both to work more and to have more children.
Women themselves take jobs for many personal reasons, of course—to pay family bills, to develop talents, to be more autonomous, and to contribute to society. With two parents working full time, then, the call turned to “work-family balance”—both a balance between the contribution of one partner and the other, and a balance between the demands of home and work. In The Second Shift, I found that comparing the paid and unpaid work of women to the paid and unpaid work of men, husbands (all fathers of children aged 6 years and under) enjoyed an extra month a year of leisure compared with their full-time working wives. But from 1980 to 2005, this leisure gap between the sexes narrowed to between a half and a third of what it had been.12 At the same time, as the workday has lengthened for the middle class, jobs have become more insecure. So men, like women, are putting on shoes for a work-family shuffle that the comedian Tina Fey describes as a “tap dance recital in a minefield.”13
A call has also gone out for a new workplace. With flextime, workers can work at the kitchen table, or a nearby hub-office, saving time, gas, and space on traffic-clogged freeways, and fetch the children from school. But only 16 percent of workers actually telecommute in any given year.14 Job-sharing and good part-time work are also yet to become part of the normal scene. And in an era of insecure jobs, many workers are loath to ask too much of hidebound bosses who might lay them off. The “mom is working, so how are the kids?” and “work-family balance” conversations continue into the present, with less and less hopeful talk of help from the government.
FREE MARKETS AND FAMILY VALUES
Meanwhile, in a parallel conversation linking the free market to family values, proponents have called for a set of government policies: lower and less progressive taxes, privatization, deregulation of companies, and cuts to state services. These policies are said to free the market and, by so doing, to strengthen the family. Just as General Motors’ CEO once argued that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the American people,” so free-market advocates argue that what is good for the free market is good for the family. Lower and more regressive taxes may widen the class gap, they note, but it will not harm families because wealth will “trickle down” from top to bottom. Deregulation will also help by allowing companies more freedom and—although this is a less explicit part of the argument—inducing them to invest in the United States.15 Strong cuts in state services will make for a leaner, “less bloated” government, they say. Yet the U.S. government supports companies such as Wal-Mart, Boeing, and Target through offers of free or low-cost land, the building of free water and sewer lines, and low-cost financing and insurance. Companies also raise billions of dollars through tax-free bonds. So their call to reduce bloat refers only to cuts in public services, not to policies that benefit companies.16 The more America pursues these policies, they say, the freer the market and the stronger the family.
But is this true? One way to approach this question is to compare children in nations that have embraced free-market policies with children in nations that have not. A 2007 UNICEF “Report Card 7” does just that.17 Capitalist countries vary among themselves, of course. The United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, and some now include Portugal—so-called neo-liberal regimes—do not favor publicly funded services such as paid childcare or family leave.18 They have weaker social safety nets for the poor, and they pursue tax policies permitting wider gaps between rich and poor. Thus, the Report Card scholars were able to compare countries that pursue free market policies more with those—such as Norway and Sweden—who pursue them less.
Conducted by an international team of scholars, the report draws from dozens of national surveys as well as from cross-national data gathered by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank. Focusing on the twenty-one richest countries in the world, and comparing the health, education, and material and emotional well-being of middle school children, the researchers asked such questions as whether the children had a quiet place to study, a dictionary, and schoolbooks. They asked them whether they had someone to talk to, and if they had had an accident within the last year.
The highest ratings of child well-being went to the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—nations that, far more than the United States or United Kingdom, tax the rich, regulate commerce, and provide public services such as paid parental leave. The lowest overall ranks went to the nations most strongly pursuing a free-market agenda—the United States and United Kingdom, both of which ranked in the bottom third for five of the six key dimensions of child well-being. The United States ranked dead last among the twenty-one affluent countries in child poverty and ranked second to last in “family and peer relations” and “behaviors and risks.” The likelihood of a child skipping breakfast, becoming fat, smoking pot, or getting pregnant—on all these measures the United States and United Kingdom ranked worse than nearly all the other nations. Indeed, American girls had the highest rate of teen pregnancy.19
When asked how often they eat their main meal of the day with their parents “around a table,” nearly 80 percent of the children from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries reported “several times a week”—in contrast to 66 percent of American children. A smaller proportion of American children described their peers as “kind and helpful” (53 percent) than did OECD children overall (66 percent). Compared with their OECD counterparts, a smaller proportion of American children ate breakfast each morning or fruit every day, and more 13- to 15-year-old Americans were overweight (25 percent vs. 13 percent). A higher proportion of teens in the United States had smoked pot in the last year (31 percent) than had teens from the OECD countries that provided information on its use (21 percent). In addition, each child in the study was shown a picture of a ladder and was told the top of the ladder (10) is the “best possible life for you” and the bottom (0) “the worst possible life for you” they were then asked where on the ladder they stood. In how far up they placed themselves, the U.S. children ranked a low 18 out of 21.20
A 2010 follow-up study, UNICEF Report Card 9, recounted the same bad news—the United States ranked 23 out of 24 nations in the proportion of its children in poverty, beating out Slovakia, which came last.21 The United States ranked 19 out of 24 in education and 22 out of 24 in health.
What are we to make of these findings? Most of us assume that richer countries offer children better lives than do poorer countries. But by itself, a nation’s wealth does not improve the average well-being of its children. Nor is a higher proportion of stay-at-home mothers correlated with higher ratings in the well-being of children. Norway has one of the highest proportion of women aged 15 years and over in paid work (62 percent), but it ranked 7 out of 21 in overall child well-being. The United States, with its lower proportion (57 percent) of women in paid work, ranked 20 out of 21 in the overall well-being of children.22
Many Americans I have spoken to about the UNICEF report have responded with one reason or another why the high-state-support model would not work for the United States. “You can pay for state supports for working parents in little Norway with its population of 5 million,” one man told me, “but not in a country as big as the U.S.”23 Yet the sheer size of a nation’s population does not correspond to its Report Card ranking. Germany, with its population of 82 million, won higher scores in child well-being than Austria with its 8 million. Gathered together, the children of the 500-million-strong European Union rank higher than those of the 312-million-strong United States.
Still others point to the high proportion of poor minorities in the United States. “It’s easier for Europeans to earn higher average scores on child well-being than it is in America,” one woman explained, “because the U.S. has more minorities and immigrants who pull down our scores.”24 Although it is hard to compare the United States with the European Union in numbers of minorities—official figures are not comparable—France and Germany are home to roughly the same proportion of immigrants as the United States, yet they still score higher in child well-being.25
On
