by Betsy Shaw posted in Mom Stories
An in-depth article published in the Nation offers up a pretty clear picture of the razor’s edge today’s working mother has to walk and just how easy it is to fall into debt and or poverty as a result of having a child.
The article recounts the stories of three different mothers and their diverse but rapid routes to finding themselves making ends meet by going into debt. All three share one similarity, the downward spiral started with having a baby and taking unpaid leave from their jobs to care for them.
A quarter of all “poverty spells”—falling into poverty for two months or more at a time—begin with the birth of a child. “Given that nearly half of parents have not a dime [in paid leave], of course there must be maternal debt,” says Ellen Bravo, director of Family Values @ Work.
One mother, Sonya, is a single mom who worked for a hospital for eleven years. When she got pregnant with her third child she ended up on bedrest, then gave birth prematurely, and had to go back to work while her son was still in the NICU. As you can imagine, once the child was well enough to come home, she couldn’t place him in normal childcare, she exhausted her unpaid leave and was let go from her job. This left her with an infant and many unpaid bills.
Under our current policies, mothers like Sonya, Tina and Anna are forced to make impossible choices when their children arrive. “All I needed was time,” Sonya says. “I had to choose between my job and taking care of my child.” In putting their health and the health of their newborns first, too many mothers are likely loading up on debt just to get by. And those choices can follow them for the rest of their lives.
There is so much talk out there right now about the sorry state of working mothers in the United States, it makes my head spin.
Save the Children just released its State of the World’s Mothers report and the United States was the only country out of 45 of the world’s most developed countries not to guarantee any paid leave for newborn care. (California, Connecticut and New Jersey are exceptions.)
In Madeleine Kunin’s new book, titled “The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family,” she points out that only 20 percent of American Families resemble the traditional model of a stay-at-home-mother and a working father, yet few significant adaptions have been made to accommodate this new model.
In Judith Warner’s review of Kunin’s book she praises Kunin for realizing that in order for anything to change, we need to focus on the children. No one wants to hear about women finding self-actualization through satisfying work, but everyone is interested in the welfare of children. Keeping mothers in the work force, especially single ones, is the best way to fight child poverty.
I find it remarkable that, with all we know, women still face job insecurity, or potential financial devastation, when they decide to have a family. I also find it interesting that the cause for working mothers can’t seem to drum up the same kind of interest and passion as does something like parenting styles.
Do concerns about job security affect your family planning? What do you think it will take for our workplaces to better accommodate the modern American family? What will it take to make people care more about this?
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