Biden Seeks to End American Brutality to Parents

Over the years it has become increasingly impossible for most families with children to survive on the income of just one spouse.  For households headed by single women, the economic situation is even worse.  Yet, compared to other advanced nations, America does little to support children and their parents with a vulture like free enterprise approach leaving most parents with crushing child care costs and/or expensive pre-school options. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought this reality into stark focus and many women have had to leave their jobs as child care facilities closed and schooling went virtual.  The lucky ones have been able to work from home, but even then have had to juggle child care and parenting with work responsibilities.  In other situations, husbands have left work in order that their higher waging earning wives can continue to work.  Things don't have to be this way as European nations have shown us for years, yet as a column in the New York Times lays out, two forces have prevented meaningful support for families with children.  One, is racism that is based on a mindset that support for children will benefit "those people", namely minorities, and result in "welfare queens" to use Ronald Reagan's stereotype. The other is the hostility to family support by Christofascists and evangelicals caught in a fantasy world who want women at home with children and subordinate to their husbands regardless of the financial consequences.  Here are column highlights:

When Patty Murray joined the Senate in 1993, one of the first bills she worked on was the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guaranteed 12 weeks of unpaid family leave for people who worked at companies with 50 or more employees.

It was pretty modest, especially compared to the family benefits available in most developed countries, but Murray said passing it was a hard fight. . . . Among wealthy nations, the United States has remained an outlier in how little help it gives parents.

Now, though, we might be on the cusp of a humane family policy. On Wednesday, Joe Biden unveiled his American Families Plan, which would, among other things, fund paid leave for caregivers, subsidize day care and institute universal preschool. It would extend through 2025 the monthly cash payments that parents will receive under the American Rescue Plan. America might finally become a country where having children doesn’t mean being left to fend for oneself in a pitiless marketplace.

There are several reasons our domestic policy has long been uniquely hostile to parents, but two big ones are racism and religious fundamentalism. Essentially, it’s been politically radioactive for the federal government to support Black women who want to stay home with their kids, and white women who want to work.

The original Aid to Dependent Children program — which would become Aid to Families With Dependent Children — began during the New Deal. It was meant, as the Supreme Court described it in 1975, “to free widowed and divorced mothers from the necessity of working, so that they could remain home to supervise their children.”

Eligibility was determined by states and localities, which found various ways to exclude Black women. With the civil rights revolution in the 1960s, however, more Black mothers were able to receive benefits. As they did, conservatives started demonizing “welfare mothers” as indolent Black women, even though there continued to be more white women than Black women on A.F.D.C.

In “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” Heather McGhee detailed how support for public goods collapsed among white people once Black people had access to them. This very much includes relief for parents and children.

But universal day care programs that would help women work didn’t go anywhere either. In 1971, Congress passed a bill that would have created a national network of high-quality, sliding-scale child care centers, akin to those that exist in many European countries. Urged on by Patrick Buchanan, Richard Nixon vetoed it, writing that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family‐centered approach.”

Ever since, efforts to expand government-supported child care have faced furious opposition from the religious right.

But Schlafly-style conservatives have less power than they used to. Religious fundamentalists have decisively lost the culture war about women working, and about family values more generally; the party of Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz is in no position to lecture anyone about their domestic arrangements.

At the same time, many on the right, driven partly by concerns about low birthrates, have awoken to the crushing financial burden of parenthood. The public policy debate is thus no longer whether to subsidize child rearing, but how. Mitt Romney’s Family Security Act, for example, would give parents $350 a month for each child under 6, and $250 a month for children between 6 and 17, up to $1,250 per family per month.

And so a window of possibility has opened. By weakening America’s already threadbare child care system, Covid made family policy an urgent priority. Among Democrats, there’s a political imperative to help mothers who were pushed out of the work force by school and day care closures to rebuild their careers. With the laissez-faire economic assumptions that dominated America since the Reagan administration discredited, Democrats no longer cower when the right accuses them of fostering big government. As Biden said in his address to Congress on Wednesday, “Trickle-down economics has never worked.”

And — this is important — there are now a lot more women in positions of power. When Murray arrived in the Senate, she said, she was one of the few members talking about issues like child care. Whenever she brought it up, she said, “it was sort of the end of the conversation,” and there would be a “pat on the head, like, ‘Oh, that’s so cute.’”

This doesn’t mean that the American Families Plan is going to happen. With little chance of any Republican support, it would have to be passed through the reconciliation process, so its fate likely lies in the hands of Joe Manchin, the Senate’s most conservative Democrat. Still, it’s amazing that it’s suddenly possible that American parenthood could actually become a less financially brutalizing experience.

“Our country has taken a turn, and I believe Covid had a lot to do with it,” said Murray. Families, she said, are acutely aware of the unmanageable stress they’re under, and they’re saying, “I want my country to deal with it.” For the first time in my lifetime, there’s hope that it will.