The Audacity of Hope

Americans today have 22 fewer hours a week to spend with their kids than they did in
1969. Millions of children are left in unlicensed day care every day—or at home alone
with the TV as a babysitter. Employed mothers lose almost an hour of sleep a day in
their attempt to make it all add up. Recent data show that parents with school age
children show high signs of stress—stress that has an impact on their productivity and
work—when they have inflexible jobs and unstable after-school care.
Sound familiar?
Many social conservatives suggest that this flood of women out of the home and into
the workplace is a direct consequence of feminist ideology, and hence can be reversed if
women will just come to their senses and return to their traditional homemaking roles.
It’s true that ideas about equality for women have played a critical role in the
transformation of the workplace; in the minds of most Americans, the opportunity for
women to pursue careers, achieve economic independence, and realize their talents on
an equal footing with men has been one of the great achievements of modern life.
But for the average American woman, the decision to work isn’t simply a matter of
changing attitudes. It’s a matter of making ends meet.
Consider the facts. Over the last thirty years, the average earnings of American men
have grown less than 1 percent after being adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of
everything, from housing to health care to education, has steadily risen. What has kept a
large swath of American families from falling out of the middle class has been Mom’s
paycheck. In their book The Two-Income Trap, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi
point out that the additional income mothers bring home isn’t going to luxury items.
Instead, almost all of it goes to purchase what families believe to be investments in their
children’s future—preschool education, college tuition, and most of all, homes in safe
neighborhoods with good public schools. In fact, between these fixed costs and the
added expenses of a working mother (particularly day care and a second car), the
average two-income family has less discretionary income—and is less financially
secure—than its single-earner counterpart thirty years ago.
So is it possible for the average family to return to life on a single income? Not when
every other family on the block is earning two incomes and bidding up the prices of
homes, schools, and college tuition. Warren and Tyagi show that an average singleearner
family today that tried to maintain a middle-class lifestyle would have 60 percent
less discretionary income than its 1970s counterpart. In other words, for most families,
having Mom stay at home means living in a less-safe neighborhood and enrolling their
children in a less-competitive school.
That’s not a choice most Americans are willing to make. Instead they do the best they
can under the circumstances, knowing that the type of household they grew up in—the
type of household in which Frasier and Marian Robinson raised their kids—has become
much, much harder to sustain.