Most Americans on the left and the right agree that supporting families is a good idea, but they have different ideas about how to do it. People on the left tend to talk about subsidies to help families with two working parents pay for child care, whereas those on the right would prefer payments to help parents stay home with their children. On this issue, policy makers have waded into one of the most fraught battles of the “mommy wars”: whether children are better off if both parents work, or if one stays home.
I’ve seen tensions flare over this issue online and on the playground. Some people suggest that moms who work don’t care about their children. Others suggest that moms who don’t work outside the home are lazy or wasting their talent. (Both sides, it’s worth noting, invariably focus on moms instead of dads.) Everyone believes that there’s a “right” way to do things—and, mostly, the right way is … my way. This comes from a good place. We all want to do what is best for our family, and any choice we make is hard. When we want so badly for our choice to be the right one, we may feel the need to believe that it must be right for everyone.
However, if the government is going to pass policies that encourage people to make a certain choice, we as a society had better be confident that the choice contributes to the greater good. Government policy is designed to discourage smoking, for example, because we have clear and definitive evidence showing that smoking is bad for health. But parental work is not like smoking. We have no comparable data demonstrating which arrangement is best, in part because families with two working parents differ in multiple ways from those with a single working parent. Any difference in kids’ outcomes is hard to attribute to parental work alone.
The best evidence relies on variations in leave policy. We know that a few months of paid maternity leave has positive effects on babies and families. Infant health improves, and infant mortality decreases. In some studies, maternity leave also affected the babies’ future education and wages.
But what about after the first few months? A number of European countries have extended parental leave to a year or even 15 months. This lets us ask whether there are benefits to babies being home with a parent for this extended period. The answer seems to be no. Extending parental leave does not appear to influence children’s future test scores, and it doesn’t appear to have any effect on their well-being once they reach early adulthood.
Separating correlation from causation is even more difficult for older children. However, when we look at all the data together—as, for example, in a 2008 meta-analysis—the impact of maternal work on children’s test scores, educational completion, and health measures such as obesity seems to be, on average, zero.
There are some nuances in the data. Researchers have found a small positive correlation between child test scores and having one parent working part-time and one full-time. This configuration is most common in higher-income households, however, which may be what explains the difference. Researchers have also found that having two (full- or part-time) working parents seems to be beneficial for children in poorer families more than in richer ones. But overall, even if we take all of these differences as causal (which is a stretch), the differences themselves remain extremely small.
The natural conclusion is that when it comes to children’s outcomes, parental work configuration probably doesn’t matter very much in either direction: There is no “best” choice. In my household, both parents work because it makes financial sense and because we want to. But individual families will make different choices because they face different preferences and constraints. This is true of virtually all the decisions we make as families—where to vacation, what color car to buy—and government policy should not try to encourage one choice over another. We would not want federal policy to subsidize trips to Disney World just because a particular politician loves it there.
Does this mean the government has no place in supporting families? No. What the government can and should do is look for “externalities.” An externality occurs when the behavior of one person affects another, or society overall. The government may want to discourage a behavior resulting in a negative externality, and encourage a behavior resulting in a positive externality.
You can make an externality-based argument for child-care subsidies. When people stay in the workforce after they have children, they pay more taxes. This is true both because of the years parents work while their children are young and also because those years are an investment in higher wages later, meaning more contributions to Social Security, and more retirement savings. This has social value. Having a large tax base, especially as the country ages, is important. Individual work has, therefore, a positive externality.
If people are leaving the labor force because they can’t find or pay for child care, as some have said they are, then the government may well have a role in fixing this. (This is the reason that many other countries have government-subsidized child care.)
You can’t make this kind of argument in favor of the reverse—subsidizing parents to stay home full-time—because the loss of their tax dollars would have a major negative externality. You can, however, make a case for policies that would support some of the efforts of stay-at-home parents.
Much of the American school system—for better or worse—is built on the unpaid labor of parents, disproportionately moms who do not work outside the home. Parents who serve in the PTA, organize fundraisers, chaperone trips, and volunteer in the classroom have huge positive externalities. Paying them for this work would be an efficient and reasonable policy choice.
It does not seem a stretch for both sides to agree that America would benefit from making it easier for parents to volunteer in schools and easier for them to pay taxes. If we can accept that there is not one correct way to run your family, then we can focus on using government policy to give parents more choices instead of fewer ones.