that\u2019s because of the varied situations of these women, many of them either living with a boyfriend or with family, with some stereotypical welfare queens mixed in.)<\/p>\n

This\u00a0is all courtesy the most recent\u00a0<\/strong>BLS report on employment<\/a>, and, yes, you might say that I\u2019m \u201ccheating\u201d by including part-time workers with non-employed mothers, but I think it\u2019s important to recognize that this status is a rejection of the push to work full-time, even if it\u2019s not a full-blown \u201cstay-at-home mom\u201d life.<\/p>\n

So here are my gripes:<\/p>\n

First gripe, all of the efforts to make it easier on the finances for mothers to work, and work full-time, are fine when it\u2019s a matter of lifing a family out of poverty or low-income-ness, but not so much when we\u2019re talking about subsidizing middle- or even upper-middle-class families\u2019 daycare choices, in ways that end up pushing women into full-time work who\u2019d really rather not, either because taxes increase, or because they feel like suckers for not taking advantage of free childcare, or because resources for women with children at home (community-sponsored playgroups, for instance) disappear.<\/p>\n

Second gripe is the implied deficiency of non-employed (or non-full-time-employed) women; a lot of what I\u2019m reading still has a component of \u201cwomen are letting their brains rot if they\u2019re not working full-time and pursuing career advancement,\u201d though, yes, this is the accumulation of a lot of reading, rather than some specific article I can quote from.<\/p>\n

Third is with the idea that our economy is by definition better off, when more people work, and they work longer hours.\u00a0 Yes, it increases the GDP, and every politician wants a larger GDP, but does it improve quality of life?\u00a0 In Japan and Germany, boosting the labor force is an important\u00a0goal because\u00a0they\u2019re seeking more workers to keep the economy humming when the population (at least until automation takes over) becomes disproportionately older.\u00a0 They are also operating under the theory that women\u2019s labor force participation rate increase are a good proxy for the extent to which\u00a0mothers are able<\/em> to stay in the\u00a0workforce, and they think women will have more children if they are able to stay in the workforce while doing so.\u00a0 But, though our own fertility rate is decreasing, we don\u2019t have the same issues.<\/p>\n

Fourth gripe, and what motivated this post in the first place, is the fact that the focus on measuring individual income and assets rather than household finances reinforces the notion that family ties are all just temporary associations that don\u2019t mean anything.<\/strong>\u00a0 I mean, look, I get it, there\u2019s no easy way to take statistics on women\u2019s vs. men\u2019s income and assets, and wave a magic wand to cook the numbers into something that reflects, \u201cthis group of women in practice shares their husbands\u2019 earnings and assets, so they\u2019re OK, but this other group here can\u2019t, so we\u2019re going to worry about them.\u201d\u00a0 But I\u2019d still like to see a different path forward.<\/p>\n

And there is a legitimate question of how income and asset growth should be divided, not just when a marriage is dissolved, but throughout married life.\u00a0 It seems to me that at least some countries (maybe Switzerland?) take the earnings of a married person and, for Social Security purposes, credit half to each spouse as its being earned, rather than coming up with ways of \u201csharing\u201d the benefit post-divorce or in retirement.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019m just making that up, but it seems like a good idea.\u00a0 It would likewise seem like a good idea for IRAs and 401(k)s to be jointly owned automatically, though I suppose employers would freak out at the idea of taking it a step further and creating parallel spouses\u2019 accounts for their employees.\u00a0 And how this all connects up with community property<\/a> in the various states where this is the law, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AHOUSEWIFE_IN_THE_KITCHEN_OF_HER_MOBILE_HOME_IN_ONE_OF_THE_TRAILER_PARKS._THE_TWO_PARKS_WERE_CREATED_IN_RESPONSE_TO\u2026_-_NARA_-_558298.jpg; By Villalobos, Horacio, Photographer (NARA record: 8464479) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Answer:\u00a0 when it\u2019s a certain type of policymakers talking about women\u2019s earnings, employment, and retirement. They measure women\u2019s labor force participation.\u00a0 They discuss the long-term costs of forgoing employment, when their children are young.\u00a0 They worry that women have inadequate retirement savings, and measure their assets relative to men\u2019s. These are all questions that are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[73,710,334,815],"class_list":["post-7951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childcare","tag-gender-equity","tag-pay-equity","tag-women-in-retirement"],"yoast_head":"\nQuiz: when is a family not a family?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Answer:\u00a0 when it's a certain type of policymakers talking about women's earnings, employment, and retirement. 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