Caregiving Crisis: The U.S. birth rate's tanking. If only we knew what policies would help. (◔_◔)
So if you don't support caregivers, they'll stop having babies and that'll be bad for the economy and so many other things? YEP
Hey everyone,
These past few weeks have been dizzying, with statistics, reports, rhetoric and politicization. (More below.1) So let’s kick it off by thinking about our roles, our work and what our children will remember. Friend, writer and neighbor Lauren Muehlethaler asks: what are the memories our kids will hold onto of this time? What do we remember from our childhoods? Here’s her Mother’s Day-inspired tribute.
On my son’s first flight, when he was four, he got a private tour of the cockpit.
He got to press every button, sit on the pilot’s lap and put on their gigantic headphones. We got bumped to first class, special cookies, the works. And when we got to our destination, a resort in Florida, he got to meet Spiderman and ride the epic waterslide as many times as he wanted.
But my son remembers none of this. All of those moments: dissolvable grains of sugar. Kids’ memories are clever and unreliable. As caregivers, there are moments that we want to crystallize for our children, insist they make meaning out of what we think is meaningful, and yet they pass through them, gone forever. There are other moments you wish your kids would forget. And, of course, those are the ones that anchor themselves in their temporal lobes like stubborn little pebbles.
My children – ages 6 and 4 – are proof of this. The moments from our Florida trip that stuck for my son: a bag of Cracker Jacks he ate on the plane and our orange-colored rental car, “like Blippi’s bowtie.” Those two particulars – soggy peas in comparison to the cockpit and Spiderman – are the pebbles that stuck.
The mosaic of my most treasured memories with my mother involve driving around in her company car, a teal Ford Taurus. She was a pharmaceutical sales rep in Boston, a job that required a lot of driving. She called on top plastic surgeons to sell expensive medical equipment – scopes, lasers, and cosmetic fillers. She threw around words like “quota,” “expense account,” and “client.” It all sounded deeply important to my 9-year-old ears.
I loved being seen with my mom. She had shoulder pads, high cheek bones, and drove like a war machine. I was her copilot in the backseat and I too, had deeply important jobs: studying the side of the Collagen® box ingredients, waiting in the car quietly, and holding my small hand out the window to cars next to us as if to say, ‘Back up, my very important mother is coming through.’
She was constantly in motion, like a tempest. My mother was my idol then and her job felt mythic. I marveled at the sound of her higher-pitched ‘work phone’ voice as it glided into the brick-sized car phone.
Recalling these vivid, yet wholly unremarkable memories of my own childhood has been a balm for me these last 18 months. My mom was probably stressed to the bone at having to cart me around on sales calls. She probably wished she could just do her thing, move faster, not have to entertain me. She probably wished she had the capacity to research afterschool programs. I didn’t notice or care. I just liked being with her, buckled in and on an adventure. That’s what I felt and that’s what I remember.
In hindsight, I can see there were bigger factors at play. My parents were divorced, so she was a single mother for a time. She was hustling, no time for friends or hobbies. She taught me to make my own grilled cheeses before my classmates were allowed to use the stove. But those aren’t really the things I remember. What I really remember is spending that time in her car, watching her work.
Kids want so much from us all the time – especially now. Food, IT support, fight mediation, the socks without those scratchy threads on the inside, the yellow bowl (not blue!), the list goes on forever.
Sometimes it feels like they want more than we have to give, like our shelves have been stripped clear. Sometimes it feels like the pandemic has been a relentlessly cruel trick to see how many full-time jobs caregivers can juggle before we combust, sending a mushroom cloud of exhausted human particles into the air.
But maybe all our kids really need to be happy and OK is to be with us for the ride. Of course we feel bad because we’re giving them less, because we’re more frazzled, because we’re being pulled in too many directions. That’s real – those might be our pebbles. But maybe theirs will be different.
I can hope they don’t remember my brittle voice on a loop, promise-pleading: “in a minute, my love,” every time they asked me to play LEGOs or go for a scoot during business hours. I can hope they forget the bright masks they learned to attach to their tiny faces anytime we left the house. But I can’t control that, and I can’t guarantee it.
All I can do is keep going and keep showing up with love. Over the last year, I’ve lost count of days I came downstairs wearing red lipstick, a fancy silk blouse, a greasy low bun, gold hoop earrings, and yogurt-stained sweatpants. “You look silly, mommy!” they’d squeal in unison. And I’m sure I did. But it was real, and they were watching me work.
I remember using my hand to trace the stitching on the backseat while watching my mother reapply lipstick at stoplights. “How do I look?” she’d ask, smooching her lips into the air in my direction. I remember thinking, my mom is so important. And she was because moms are.
So, Happy Mother’s Day, people. You are doing great. We are doing great. Here’s to hoping our kids’ memories hold onto the good stuff.
— Lauren Muehlethaler, who occassionally wonders:
Emily again. 👋 Thank you so much to Lauren for her perspective. These are important questions to ground us as we endure this crisis. Have a caregiving story or know someone who does? Please message me for inclusion in a future issue.
This week’s issue is SO MUCH. We try to keep it as short as we can, but the numbers, man. The numbers. Hang in there and see you soon.
What To Know About the Caregiving Crisis This Week
JOBS REPORT DEEP-DIVE: The April U.S. jobs report showed fewer new jobs and more women leaving the workforce and was considered universally disappointing:
U.S. employers added just 266,000 jobs in April, far short of the 1 million expected. The unemployment rate rose to 6.1%. Some 165,000 women aged 20 and over withdrew from the labor force, marking the first such monthly withdrawal since January. As the 19th put it in its headline: “A year from the start of the women’s recession, 2 million women are still out of the workforce.” Notable reactions:
"We need to make sure if we're going to have a strong recovery — a strong, equitable recovery — we need to get women back into the workforce," Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said in an interview with All Things Considered.
“Our policymaking has not accounted for the fact that people’s work lives and their personal lives are inextricably linked, and if one suffers so does the other. The pandemic has made this very clear,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at a White House briefing on the jobs numbers, per Forbes and NBC.
“Women’s re-entry into full engagement with the labor market — they are being held back. It is not the case that women are holding back the economy,” Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution told the 19th.
"It’s pretty clear that women will make or break this economic recovery and mothers are going to be at the center of it. Will mothers work? ... It is an economic question that has probably never been larger than it is right now," Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist at the RAND Corporation speaking to Reuters before the numbers even came out.
::looks to the door:: Oh wait a second… foremost economist Blanche Devereaux has some breaking news.
She reports that OTHER data out this week showed U.S. job openings soared to the highest level on record in March. As the AP says, this illustrates “starkly the desperation of businesses trying to find new workers as the country emerges from the pandemic and the economy expands.”
Gee, if only there were a sizable population of workers ready to go (cough cough, caregivers). And if only we knew policies that would enable them work.
Bottom line: Women and caregivers are pulled in too many directions and if we want to get them working (and we should!), then policy better shape up. It’s never been a question of women being able to find jobs, it’s being able to do them along with all their other responsibilities. Women looking for work should be upfront with hiring managers about their needs, Jenny Galluzzo, co-founder of The Second Shift, told MamaDen in a session with Julianna Goldman last week. The Second Shift connects companies with women looking to work on a project basis. "It's a great time to be able to speak up for yourself and self-advocate for what you need, or what you want out of a job and not take a job just because you need to take it," she said. "Take the job to be right for you, you your family, your life experience.”
NEWS WATCH: ROUNDUP — Keeping tabs on legislation, regulation and conversation:
Analysts: Biden's family plan would cost $700 billion more than the White House's estimate of $1.8 trillion over the next decade. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects2 the American Families Plan would spend $2.5 trillion through 2031 and tax hikes on the wealthy to pay for it would fall short at $1.3 trillion. The plan — which includes tax credits for families, universal pre-kindergarten3 and free community college — would increase government debt by almost 5% and decrease GDP by 0.4%, analysts say. They expect the effects from larger debt on the economy/tax increases to outweigh any productivity gains associated with the new programs.
Fox Business was all over this news, noting this report "could provide new fodder" to critics as negotiations "inch forward on Capitol Hill."
CNBC took a more balanced approach, citing an analysis, also released last week, by Moody's Economist Mark Zandi. His findings conclude the families plan AND the American Jobs Plan together would yield brighter long-term growth prospects by increasing productivity growth, labor force participation and hours worked. And it gets help to people who need it. Zandi wrote: "It also directs the benefits of the stronger economy to lower-income Americans and away from corporations and the well-to-do, helping to address the long-running skewing of the nation's income and wealth distribution."
If you want to make your blood boil, read New York Intelligencer’s article: “The Sexist Backlash to Universal Day Care.” It looks at fears by the right that subsidizing childcare will jeopardize families by freeing women up to work more. “The backlash to day care is not about workism but women,” it concludes. Feel free to read about protests after similar arguments were made when Idaho lawmakers rejected $6 million in childcare funding, per the 19th. WaPo features a great op-ed refuting these arguments by education policy and research expert Elliot Haspel.
If you want to cheer, read the New York Times’ “Policymakers Used to Ignore Child Care. Then Came the Pandemic.” Favorite quote: “If the United States treated other elements of infrastructure that are critical to the economy the way it does child care, you could imagine the chaos: Car owners would be left building bridges out of duct tape and scrap iron to get to the office, begging close relatives to come by each morning to hold a traffic light up at the corner.”
These policies do help and they do work, writes Misty Heggeness, Principal Economist and Senior Advisor at the U.S. Census Bureau, writes in an opinion piece for Columbia University's Initiative for Policy Dialogue.
Study after study has shown that putting resources directly into the hands of women and creating programs that improve their lives also improves society as a whole, she wrote.
Gonna just put this here about childcare costs: Zandi’s report noted the cost of childcare has risen quickly to substantially outpace inflation. We’ve all felt this but it was eye-opening to read the stats:
Some 4.9 million American households spend almost $36 billion on daycare centers, nurseries and preschools a year. The typical household that has childcare expenses spends $7,200, equal to some 10% of their income.
Only about one-third of families with the nearly 20 million kids under the age of 5 use childcare services; the rest rely on relatives or informal and often unreliable arrangements.
Over the past 20 years, the cost of daycare has doubled, while prices for all goods and services are up only 50%. Increases in the costs of all levels of education and childcare are far surpassing the rise in consumer prices since 2000.
On top of all this, childcare centers are hurting. ProPublica writes a deeply reported, moving story about one woman’s quest to keep her childcare centers open so she can help working parents. Mrs. Jackie, in Kansas City, went from having 112 kids pre-pandemic to 26, and was saddled by debt and issues with regulators. Also on our radar, but haven’t watched it yet, a PBS POV documentary about 24-hour childcare centers.
Bottom line: Ommmmm. Trying to breathe. There is so much at risk. So much politicization of something that should be so simple. And we haven’t even gotten to the birth rate drama yet. So first…
EVERYONE IS FLIPPING OUT ABOUT THE DROP IN BIRTHS BUT IT’S WAY MORE THAN THAT — Last week’s release of the U.S. birth rate for 2020 spurred a lot of “crisis” headlines that failed to miss the deeper intersectionality of what’s going on. Anne Helen Petersen, writer of Culture Study, sums it up perfectly in this tweet:
Let’s backtrack.
The news: The U.S. birthrate declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, falling 4% to 3.6 million births. That’s the lowest since 1979. And births declined about 8% in December, when babies conceived at the start of the pandemic would have been born. Meanwhile, the year’s deaths rose about 18%. (Covid-19) A total of 25 states had more deaths than births last year — up from five at the end of 2019.
The most obvious implication: The pandemic-propelled drop in U.S. births and increase in deaths, along with a decline in immigration, are now contributing to the aging of the American population. The trends were already looking grim. The U.S. Census Bureau reported late last month that in the past decade, the population rose at the second-slowest rate since the government started counting in 1790. The slowdown was caused by a drop in immigration and (you guessed it) declining birth rate. There are now more Americans 80 and older than 2 or younger, the NYT says, adding: "This would put the U.S. in line with the countries of Europe and East Asia that face serious long-term challenges with rapidly aging populations." (CC sidebar: The once-a-decade Census is used to reapportion seats in Congress and thus, the Electoral College. So the aging aspect of the data release hasn’t been focused on much by the media yet.)
What’s so bad about aging populations? There are many reasons. Aging populations can mean slower labor force growth, which will hamper the economy and call into question social safety nets, such as Social Security. There is also more difficulty caring for older adults, because there aren't enough workers to go around. This can pose significant challenges to families.4
Wait, isn’t this happening in Japan? Yep. (Keep an eye on China, based on their woeful birthrate out this week.) NYT’s The Daily Podcast did an excellent two-part take looking at the slowdown in the U.S. birth rate, followed by an episode looking at the slowdown in Japan, considered the “greyest” country in the world. The population has been shrinking since 2007 and nearly 30% are now over 65. The birth rate is among the lowest of developed countries. Why? More women had to work in the 1990s amid a weakening economy, but they take on a heavy childcare burden. It’s untenable: Japanese men do on average 41 minutes a day of housework and child care, vs men in the U.S. at just under 2 and 1/2 hours of housework and childcare a day. Not hard to see where years of this get you. (Listen to the podcast as it tracks a mom who “misses” a train on her way to pickup her kids, saying it’s her only time alone. We’ve all been there.)
“When the women go to work, they either decide that they like working so much that they don’t want to get married and have children,” Tokyo bureau chief Motoko Rich said. “Or, if they’re working and they also have children, it’s so difficult to combine the two that is certainly not an incentive to have a lot of children.”
Japan has been offering free preschool and other incentives, and opening itself up to immigration. Advisers warned leaders just last month that Japan should have a "sense of crisis" about the birth rate because Covid-19 is hastening the downward trend, Reuters reports. This year Japan may see fewer than 800,000 births, which is a decade ahead of projections.
So the birth rate decline is actually indicative of SO MUCH MORE. Correct. And it has implications far beyond having fewer babies. We like how NYT lead Census writer Sabrina Tavernise summed it up on The Daily.
“It seems like just a nerdy little number. But the truth is it’s incredibly important because it touches on almost every aspect of American life. I mean, think about it— immigration, the social safety net, health insurance, hospitals, elder care, the role of government, how large it should be,” she said. “These are huge arguments in this country and they have been for a long time. And the problem is we as Americans have gotten unused to thinking of ourselves as one group. It’s much less we and much more I. We’ve become tribal in a way that will really complicate collective decision-making on these really, really important issues.”
Bottom line: We can hope the low birth rate and its many ripples will provide more grounding in arguments for caregiving as economic infrastructure, and for broader support of women in the workplace. Gee, if only we knew what policies would help.
Signing off
Thanks, as always, for reading. Please send feedback, articles, gifs, your stories. If you find value in this newsletter, please spread the word.
Caregiving Crisis is a newsletter written by Emily Fredrix Goodman. We aim to publish every other week but other things may get in the way.
Brace yourself.
I wondered if they were focusing only on finding fault in the families plan because you know, that wouldn’t be surprising. But they did an analysis of the American Jobs Plan, finding it would spend $2.7 trillion (in-line with WH estimates) and raise $2.1 trillion dollars over the decade, largely via corporate tax hikes. The researchers estimate government debt would decrease by 6.4% and GDP would fall 0.8% in 2050, steeper negative impacts than the families plan. But I’m not seeing media covering this and the voices against the families plan are far louder than those against the jobs plan. Women have to prove their worth more and are being judged more harshly? Been here before. 🤦♀️
There is so much this week. Must flag that researchers have released their examination of the long-term effects of universal pre-K in Boston, which expanded public pre-K in the late 1990s but didn't have enough spots for all kids, as the NYT explains. Enter researchers, who have spent years tracking the effects. The findings: Preschool enrollment boosts college attendance, as well as SAT test-taking and high school graduation. Preschool also decreases several disciplinary measures including juvenile incarceration. Preschool enrollment does not affect state achievement test scores.
This is one of the reasons why I am silently screaming all the time. It's very clear where trends are headed. This caregiving crisis could be around for decades if we don't put in infrastructure now, empowering caregivers to work AND, if they choose, have babies. Inequities between women and men, and people of color vs. white people will widen if the crisis festers as Baby Boomers age.