Child Care Hassles Cause Birth Decline
Who’s watching the kids? The answer may explain why there are fewer kids to watch. With more than half the mothers of preschool children in the work force, it has only recently struck demographers that there is a connection between the phenomenon of declining fertility rates and the difficulties in arranging child care.
The sexual revolution is only slowly reaching the world of science. Hiring women to integrate the ranks was a beginning. Accepting females as players on the world stage is more difficult.
Take that sperm bank for Nobel laureates, for instance. Its advocates ignore that the mother, whose credentials they scarcely check, contributes an equal number of chromosomes to the child as the “genius” father. Likewise, until very recently, demographers examining the rise and fall of populations have focused exclusively on male issues, while agreeing with economist Eli Ginsberg that the rapid growth of women in the work force may be “the single most outstanding phenomenon of our century.”
Harriet Presser, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and currently a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, links hitherto unrelated studies of low fertility in the industrialized world to her own research on shift workers throughout the United States, many of whom are women. Her research has been published in demographic journals, and Presser, who is considered one of the leading demographers, is about to present her findings to an international meeting of demographers in Warsaw.
In the United States, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Poland and Romania, births are below the replacement level. (This does not mean that populations are actually declining, but it does mean that there is a leveling out that has important economic implications). At present rates of increase, there will be fewer working adults in the next generation to support the large number of retirees.
Fears of falling populations have traditionally elicited suggestions that fatter salaries for men would send their wives home from their jobs to have more babies. The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future argued in 1972 that government provision of child care would encourage women to work and thus lower family size.
But Presser argues that it is the burden of child care that prevents American women from having as many children as they say they want. Given a choice of working or remaining home, women who postpone childbearing until their mid-20s opt to remain in the work force but would like a second or third child--if there was some way to have that child without assuming total responsibility themselves.
By default, and economic necessity, many couples have arrived at a solution that may itself be creating new problems. Presser’s data reveals that in one-third of the American families that have a full-time working mother, one parent is working evenings or nights. Among married women working between 20 and 34 hours a week, two-thirds of the child care is done by the fathers. So Mom or Dad is at home while the other one works. That’s who’s minding the kids.
Children may well benefit from being with each parent individually, but there is evidence that tension is higher between parents who are working separate shifts than between parents who are home together. Besides, working nights or rotating shifts is contrary to our biological clocks. Shift workers tend to suffer from insomnia, indigestion and other stress-related symptoms. Presser feels that this situation has grave implications. “The ‘home-time’ structure of the intact American family is changing radically. The increase in ‘split-shift’ married couples with young children offers a special type of ‘single parenting’ family” that up until now has been ignored, her report says.
She suggests that women with young children want to work, but not necessarily when their husbands are home. Working different shifts is a jerry-built way to save money on child care, but it is far from ideal. She suggests that low fertility rates in all industrialized countries may result from the relatively higher cost of motherhood. Besides the expense of child care, there are non-monetary costs. Women in the work force enjoy child-free time to participate as adults in other activities. In spite of some changes in the attitudes of men toward fathering, surveys show that most still leave the bulk of parental care to their wives.
Presser doubts that women can be “bribed” away from the work force to have more babies by higher salaries for their husbands. If our society is really worried about the birthrate, “subsidizing child care for employed mothers would seem to be pronatalist,” she says. But she does not foresee this happening. Rather, she believes the population will level out and “only” children will become more common.
“Having fewer children enhances women’s status outside the home, increases their family power, and is certainly less tiring,” she maintains. If our society really fears depopulation, it would do well to provide good and inexpensive child care to make the work place compatible with child-rearing.
