Financing Parenting

Ask parents and many of them will tell you they would like to be able to take some time out from their jobs so they can devote more attention and energy to their kids. A recent study by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public policy research organization, reports that most parents (68 percent) "would prefer to stay home with their children when they are young." Among parents with children under five, 80 percent of mothers say this and 52 percent of fathers.1 Public Agenda's report set off a predictable outcry - especially among child-care advocates and some feminists. But before rushing to refute it, maybe it's time we listened carefully to what parents are actually saying.

Parents are not arguing that mothers shouldn't work - of course, they should be able to - or that we don't need higher quality, more affordable child care. Of course, we do. But more and better child care is just part of the solution. We also need to re-engineer our work lives to create more time for parenting. Public Agenda's report confirms what the National Parenting Association has found in our own polls.2 Parents don't define their biggest struggle as finding child care, they see it as balancing work and family. Even more striking is the finding that both mothers and fathers say that balancing job and family responsibilities is their toughest daily challenge. And almost half of full-time working mothers surveyed said they don't have enough time for their kids. Research by both Public Agenda and the National Parenting Association shows that given a choice of public policies, parents would much prefer to see tax breaks that make it easier for parents to cut back on job hours and incentives for businesses to adopt flexible work policies, than massive new subsidies for a national child-care system.3

We are fed up with either-or choices of uninterrupted work from graduation to grave versus jettisoning hard-earned degrees and years of job experience if we choose to spend more time at home for a few years raising our kids. For lower-income and single parents the choice is even starker: the income to support your children versus the time to care for them in the way you deem best. It's time for a new paradigm that allows us to take a chunk of time out from our lives of paid work to give the unpaid, but no less important, work of parenting the attention it deserves.

If so many parents are yearning to stay home with their children during their earliest years, what stops them? One factor is certainly well-founded anxieties about returning to the labor market and visions of lifetime career setbacks. Some want the continued rewards of work, but with scaled-down hours. For many parents, though, the biggest barrier is practical: they can't afford to.

Here's a proposal to help them. Why not allow working parents to draw social security benefits for up to three years during their prime child-rearing years? This would give moms and dads a real choice about how much time to spend working and how much time to spend with their kids. Some parents would decide to stay at home or cut back to part-time work so they do not become entirely disconnected from the labor market. To help cover the costs, those who elected to "borrow on their social security" could repay the system, at least in part. For example, benefit-takers could increase the employee's share of the payroll taxes they pay in when they return to work, they could defer their age of retirement with full social security benefits on a year-for-year basis, or they could accept a reduced monthly benefit, as those who opt for early retirement do now.

Any of these options would still involve some subsidy; otherwise the required payback would take too steep a cut out of future paychecks or retirement benefits to make it an affordable choice. Given our "pay-as-you-go" system of financing senior benefits out of tax contributions from current workers, you can argue this is fair. Without parents devoting time and resources to raising children, there will not be productive employees in the future whose earnings will be taxed to pay the bill for the older generation. And that is, in fact, exactly the argument made in a recent decision by Germany's Constitutional Court. It ruled that workers with children should pay a lower premium for the country's compulsory long-term nursing care insurance plan than childless ones on the grounds that future beneficiaries will depend on the premiums paid by coming generations of workers. "Those people who have not helped to maintain the number of future contributors - i.e., the childless - are getting an unfair financial advantage, says the court. So they should pay more."4