Covid-19 is clearly going to change many of the ways we live and work, and one of those changes might be a revolution in how we value stay-at-home parents.
A poll released last month shows overwhelming bipartisan support for government assistance to child care providers during the Covid crisis. Presumably, parents who are at home with their kids have a renewed appreciation for how hard it is to care for children, and Americans understand how critical adequate childcare is going to be for the nation’s economic recovery.
The poll is good news for professional childcare providers whose work has traditionally been undervalued and underpaid. But it could also be good news for stay-at-home parents whose work has always been undervalued and has never been paid for in dollars and cents. This in turn could have serious implications for women, many of whom are now being pushed out of the workforce and back into the home by the pandemic.
Advocates for mothers have long argued that women deserve to be paid for the work they do at home. But that argument never caught on for two reasons. First, many people define caring for family as a labor of love rather than real work. Second, even those who consider it real work think there is no way to pay for it.
Covid could change that.
Millions of people who are used to going out to work are now struggling to keep up with the cleaning, cooking, schooling and laundry that make up the day-to-day life of stay-at-home parents. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, they are seeing the work that is done inside the home as real work. And many are asking themselves why that work isn’t paid work. As an opinion piece in The New York Times put it this past Mother’s Day, “if garbage collectors and grocery store workers and hedge fund managers expect to be paid for their labor, why not those who create and sustain the human race?”
Of course, the obvious question is who is going to pay stay-at-home parents. One solution, proposed back in the 1970s, calls for the state to pay them. But that solution is unlikely to ever win the support of taxpayers, particularly those from dual income households who see staying at home as a luxury they can ill afford. Furthermore, even if taxpayers did support it, it raises serious privacy and practical concerns. Who will check whether stay-at-home parents are doing the job they are being paid to do? Who will assess their performance? Government bureaucrats? Spouses? The courts?
Fortunately, there’s a smarter, simpler and fairer solution: Turn stay-at-home parents into pay-at-home parents by allowing them to claim a portion of their working spouses’ salaries as earned income.
When it comes to spouses sharing income in situations where only one spouse works outside the house, our imagination has largely been limited to depositing the working spouse’s salary into a joint checking account. But that does not entitle the stay-at-home spouse to have any of the benefits associated with earned income: a 401k, social security, health insurance, and in difficult times like these, unemployment insurance. It also does not give them any of the psychological benefits of paid work like a structured day, a sense of independence, and enhanced self-esteem.
In contrast, under the pay-at-home model, the stay-at-home spouse would claim a portion of their spouse’s salary as earned income and receive all of the financial and psychological benefits that flow from paid work.
Stay-at-home orders have created a unique moment in time in which the logic behind such a new model is clear. During the pandemic, when a working parent heads to the attic to zoom and a stay-at-home parent keeps the kids quiet in the living room, everybody understands that the former’s ability to do his or her job depends upon the latter’s ability and willingness to take care of the kids.
But while this dependency has become more visible because of stay-at-home orders, it is certainly not new. It is why 7 out of 10 men whose income puts them in the top 1% of earners in the US have stay-at-home spouses. And it is why Ursula Burns, former CEO of Xerox, suggested that women who want to get ahead at work marry someone who will care for the kids.
When the stay-at-home parent is packing the lunches, doing the grocery shopping, and running the kids to the doctor in the middle of the day, the parent who works outside the house is able to increase his or her earnings. So why shouldn’t the stay-at-home parent be entitled to some of those earnings? And why shouldn’t our policies advance this just outcome by finding an effective way to compensate stay-at-home parents?
Of course, all of this might seem like pie in the sky right now when millions are out of work and many households don’t have any income. But this crisis give us an opportunity to begin to correct an inequity that stay-at-home parents have been living with for generations. If we adopt the pay-at-home model, then as our economy recovers, a fairer society can emerge.
Rhoda Dermer is a Visiting Scholar at American University’s Washington College of Law. She is working on a book entitled The Pay-at-Home Mother: Why Paying Yourself to Be a Mother Will Change Your Life, Strengthen your Family and Break the Glass Ceiling for Women Everywhere.