Lies Parents Tell Themselves About Why They Work
Few topics are as important--and involve as much self-deception and dishonesty--as finding the proper balance between child-rearing and work
But the self-deceptions are self-destructive. The lies parents tell themselves--combined with the fraudulence of the public debate--make it difficult to devise reform or change attitudes in a way that might ease pressures on families.
Lie #1: We need the extra money Ask parents why they both work and the answer is often simple: They have to. For instance, when that question was posted on the Women's Wire, an Internet bulletin board, 53 percent of the 944 women who responded said they worked to "pay those darn bills." According to a 1996 Yankelovich survey, people with high incomes were just as likely to say they worked for "basic necessities" as were those at the economic margins. Are most middle- and upper-middle-income families really working because they "need" the money?
For the bottom third to half of the work force, it is true that stagnating wages have increased pressure on both parents to get jobs. Over the past quarter century, earnings for men without college degrees have barely kept pace with inflation; high school dropouts have actually worked longer hours for less pay. Wives in the poorer half of U.S. households helped cushion the blow, typically working 40 percent more hours today than in 1979. "At the bottom," says economist Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan, two sources of income are "the difference between making ends meet and not making ends meet."
Yet families with bigger incomes are as likely to have both parents working as those from the bottom half, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thirty-one percent of the families in which both parents work are making more than $70,000 in income. Many families have, in effect, defined "necessity" upward. When asked in a 1975 survey to define "the good life," a majority listed only a handful of things: a car, a lawn, and a home they owned; a happy marriage; an interesting job; and being able to afford college for their kids. Twenty years later, the Roper Starch Worldwide survey found that most respondents defined "the good life" to mean far more in material terms: a job that pays "much more than average," "a lot of money," a color TV. Four in 10 add "really nice clothes," a second car, a vacation home, travel abroad. Thirty-seven percent even mentioned a swimming pool.
Many dual-earner couples say that although they may not be working literally to put bread on the table they do need two earners to pay for the necessities of middle-class life. Janet Slemenda, a Boston architect, concedes that her family could live on one income but that "we wouldn't be able to visit our relatives out of state or travel on vacation."
The argument that middle-class families need two incomes usually rests on the soaring costs of housing and college tuition. Yet even those expenses have not risen fast enough to explain the massive entry of women into the work force. At $113,000, the median price of a single-family home rose by 25 percent more than the general inflation rate from 1970 to 1995. During the same years, earnings in one-income families were essentially flat. But that means that half the houses in the country sold for less than $113,000, and in dozens of cities the average is much less: San Antonio, $81,000; Tampa, $78,000; Pittsburgh, $82,000. In addition, today's higher prices simply buy more house. The average new home has 38 percent more square footage than in 1970. And based on the actual costs of carrying a mortgage--an amount affected dramatically by lower interest rates--houses are more affordable now than in 1975. (This is the other side of the widely noticed sag in the real-estate market.)
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