Can Public Policy Encourage Women to Have More Babies?
Episode 505 | Author: Emilie Aries
What might actually impact our drastically declining birth rate?
You may have heard the Trump administration’s recent endorsement of the idea of a “baby bonus.” President Trump floated the idea of sending $5,000 payments upon the birth of a child, among a variety of other child-bearing incentives. This caused something of an uproar on social media, where thought leaders from across the political spectrum chimed in with their thoughts on what public policies would spur on America’s next baby boom. But can any reforms really have that intended impact?
Let’s take a look at what role policy might possibly play to reverse our dropping birth rate and the economic and social issues that come with it.
Women want more kids
I’m the last person to suggest that we should be forcing happy, childfree people into raising families. But while research does show that fewer people want kids than years ago, it also shows quite clearly that that isn’t the only problem: a lot of people who do want kids aren’t having them—for a slew of reasons that call our societal values into question.
In 2018, the New York Times published an article titled American Women Are Having Fewer Children Than They’d Like. The research they cited highlights a significant gap between the number of kids women say they want (2.7) and the number they’re likely to actually have (1.8). For what it’s worth, that gap is almost the same for men.
What this shows us is that people wanting to remain child-free by choice isn’t the problem; it’s the inhospitable society for young people and their caregivers that existing policies have created.
The problematic factors
I’ve mentioned before that childcare for my two children (currently 3-and-a-half and 6 months) would be around $50,000 for our family this year. Turns out, I quite underestimated that total; it’s going to cost us closer to $57,000. That’s an unrealistic amount for many people, but it’s by no means outside the norm.
With sky-high childcare costs, there’s little choice but for one parent, usually the mother, to leave their job and stay home with the kids instead. Some parents love being stay-at-home caregivers, but many would prefer to keep working, at least part-time. Studies show that it’s not good for kids or for parents when the parent is miserable (and we know parental mental health is a major concern right now).
Then, there’s the problem of how little we value the caregiving of young children. While my state’s medicaid program offers as much as $2,750 per month to people caring for elderly or disabled family members, the highest amount I’ve seen discussed for paying stay-at-home parents was the $300 per month floated in 2019 (and recently reintroduced) in the American Family Act, a bill that was never passed.
What is President Trump suggesting?
It’s pretty clear that society doesn’t value young children the way it does other members of society. For whatever reason, when kids hit five, we deem them worthy of social coverage, sending them to public schools funded by taxpayer dollars. So my question is: what’s so different about a four-year-old, or a two-year-old?
All this is why I’m intrigued by the Republicans’ recommendation that new parents receive a one-time baby bonus of $5,000. It’s certainly ironic that this comes from the same party that historically maligned“welfare queens” for having more kids just to get more state dollars. And a single payout of $5,000 obviously isn’t enough to right this ship, but at least it’s a jumping off point for a bigger conversation.
What else could we do?
How about paying stay-at-home parents? As the New York Times asked in Stay-at-Home Parents Work Hard. Should They Be Paid? and founder of the Forward Party, Andrew Yang, said recently: We pay for (and value) work, but what exactly do we mean by “work”?
Currently, the market values parenting at zero dollars, despite the fact that our entire economy benefits massively (and would cease to function) if this role didn’t exist. What if, instead of completely ignoring children (and their parents) until they hit that magical age of five, we paid stay-at-home parents a salary? It is an expensive proposition, but one I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about. And yes, it should go without saying that a meagre $300 per month or a one-time $5,000 payout falls woefully short of the value this work deserves.
Finally, while there’s no guarantee that policy changes would cause the U.S. birth rate to soar—unfortunately, it hasn’t worked so far in highly equitable and family-friendly Sweden—these conversations have to be had, preferably as non-partisan conversations. That’s why I highly encourage everyone to reach out to their Members of Congress or Governor to ask them what they have planned. How are they working to win your region the title of Most Family-Friendly State?
What’s your take on all of this? What challenges are you facing as a parent of young kids or as someone who would like to becomea parent in the near future? Drop me a line at emilie@bossedup.org or hop into our Courage Community on Facebook or LinkedIn group to join the conversation!
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
Episode 479, America’s Parents Are Not Okay
Episode 489, How the Cost of Childcare Has Become a Workforce Issue
Episode 495, New Prenatal Leave Law Benefits Pregnant Workers in New York
Episode 451, The Impact of Return-To-Office Mandates on Working Moms
Senior Living News, Help Address the Population’s ‘Inverted Pyramid’
New York Times, American Women Are Having Fewer Children Than They’d Like
New York Times, Stay-at-Home Parents Work Hard. Should They Be Paid?
New York Times, An Interview with Andrew Yang
Abby Care, Get Paid to Care for Your Family in Colorado
Compact Magazine, The Failure of Feminist Natalism by Darel E. Paul
TAKE ACTION to improve childcare for
working and stay-at-home parents:
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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 505. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today I want to ask a provocative question. Can public policy actually encourage American women to have more babies?
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You may have heard this pronatalist message from the likes of J.D. Vance, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, who want to inspire a new American baby boom. They want American women to have more babies. My first confession of today's episode is that I weirdly agree with them. I do think our plummeting birth rate could be a really bad thing for our country and for the world, with enormous implications on things like, I don't know, funding Medicare. Demographers call this population decline an inverted pyramid structure where there are many fewer young people who are working and supporting many more elderly people who are, let's say, benefiting from things like Medicare and Medicaid, and who are not currently in the workforce. That has a lot of implications for our society, which was designed for the opposite to be true in so many different ways.
The other reason I find America's declining birth rate a concern is because women themselves say that they want more kids. An article in the New York Times put it bluntly back in 2018 titled American Women Are Having Fewer Children Than They'd Like, in which they wrote, quote, “the gap between the number of children that women say they want to have 2.7 and the number of children they will probably actually have 1.8 has risen to the highest level in 40 years. From 1972 to 2016, men have expressed almost exactly the same ideal fertility rates as women. In a given year, the average just 0.04 children below what women say is ideal”. So in other words, what they're saying here is that both men and women want to be having more kids than they actually are. Ask any parent right now why they're not having more kids and you'll probably get an onslaught of economic realities like the many topics that we've talked about on this podcast before.
What comes to mind for me right now as the mom of a six month old and a three and a half year old, is the cost of childcare, which is skyrocketing, which will be costing my family, I've been staying on this podcast for a long time now. Over 50 grand this year. I was woefully underestimating that number, which is actually coming closer to being $57,000 this year. That's wild, right? That is a huge economic burden that most people cannot justify and can't make happen. And so, when we hear about the declining fertility rate, we're really talking about this gap between the number of kids people say they want to have, men and women alike, and the number of kids that we're actually having.
I think that's sad. Call me crazy, but I think people who want to have kids should be able to have kids, especially in the wealthiest country on earth. Not only do I think it's sad that we can't self actualize the families we envision for ourselves, but we're also, you know, kind of continuing the species and all that. So I think that's really messed up that we are not creating incentives for people to have the kids that they actually want to have.
Now let me be clear, I'm not saying we should encourage people to have kids who do not want to have kids. I am super pro-choice, more pro-choice than ever before as a mom, you know, the absolute life altering decision to become a parent should not be one that is ever forced upon any person. But for those who want to have more kids, who are saying that they can't or they won't, or that it's just not in the cards for them, I think that's a failure of our society and that it, it says something about what our society does and doesn't value. It values you as a consumer, it values you as a worker, and it doesn't really value you as a parent. It doesn't really value kids, especially young kids.
And so that's left us with what I consider to be a national crisis on our hands. And I don't want that national crisis, this plummeting birth rate, to be somehow co-opted by the GOP and the right wing alone, because folks across the aisle care about this issue. But as Chappell Roan recently put it in a Call Her Daddy episode interview that went viral and earned her a lot of s***, quite frankly, she got a lot of flack about this. She talked about her friends who have kids and said that they are in, quote, hell. And here's the thing, she's not wrong, right? Love or hate her, which by the way, I love her and I think her music is great. And Max, my and a half year old, particularly loves Pink Pony Club.
You know, the Surgeon General put out a report last year I covered on this very podcast that reinforces what she's saying. America's parents are experiencing an absolute mental health crisis. And so you look into the causes of that mental health crisis and you see a society that does not make it easy to have kids. So what's being done about this? Well, just the other week, Donald Trump floated the idea of a $5,000 one time baby bonus, which earned a lot of derision from the liberal circles that I tend to run in. But from my standpoint, I think this is a very interesting development. Not because I think this is a good idea necessarily, but in what world are we living in that a conservative president is talking about government handouts to moms?
That's really interesting because that has historically been antithetical to the GOP and to more conservative thought leaders, you know? These are the same folks who railed against welfare queens as this barely veiled racist critique of women who are having children to get more government benefits, right? That's historically been a huge critique from conservatives. So the fact that Donald Trump is explicitly floating this government handout concept is really interesting to me. Now, do I think $5,000 is sufficient? H*** no. But perhaps this is a starting point for a broader conversation that we can actually have in this political moment.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that we have broad bipartisan agreement that having kids is too hard to do in our country right now. And even for folks who don't have kids and who don't want to have kids, I think they can acknowledge, like the Chappell Roan’s of the world, that their friends who are having kids don't really make it look appealing either. So there are lots of family friendly policies that have been discussed and floated. Most of these, by the way, are being promoted by Democrats and Liberals that include things like paid family and medical leave for all workers, both men and women, whether you're leaving to take care of your elderly mother or the arrival of a new child, right? Or yourself. Paid family and medical leave covers all of that.
Affordable childcare, don't get me on my soapbox, I've got enough episodes about that issue already. Affordable access to high quality prenatal care, especially for black women and women of color in this country, whose maternal mortality rates should be a national embarrassment for us. And then the things that are more kitchen table issues like affordable housing. How can you have more kids if you don't know where to put them? How about working hours that match school hours? How about year round schooling? Because what the h*** is a working parent supposed to do in the summer break? And how about something like gun control? I know a lot of folks, a lot of parents across the political aisle who feel afraid to send their kids to school in our country for obvious reasons related to gun violence. The list goes on. And all of these public policies are good thought experiments. These are good ways that certain states can move forward in experimenting with making family friendly policies the law of the land.
One idea that I don't think gets enough attention and I really want to advocate for and elevate is the idea of paying stay at home parents. If we pair this policy, paying stay at home parents from birth to five with affordable access to high quality funded early childhood education, early childhood care, daycare, I believe this would create a true pro-choice environment to navigating those first critical years of a child's life. Right now that age group 0 to 5 just falls into a societal chasm where we don't even really acknowledge in any particular infrastructure that they exist. And our entire economy has been running on the backs of stay at home parents and stay at home moms in particular, who tend to exit the workforce to care for kids during that really critical time period until the age of five, when all of a sudden our society deems them notable enough to have some place to put them kindergarten, right?
Now that has created a huge mental health crisis among parents because a lot of parents don't want to stay at home full time. Maybe early childhood development isn't for them, isn't their passion, isn't their first choice, but it is the choice they have to make due to financial necessity. That's not good for parents, that's not good for kids, right? The data on whether your kid is better off in daycare or staying at home with a parent is very clear. It depends on what makes that parent happier. A depressed stay at home mom is not better than a not depressed daycare provider, right? So it's not you being the sole provider of care for your child, it's about the person who's providing care for your child not being clinically depressed that matters, right?
And so if we create a society where men and women can really access that choice without financial constraint, whether they want to stay home during those early years or not, I think that would make for a much more equitable society. Now some people, feminist scholars in particular, worry that only women, or very much mostly women, would take advantage of this opportunity and that, that would, you know, cause a backsliding of women's achievements in the workplace. I'm left wondering, like, who are we to judge if women want to take time off to stay at home, as a full time parent?
As a feminist, I think that should be women's free, unrestrained choice to do so. I think we should make sure that the workplace is accommodating for on ramping back into the workforce and that we can make systemic changes to how our workplaces work to make that possible. Workplaces should also be accommodating for working parents, whether they're male or female. And yes, I want women to consider the impact on their careers that, and lifetime earnings that taking a five year career break could have. But I also want men who have careers to feel like if they choose to be there for their kids during that critical time, in that way, if they feel called to be a stay at home parent, they should be able to access that option without long term negative ramifications on their careers too. I think that's good for both men and women.
Now I would think that this would be a wildly popular policy. It's not a cheap one. That's, that's another part of this, it would be a very expensive policy. But I haven't really seen most people talk about it. And interestingly I was reminded that back in 2019 there was a policy introduced in Congress, the American Family Act of 2019. It was proposed, it was sponsored actually by Colorado's own Senator Michael Bennett, who interestingly enough just announced that he's running for governor here. So maybe this is his chance to make Colorado the best state in the nation for being a parent. We'll see.
But Democrats, including everyone from Bernie Sanders to Kamala Harris, co-sponsored this legislation. And among the many things that it adjusted, it offered $300 a month per child for parents who stay home to care for those children up to the age of five. Essentially what they did is they took the child tax credit and instead of giving you that couple thousand dollars off your taxes at the end of the year, they turned it into an upfront monthly payment, not just an end of year credit. There was a really interesting article written about it at the time again in the New York Times called Stay At Home Parents Work Hard. Should They Be Paid?
And Andrew Yang, one of the many Democrats who was running for president at the time, said this, quote, “the question is, what do we mean by work? Andrew Yang said on the Daily last month and gave as an example his wife who stays at home with their sons. Quote, I know my wife is working harder than I am and I'm running for president. And right now the market values her work at zero. So we have to think bigger about what we mean by work and value”. And I completely agree. I don't think $300 a month per child comes close to actually valuing the labor that stay at home parents provide. But whether I hire someone to care for my children like I do happily, by the way, or I choose to stay at home myself, I would want that labor to be valued in real dollars.
Now look, there is some precedent for this. Many state Medicaid programs will pay family caregivers to care for their elderly, aging parents or siblings or whomever that you're related to directly. In Colorado, I looked it up. They will pay caregivers up to $2,750 a month from Medicaid to provide elder care. So we value caring for an old person at about $2,750a month. And yet the most radical proposal I've seen in Congress for the same care for a 0 year old for a 1 year old, or 2 year old, or 3 year old, or 4 year old is tapped out at $300 a month. That's bulls***, in my opinion. I think we know that caring for an elderly family member or caring for the nation's youngest and most vulnerable population, that caregiving work is hard and should be valued at the very least up to $2,750 a month.
But I can hear the critics already saying, Emilie, why should I pay for your child care? You chose to have them, so why should I pay you to stay at home as a parent? Or why should I pay for your provider of childcare? I hear that argument and I get it. Here's what I would ask in response. We already pay collectively to educate and care for 5 year olds in this country, right? Once they become kindergarteners, we've already collectively decided we should probably care about the future citizens of our nation. So what's different about a 4 year old than a 5 year old? Exactly. I mean, I know early childhood development specialists would have a lot to say about that, but why do we care about kids when they turn five and decide that we should have a safe haven for them in the form of public kindergarten? And we just don't care about 0 to 5?
They just fall into this societal chasm that where they're completely unaccounted for because we have been running our entire society banking on some family member more often than not moms caring for those 0 to 5 year olds. And that's a huge liability. It's a liability undergirding our entire workforce and our entire society. Nothing in our world works without providing care for kids at these earliest ages in their life. And nothing about our world can continue if we stop having kids because we've deemed that labor, providing that labor for free is just too impossible. And that, you know, being able to live off a single person's salary or if, god forbid, you're a single parent, leaves you feeling like you're in an absolutely impossible situation.
So to me, this is a truly existential question. If you care about the continuation of our species, of our country, of your fellow countrymen and women, we should all invest in children. They are as cliche as it sounds, our future. And so to be clear, supporting parents in this pursuit should not be a punishment for non-parents. I'm not saying we should ask non-parents and people who have no interest in parenting to somehow shoulder the burden for the rest of us. I'm saying we all should make removing barriers to having the families that people want to have possible so that all of us can achieve our full potential. And shout out to the aunties and the uncles out there who are taking awesome vacations and traveling and like, doing all the cool things with their disposable income that parents are unable to do because we're spending all that money on childcare, or diapers, or what have you. I'm not judging that and I don't think that should be a right that anyone has access to luxury. I'm saying we should have a right to have access to having the kids you want to have without going completely bankrupt along the way.
Now here's the unfortunate reality of the situation. Even if we do all of this, which is a big if, because god knows, the political will to pass paid family and medical leave alone has not been there in congress. But even if every policy I just described is implemented, the birth rate might just be doomed as everyone tends to turn towards Sweden, known as it being extraordinarily equal, where, quote, family friendly public policies are especially effective, end quote. We've seen sort of egalitarian, values on the national level and more progressive family friendly policies passed there for decades now. We just haven't seen the birth rate decline reverse.
According to some of the most recent fertility statistics coming out of Sweden, this causal relationship between family friendly public policy and the birth rate is very much under question. Quote, “Swedish births for 2023 will settle at their lowest level in two decades. While the country's annual fertility rate, the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49, will likely set an all time record low.” They go on to write that since 2021, the number of births in Sweden are down more than 12%. The fertility rate has fallen almost 14%. Now there's a lot of demographers who would emphasize the fact that the United States and Sweden have very little in common demographically, starting first with the fact that we are so much bigger. And I'm left wondering, like, is there anything we can do to reverse the tides?
There's a lot of people who say, oh, the cultural narratives are already in place where people who don't want to have kids aren't having kids. I don't think we need to persuade anyone to have kids who doesn't want to have kids to improve our birth rate and our fertility rate. All we need to do is enable the people who do want to have kids to have the number of kids they actually want to have. That's the gap I think that public policy can help to close. But it is a hypothesis. We're not experimenting nearly enough to even test that hypothesis right now. So perhaps this is a moment where there will be federal leadership or at least an appetite for some new federal conversations nationwide about how America can spur it’s birthright along. And hopefully we can have those conversations without it turning into something about eugenics and white supremacy, as the quote pronatalist movement has tended to do in recent months and years.
But if we can simply have a conversation about why it is so hard to have the kids you want to have, if you want to have them in this country right now, I think that could be a very fruitful discussion for our federal leaders. And in the absence of Congress's ability to get much of anything done these days, I will look to the state level and I really would challenge folks like Senator Bennett here in Colorado, if you were to become governor, to ask themselves, how can my state become the most family friendly state in the nation? I know Tim Walls really asked himself that question in Minnesota and has been making strides to make that possible.
The fact of the matter is we have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to making America a great place to have kids again. Maybe that's, maybe that's the slogan that could bring folks together if you're gonna go that way, you know what I mean? I do think a lot of folks on both sides of the political aisle care about this issue. JoJo, my six month old who's currently sitting on my lap certainly does.
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I want to hear what you make of today's podcast, so let's keep the conversation going as always in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn. You can find today's corresponding blog post and fully written out transcript at bossedup.org/episode505 that's bossedup.org/episode505 until next time let's keep bossi’n in pursuit of our purpose and together let's lift as we climb.
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