What Happens When You Can’t Afford Your Children?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/156260/what_happens_when_you_can’t_afford_your_children/

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Helping highly educated women have it all is a hot topic, from Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article, to Amy Chua’s book about Chinese child-rearing Tiger Mothers to Pamela Druckerman’s ode to French parents. The blogosphere is on fire.

Missing from this discussion is the plight of working-class women to have it at all. Since the Great Recession, a larger portion of adults worry that they cannot afford children. Doing so often requires a stark choice between jobs essential to the family’s solvency or adequate supervision of the young. The class contrasts are wide and growing starker.

The lives of upper-middle-class women have been remade to make two high-profile careers the norm. Sociologist Paul Amato and his colleagues found that those with the highest marital quality were the upper-middle-class, two thirds of whom had dual income marriages (Alone Together, 2009). The others have husbands with six-figure-plus incomes.

These couples marry and have children later. When they do, the marriages are more stable and partners tend to be more supportive of each other’s work needs. The men and women have made it into high status positions with more flexibility in scheduling work activities, and they have the resources to supplement parental time with high-quality caretakers. If the women (and increasingly many of the men) must give up the gold ring – the career capping position that includes ultimate power, status or income – to meet their families’ needs, they can still achieve the good life and manage it well.

[Gman]

1. During the Great Depression

they would literally give children away. I heard several stories growing up about families that did.

[bemildred]

2. You all go to jail?