A Labor Day Tribute to Unpaid Labor

By Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post

02 September 19

How do you calculate the value of a stay-at-home parent? Maybe the idea misses the point completely.

s the U.S. Department of Labor styles it, Labor Day “constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” But there’s one category of labor that tends to get overlooked — the uncompensated labor of moms and dads whose primary occupation is child-rearing and managing their households.

As any stay-at-home parent will tell you, there’s little down time. There’s the obvious work of caring for a child, which is particularly intensive in the years before he or she starts school. But the job also typically requires maintaining a household, fulfilling a host of duties such as cleaning, shopping, meal prep and managing the family’s finances and schedules. It’s not uncommon, either, for stay-at-home parents to take on elder-care duties when relatives become infirm.

So how would an economist calculate the value of a stay-at-home parent? The most straightforward way would be to focus solely on the child-rearing element and use day-care costs as a proxy. After all, the other stuff stay-at-home parents do — the cooking, cleaning and planning — has to get done regardless of whether both parents work.

In Washington, for instance, infant care averages out to about $24,000 per year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. The average cost for a year of day care for a 4-year-old is about $19,122. Multiply those figures by the number of kids in the home and you get a pretty good sense of the economic value of stay-at-home parenting.

That kind of labor has been shrinking for years. In 1975, fewer than half of mothers were part of the paid workforce, according to the Department of Labor. By 2018, that number had jumped to 71.5 percent. Because about 80 percent of stay-at-home parents are mothers, their workforce-participation rate is a decent proxy for the decline of stay-at-home parenting. Last year, the Pew Research Center estimated that about 18 percent of American parents did not work outside the home.

Economic considerations apparently affect that tally. In 2018, the gap between the number of children women say they want and the number they actually have was at a 40-year high. When the New York Times subsequently surveyed Americans on their reasons for not having as many children as they wanted, financial concerns topped the list.

There’s a fairly large body of research demonstrating the benefits for children who spend more quality time with their parents, especially for children in two-parent, middle-income households.

American moms’ decades-long push into the labor force is also a reflection of the gains women have made in the workforce. They have career opportunities now that were previously closed off to them because of a combination of sexist attitudes and traditional notions about how families should be structured. But the gap between the number of children people are having and the number they want — with financial worries wedged in between — suggests another factor is at play: As wages stagnated in the second half of the 20th century, mothers who might have previously stayed home with their children opted to enter the workforce simply to make ends meet.

That’s the thesis that undergirds “The Two-Income Trap,” the 2003 book by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). It’s also where the traditional labor concerns of fair pay and an adequate safety net intersect with the choices families make around work and child care. Viewed through this lens, stay-at-home parenting has become rarer, in part, because wages haven’t kept pace with the rising costs of raising a family.

In this way, the big labor objectives of the current moment, such as the fight for a higher minimum wage and the push for universal health care, can also be seen as a fight to give parents the financial leeway to spend more time with their children.