By the time I gave birth to my second daughter, her older sister was just 19 months old. At the time, I did research for a small nonprofit and my income barely covered the childcare I’d need to keep doing it. So, like a lot of mothers, I left my job because it didn’t make financial sense to continue working.
I didn’t have a problem with the decision. Thanks to my background in public policy, I’m well aware of the economic value of parenting. By fostering a safe, nurturing, and stable environment for my children in their infancy, I am helping to mold the intelligent, creative, hard-working adults society needs. In economic terms, I’m helping to create human capital, which accounts for two-thirds of global wealth and is a key driver of growth in our increasingly high-tech, globalized economy.
Despite all this, when I return to the labor force, I’ll have nothing but a gap in my resume to show for it. It’s a problem many more women will grapple with, owing to coronavirus and the need to take time off and care for their kids. An employer may accept parenting as an understandable explanation of that gap, but few would accept it as evidence of my hireability.
This is frustrating, because I’ve sharpened a wide range of skills as a parent: patience, adaptability, multitasking, communication, budgeting, problem solving. I’ve become more efficient. I can finish tasks that once took me an hour during the 15 minutes my toddlers eat their breakfast. I’ve become more decisive, simply because I no longer have much uninterrupted time for hemming and hawing.
My ability to focus in the face of distraction has grown exponentially. I can follow a 16-step recipe with a baby on my hip and another twirling under my feet, singing the theme song to Frozen on a constant, off-key loop. I won’t pretend that I’m always graceful under the never-ending pressure of parenting, but there’s no doubt I am mentally, physically and emotionally tougher as a result of it.
Everyone seems to agree that parenting is as difficult as it is important. Still, the fact that we don’t mention parenting when someone asks about our work experience seems to indicate that we think of childrearing as unlike other forms of work, as if the Venn diagram of the skills they require is just two circles with no overlap. But this dichotomy dissolves under any serious scrutiny. Paid childcare positions, such as a nanny or nursery worker, count as work experience. Unpaid internships and volunteer positions count as work experience. I can see no reason that the unpaid childcare role of a parent shouldn’t count for something, too.
This has never been more obvious than right now, as the coronavirus has forced parents to shoulder caregiving duties previously outsourced to daycares and schools in addition to their other jobs.
While many of the tasks of parenthood bear little resemblance to an office job, the mental labor involved is not so different. I don’t just steam broccoli for my children, I manage their diets. I don’t just take their temperatures when they’re sick, I monitor their health and development. Surely the research, observation, coordination, and thoughtful decision-making this involves have applications in other forms of work.
Yet the skills honed in parenthood go unrecognized by the working world. Every moment that mothers are absent from the labor force, our perceived value to potential employers deteriorates, as if our brains go to mush along with the carrots we’re feeding our kids.
It’s no secret that childbearing deals a serious blow to women’s earnings, resulting in a so-called motherhood wage penalty. A recent analysis of research on this phenomenon found that working mothers earn an average of 3.6% less per child than comparable childless women, much of which is explained by loss of work experience during career breaks. It’s hard not to wonder why parenting does not – at least to some degree – count as work experience.
I’m not the first to point out this double standard. In her book, The Price of Motherhood, former New York Times reporter Ann Crittenden laments that “economic theory has nothing to say about the acquisition of skills by those who work with children; presumably there are none”. This, she argues, puts mothers at an undeserved disadvantage when they return to the labor force.
“Changing the status of mothers, by gaining real recognition for their work,” Crittenden wrote, “is the great unfinished business of the women’s movement”. Nearly two decades later, it remains unfinished.
Obviously, I didn’t become a mother for the paycheck or to advance my career. Parenting is, as they say, a labor of love – but it’s still labor, and in many ways not so different than other forms of work. It only hurts unpaid caregivers like me to pretend otherwise. So while parenting may not qualify me to develop software for Google or sell bonds on Wall Street, it ought to count for something.
