Consider my Sengottai grandmother. Her life was in a joint family--a multi-generational household in which the matriarch lived with her daughter and son-in-law, and their sons and daughters-in-law. My grandmother was one of the two daughters-in-law.
When my grandmother had kids--four of them, and all daughters--she was not the only one taking care of the girls. Depending on the time of the day, there were other family members who attended to the infant or the toddler.
After getting married, my mother was practically in a nuclear family setting. (In their later and final years, both grandmothers lived with us.) During their visits, grandmas helped out in the kitchen and with the kids. And, yes, my mother too did not work outside the home.
All these mean that neither my mother nor my grandmother ever had any worry about child care for their kids.
But then those were the old days when a woman's role was tightly circumscribed.
However, at first gradually, and then suddenly, conditions for women changed in India too.
Most of my parents' younger female cousins went to college. A couple of them started working as professionals, as teachers and physicians. So, of course, there was no doubt that my sister would go to college, and that was the case with all my cousins too.
It is such changes throughout the old country that made possible the wonderful image of women rocket scientists celebrating their achievement in India's space program.
Did those women scientists have to worry about child care for their kids? My hypothesis is that they did not. I don't know their back stories. But, chances are good that if those scientists are also mothers, then child care was never a big worry for them. Grandparents, almost always grandmothers, took care of the young ones while the parents were off at work.
Of course, that is not the case here in the United States.
Living as nuclear families is the norm here in the US. Sometimes the nucleus is a single-parent, surrounded by electron children. (I know, I should stop here with this metaphor!) It is also not unusual for the nuclear family to be far away from grandparents.
There is no going back to living as joint families. There is no going back to restricting what women can do either. Well, in such a case, it does not take a female rocket scientist in India to figure out that we have a huge problem in this country with taking care of the young.
In such a context, is child care a personal responsibility or a social issue that has to be collectively addressed?
The two main political parties here are divided on this, as one can easily imagine.
[Progressives] are seeking a paradigm shift. They see child care much like public education: a service on which society depends and therefore should ensure.“It’s a public good and should be treated that way” said Julie Kashen, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “The shared stake in seeing children thrive doesn’t suddenly begin when they turn five.”But conservatives fear government intrusion into the family realm. Rachel Greszler, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, recently warned Congress that the measure would increase costs and drive small centers out of business, especially those based in homes and churches. She also said the policy would penalize parents who stay at home, taxing them to expand center-based care and ignoring the “tremendous personal and societal value” of full-time child-rearing.
I was/am never a fan of government-subsidies for adults to have children. In my secular framework, having a child is a conscious (or, sometimes, an accidental) choice. Decisions on what we choose to do have consequences. I am not ready to agree that the consequences of personal decisions have to be shared societally.
But, I have also always believed that subsidies for human issues are far more important than subsidies for the artificially and legally constructed "persons" called corporations.
I don't suppose that the Republican Party that favors subsidizing artificial persons over real people could be bothered that Catherine Rampell says "care work is in crisis."
[Child]-care providers (whose ranks have begun shrinking again in recent months) as well as nursing and residential care facilities.
Both of these industries employ about 10 percent fewer workers today than was the case pre-pandemic. Collectively they’ve lost almost half a million jobs on net since February 2020.
It comes down to supply, demand, and price.
The need for care workers is vast. But few people are willing to take these positions, at least in exchange for the meager pay offered.The key problem is the enormous gap between what it costs to pay a living wage, and what families can afford. Caregiving — whether for elderly patients, or young children — is extremely labor-intensive. The labor itself is emotionally and physically demanding. And care recipients often cannot absorb the full cost of these services on their own.
Corporations-loving Republicans ought to be concerned though:
Problems in the care economy cascade into every other industry. A lack of affordable care options pulls workers from other fields — especially women, who are more likely to be their families’ primary caregivers — out of the labor force.
If Republicans do not want to subsidize the child care and caring for the aged, then there is another option on which they could shift their position: Welcome immigrants!
.@margbrennan: "There are 100,000 fewer childcare workers now than...before the pandemic. Where did they go?"
— Will Saletan (@saletan) October 17, 2022
"We are missing a lot of foreign-born women," says @BetseyStevenson. "Immigrant women provide a lot of childcare in this economy. And they left." https://t.co/nQnApL4MS3
As long as we have a party that is committed to protecting the life of abstract "persons" that corporations are, and with their party faithful committed to defending the "life" of a fetus in a petri dish while not caring about investing in life that is already here alive and suffering, we are doomed.
So, what can you do? The answer is simple: Vote like your life depends on it.
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