The insistence on “affordable daycare” as a viable solution to the problem of childcare reveals a consistent devaluation of gendered labor. It might also negatively impact children themselves.
Last March, in the highest “no” vote in their nation’s history, Irish voters rejected a proposal that would have removed gendered language from the island’s “Cares Act.” The referendum, which codifies the Irish state’s economic commitment to mothers, was criticized by some for being “old fashioned.” To the majority of Irish voters, however, keeping the act’s gendered, supposedly sexist language—for example, the amendment declares that Irish women’s primary responsibilities occurred “within the home”—was important, because it ensured that Ireland would continue to value labor performed by women, specifically mothers. Irish women, after all, spend more than twice as much time on caring and housework than their male counterparts. It turns out Irish voters are less concerned with what ought to be the case—gender parity in language and in life—and more concerned with recognizing what is: the fact of gendered labor performed primarily by women.
Americans, for our part, could be so lucky. In Ireland, laws like the Cares Act ensure that the decision to stay at home, raise a family, or to return to work is just that: a decision. In the United States, by contrast, the choice to stay home or go to work is hardly a choice at all. Here, mothers are stuck between the Scylla of losing an income and living in relative social isolation as a stay-at-home-mom and the Charybdis of leaving one’s young child to work, which usually means shelling out for expensive childcare that can cost upwards of $36,000/year. (In 2023, the median annual salary for an American was around $59,000.)
Predictably, in the United States, about two-thirds of new moms return to work shortly after giving birth. According to a 2012 study from the U.S. Department of Labor, 25% of mothers return to work within two weeks of childbirth, usually because their jobs don’t provide leave or because they fear the economic consequences of not working. College graduates fare a bit better—they secure about six weeks of leave, though this absence is often unpaid. The Family and Medical Leave Act, which officially allocates 12 weeks of unpaid leave for new mothers, and which the US Congress passed over thirty years ago, is not much of a help: numerous stipulations mean that 59% of working mothers are ineligible for the program. For these reasons, about 62% of American children under the age of 5 are enrolled in center-based care, and that figure would be even higher if it included home-based daycares or those situations that include some mixture of daycare, nannies, or other non-parent care. For comparison, only 35.5% of pre-Kindergarten German children are in daycare.
In the past several decades, the Left has embraced the demand for affordable daycare, which has replaced demands for robust, paid, and extensive maternity leave policies that protect women’s jobs or, alternatively, afford them real opportunities to leave the workforce, even if for only for a few years. Given this reality, and given the Left’s insistence that daycare is a viable solution to the problem of childcare, it’s worth asking whether the practice of separating children from their primary caregivers—usually, if not always, mothers—is the panacea so many believe it to be, or if it instead reveals a consistent devaluation of gendered labor that might also negatively impact children themselves.
