The Economic Reasons Why ‘Mom’ Is America’s Most Important Job
Instead, for Mothers Day, I want to highlight something the official statistics never consider: Many womens most important job takes place outside the labor market. Its called being a mom. Failure to appreciate this can, and often does, lead to short-sighted, misguided labor market policies.
Working Moms
Consider this simple accounting exercise: 70 percent of prime-age women are working and about 74 percent are moms. Of course, these groups also overlap 48 percent of women fall into both categories. Putting it all together, roughly 96 percent of prime-age women are either working or parenting or both. Call it the EMP ratio: employed-and/or-mom to population ratio. In other words, nearly all American women age 25-54 are substantially engaged in productive and societally important activities. (The EMP ratio is about 88 percent if we only consider those with children under 18, but in this day and age, does anyone really believe parenting responsibilities end with high school?)
Why is this important? An enormous body of research spanning economics, biology, neuroscience, sociology and psychology points to the huge impact parents have on their childrens future outcomes, including health, educational attainment, employment and earnings. To take just one example, Nobel Laureate James Heckman has shown that test scores among children in the lowest income quartile, on average, rank 15 percentiles below those in the top income quartileby age six. Put differently, the disparities that are already in place by the time kids begin school account for more of their relative performance in seventh grade than do all of their experiences while in school .
Although scholars disagree on the degrees to which genetics and parental behavior contribute to child outcomes, two things are clear: First, parenting matters, and differences in parental backgrounds and capabilities contribute strongly to the intergenerational transmission of inequality; and second, well-designed public policies can immensely improved the life prospects of disadvantaged children, particularly if action is taken early.
Why Moms Matter
On the first point, Janet Currie of Princeton, among others, has demonstrated one potential pathway through which the parent-child link operates. Parental socioeconomic status is strongly predictive of child health, and this childhood health gradient can help explain differences, in the labor market and otherwise, in adulthood.
The role of moms is particularly important. While traditional gender responsibilities are blurring and although some studies emphasize the importance of dads education or occupation it remains the case that, in most families, the lions share of parenting duties falls to mom. According to the American Time Use Survey , among households with children under 18, women spend 1.7 hours engaged in childcare as a primary activity, compared with 0.9 hours for men. If we include secondary childcare time that spent while also doing something else (better known as multitasking) women spend 7.6 hours a day tending to their children, while men allocate just 5 hours. The gap persists even when both parents are working full time, with women spending an average of 30 minutes more a day caring for their kids. If 30 minutes doesnt sound like a lot, consider that it works out to 182 hours over the course of a year equivalent to dad taking a week-long vacation while mom does all the parenting herself.
Whats more, mothers exert disproportionate influence on the health of their children. For one thing, its biology. Economists Anne Case (Princeton) and Christina Paxson (Brown) have found mothers behaviors during pregnancy (for example, whether they smoke, drink, or receive prenatal care) have a significant impact on infant birthweight and child health; child health, in turn, influences cognitive ability and academic achievement. Here, maternal education becomes particularly relevant. The more educated a woman is, the more likely she is to avoid substance use and seek medical care while pregnant. Shell also be more likely to defer childbearing to a later age, and with maturity comes improved parenting practices. Finally, if it is women to whom the majority of child-raising duties fall, then it is their knowledge of and attitudes toward health practices that will shape their childrens health.
So, for reasons of both time investment and biology, how capably women perform as moms has consequences that extend well beyond their families, shaping the character and productivity of the next generation, as well as the demands placed on government programs and services including the public assistance, health care and criminal justice systems that we remedially rely upon to fill in the holes. Theres also another reason we ought to pay particular attention to moms: It is to them that the vast burden of single parenting largely falls.
The story of poverty in America is largely a tale about single moms. People in families headed by women with no husband present account for half of all poor people in families (by contrast, single father families account for just 10 percent of the total). Growing up in a single-mother headed household is one of the surest pathways to poverty: 55 percent of children in such circumstances are poor; among African-American children, the number is 61 percent.
Sometimes, no amount of effort is able to make up for the lack of a spouse. One in 10 single mom families remain poor despite mom working full-time, year-round; in those cases where employment is constrained to be part-time, or part-year, the poverty rate jumps to over a third. The unemployment rate among single moms with young children is among the highest of any group and two to three times higher than that among married women. If you want to prevent poverty from perpetuating, youd be hard-pressed to find a better place to start than helping single moms.
This Mothers Day, lets remember two things. First, labor market policy must respect and prioritize the job of parent.
And, second, call your mom.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-economic-reasons-why-%e2%80%98mom%e2%80%99-is-america%e2%80%99s-most-important-job/ar-BBjwQUh
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XXJefferson51
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