S1E78 / Caregiving as Infrastructure / Stephanie Coontz, Julie Morita, Erika Moritsugu, Sarah Murphy

It's so sad that women and men who idealize the role of motherhood and how important childcare is actually have contempt for it when it is a paid job.

I think that the pandemic has given us an opportunity to finally change this. And if we don't, the economic impact from the fallout of women in the workforce is going to be devastating.

You're listening to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health, and social impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. I'm your host, Dr. Celine Gounder. Sarah Murphy is an advocate for women and children in Pennsylvania. She's involved with an organization called the Women and Girls Foundation.

I was the person that would go to Harrisburg and go to the politicians and fight for funding for pre-K.

Sarah grew up with a single mother.

My mother didn't have a big bank account, never had a savings account, so She was pretty much living paycheck to paycheck like I am. And people don't realize when you're paycheck to paycheck, as soon as your paycheck is cut off, there's no savings.

That experience shaped a lot of her activism. When she wasn't volunteering, she worked in daycares and after-school programs and cleaned apartments.

So then I had a son, and that kind of shifted my goals towards moms and the things that moms need.

She found out that moms needed a lot. Her son was born in 2012. As he grew up, Sarah struggled to balance work and childcare.

The whole summer my son is off from school, but I still had to work. And so I had to scramble every summer to, you know, find childcare. I put him in summer camp sometimes, but summer camps are like 4 hours and work is 8 hours. So I would have to leave work, you know, at lunchtime to go get him and bring him to my job or take him to someone else. And like, it's a lot of maneuvering.

So Sarah had to rely on older folks in her community to help her watch her son while she worked.

I like to have older people watch my son because it was good for them and good for him.

She told me about one person in particular, Miss Linda.

Miss Linda is the person that, even though we're not related, she never forgets my birthday. She never forgets my son's birthday.

Sarah met Miss Linda when she was cleaning apartments. Miss Linda lived alone. One day she fell while she was shopping.

I told her, you could always ask me to go to the store for you. And so since she came home from the hospital, and that was probably like 3 years ago, 3, maybe even 4 years ago, I've been shopping for her every Monday.

But when the pandemic hit, Sarah lost this delicate balance of work and childcare.

So once they say, oh my goodness, all the older people can get sick from the kids, that took away my whole support system.

Schools were closed. Childcare centers were closed. Her son's father was a part of his life, but he didn't live with them. He was working in a facility that cleaned hospital linens.

And being that I have asthma, it was the safest thing for him to just pretty much stay away from us until we figured out what was going on. So like for months, we didn't— he didn't see his father because we weren't quarantined together.

Money was tight. Sarah had lost her job shortly before the pandemic. She was wary about looking for work because of what might happen if she got sick. When school went online, Sarah had to find money to pay for home internet.

We did not have internet in the house, only had internet on my phone. We didn't even have a computer at the house.

Alone at home with her son, Sarah tried to find ways to protect her son from the emotional strain of the pandemic.

I would joke and tell my son that we were doing that safari when you drive in your car and wave at the animals. So that's what we would do at the beginning of the pandemic. We would just get in the car, roll the windows up. We could leave our mask off and just wave at people. Hey, how you doing?

You know?

So it's like you have to find ways to survive.

The pandemic has upended caregiving and what it means to be a working mom. Parents, especially moms, have had to take on full-time childcare and school duties and hold down their jobs, all in the middle of a pandemic. And the repercussions of this disruption could last for generations. More than 2 million women left the workforce during the pandemic. The reason? The cost and effort of caring for children and older family members. This burden falls especially hard on women of color like Sarah. In this episode of Epidemic, we'll hear why the United States is the only wealthy nation not to offer comprehensive support to parents.

They claimed that childcare would be communist. They vetoed it, and that pulled childcare into the culture wars.

How it's affecting families like Sarah's during the pandemic.

There was no childcare because all of the centers were closed down, and then all of the older people that were my support system were completely just taken away.

How the pandemic has created an opportunity to turn it around.

And that's why it's really exciting to see what's becoming available through the American Rescue Plan, where resources are being made available to support early childcare and early education, because these are the kinds of things can actually help children recover from some of these traumatic events.

Today on Epidemic, caregiving as infrastructure. Before we get back to Sarah's story, we need to know the backstory for why single parents like her are struggling with childcare today. The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet, but it's also the only industrialized country that doesn't offer childcare and paid leave for parents and caregivers. Stephanie Coontz is the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. She says many of our assumptions about how families should be date back to the 19th century.

Before that, the assumption was that women and men were both caregivers for family life in association with the groups in which they lived. And that women were equal providers for the family.

In many pre-industrial societies, children were cared for communally. Older members of the community would help care for kids.

I've just spent the last 3.5 months in Oakland with my own new grandbaby, and so I found great confirmation of the historical anthropological theory about why grandparents are so important to human development and socialization.

Children might spend half their time with people who weren't their biological parents.. But this started to change with industrialization.

And so if there were places where real wages were rising for men, it made more sense to send the men and the children, by the way, this is what gets forgotten, out to earn wages and have someone at home to continue to do the home production that was so central.

It was around this time that the work of childcare became increasingly segregated.

Servants were usually neighbor girls who were doing this for a year or two to save some money so that they could get married, have a household, and have servants of their own.

But factory work provided these women, mostly white women, with other, often better-paying opportunities.

People begin searching for permanent servants, lifelong servants, and servants who can't talk back, can't pack up and go, whether it's because they can afford to or not. And that's where, of course, you begin to get the exploitation. Of Black, Native American, and then later immigrants.

This segregated class of domestic workers reinforced the idea that childcare was unskilled, low-paying work.

And, you know, it's so sad that women and men who idealize the role of motherhood and how important childcare is actually have contempt for it when it is a paid job, despite the fact that it is, you know, one of the most important jobs in our society.

Another big change in the workplace impacted women's roles as caregivers: the abolition of child labor. Now children were expected to go to school, not work alongside their fathers.

Then it turns out that not all women want to be or need to be in the home full-time, and we begin to get this move of women into the workplace. And that, of course, really accelerated during World War II.

Women are called upon to leave their homes and take jobs. Employers find that women can do many jobs as well as men, some jobs better.

Women entered the workforce by the millions.

By the end of 1943, 1 out of every 3 women will be at work.

Stephanie's mother was one of them.

My own mother worked in the shipyards during World War II, and the women were so proud that they were doing this work.

And with all these women working outside of the home, there had to be programs for their children.

When married women with small children have to take jobs, everything possible will be done to provide daycare for the children.

The Lanham Act of 1940 provided federal money to set up a nationwide system of daycares for the children of women contributing to the war effort. By the end of the war, as many as 600,000 children received some kind of care through the program.

My mother used to talk all the time about the pride she felt and the joy she felt at watching this childcare. And then, of course, by the time she had me, those childcare centers were gone. And she said, wow, she could really feel the difference, you know, of what it was like to just have to do it yourself and not get that help from the outside.

These national childcare programs ended after the war. Women were expected to leave their jobs and return to housework. But by the 1970s, there was a push to create a national childcare plan. In 1971, the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act. The bill would have created a national system of daycares to help watch the children of working mothers. But President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill.

And the backstory to that is that Nixon was about to go to China and they wanted cover, so they wanted to set him up as the anti-communist, and they claimed that childcare would be communist. Minus, they vetoed it, and that pulled childcare into the culture wars.

Just a few years later, the repercussions of that veto would affect Sarah's family. Sarah's mom was a single parent. Money was always tight. Her mom often had to make hard choices about what to do so she could keep working to provide for Sarah. In 1976, Sarah was 3 and her mother was pregnant. The day Sarah's mom gave birth, she had to work. Her mother had to make a terrible choice. She gave birth alone and left the child.

She simply said she could not get the day off work. She hadn't accrued any time, any PTO time to take off to have this baby. So what she did was had this child, cut the cord herself, and then went to work. She went to work at Mercy Hospital. As a nurse on her feet after she gave birth to a child. And so that's the type of stuff that, on a smaller scale, that I've been forced to do. There's been times where I didn't have childcare, and I had to sneak my kid in supply rooms at work because I didn't have childcare. And that was pre-pandemic. So that's a struggle that I had to mention what happened to my mother because it happened to me too, you know. That I had literally had to put my son in a supply closet so I could work. And so there was times that I cried. I walked away from my kid, and I cried. And I, you know, still feel terrible about that. And I know that I'm not saying that I made better options than my mother did by not just leaving my kid and walking away, but it's like I felt like I was making that same choice that she did every time I had to do that with my son.

Decades later, Sarah and her sister were reunited in August 2019. Her sister got to meet their mother before she died. Sarah says the pandemic has kept them apart, but they're working on building a relationship.

My sister ended up put behind a dumpster because services for mothers were unavailable 45 years ago. That hasn't changed. Women are still not having adequate childcare, not having adequate resources.

Comprehensive childcare wasn't available for Sarah or her mother, but that might change for future families. The Biden administration announced this spring the American Families Plan. This bill would redefine infrastructure to include things like caregiving support to families and much more. We'll hear how caregiving was impacted by the pandemic, why it's a critical part of American infrastructure, and what's at stake if parents and caregivers are forgotten again. That's after the break. Before the break, Sarah told us about the hard decisions she had to make before the pandemic when it came to childcare. This dilemma weighs on mothers like Sarah, but there's another side to the issue: the children themselves.

We haven't really paid that much attention to children during the pandemic because fortunately they haven't been hit as hard as adults and older people.

This is Julie Morita. She served as health commissioner in Chicago and is now executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She also served with me as a member of the Biden-Harris transition COVID advisory board.

There's still millions of children who have been infected by COVID, and there's hundreds of children who have died because of COVID directly. But then there's indirect impacts that children have experienced because of COVID and those things relate to problems with social isolation.

Sarah's child was one of them.

He needed the social interaction because he's a shy child. So pulling him away from his friends, I still worry how that will long-term, how that will affect him emotionally.

Sarah was at a loss for how to explain the situation to her son.

I just couldn't fix it. And I have to laugh about it because you gotta laugh to keep from crying. But it just had me so like angry as a parent that there was nothing that I could do to alleviate what happened.

So when Sarah had the chance, she sent her son back to school.

And I jumped at that. Like, people judge me like I'm trying to kill my child, but mentally he's suffering in here. My son started pacing the floors, and he's 8, because we couldn't go outside. So he was in here just pacing.

These strains are building up. Julie says one way is in the growing rates of mental health challenges for children and adults.

And that's why it's really exciting to see what's becoming available through the American Rescue Plan, where resources are being made available to support early child care and early education, because these are the those kinds of things can actually help children recover from some of these traumatic events.

In March, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law. The $1.9 trillion act included expanded child tax credits, extended paid leave credits passed in 2020 for employees who had to take time off because of illness or caregiving duties, and billions of dollars to stabilize child care centers.

We know that about 20%, 20 to 25% of child care centers actually closed, and that 40% of child care centers and childcaregivers actually went into debt to maintain operations, and that over 60% actually had to lay off individuals or furlough people. So the childcaregiving economy was really struck hard during this pandemic.

But many of those policies to help caregivers were temporary.

We can't keep people safe and healthy and rebuild our economy without allowing people the time off from work that they need for their own health or to care for a family member or to welcome a new child.

This is Erika Moritsugu. She's the White House Asian American and Pacific Islander Senior Liaison. But when we spoke with her for this episode, she was the Vice President for Economic Justice at the National Partnership for Women and Families.

So our top priority has been and is creating a permanent paid family medical leave program and a permanent national paid sick days standard.

Erika herself is a COVID long-hauler, but between emergency leave policies Congress passed in 2020 and the unlimited leave she had at her job, Erika didn't have to make the tough choices many Americans did when it came to choosing between her health, her family, and her job.

My boring but lucky story helped sharpen my focus professionally on folks who do not have the luxury of working from home or who didn't have access to paid leave or paid sick days. It's working people, particularly women, who were suffering without these policies before the pandemic, and now they're even more important.

Erika says the lack of paid time off, sick leave, and other policies to support families is driving women out of the workforce. As many as 2 million women left the workforce in 2020 because they lost their job or had to give up their career to meet caregiving obligations at home.

Access to paid leave in the United States is dismal. Only 21% of working people have access to paid family leave through their employer, and only 40% have access to paid medical leave.

And this is especially true for women of color. It's no surprise by now that the pandemic has hit communities of color especially hard. Many women and women of color are frontline workers. These are often low-paying jobs with few benefits like paid time off or sick leave, despite their increased risk of exposure to coronavirus.

The United States' segregated economy and reliance on employers to provide basic health and family supports, including paid leave, have created greater economic insecurity for people of color. And it's a well-designed national paid family medical leave program that would address those longstanding inequities in health outcomes.

That's where the American Families Plan comes into play. As part of the Biden administration's infrastructure proposal, the American Families Plan would recast caregiving as part of the nation's infrastructure and formalize many of the things we discussed in this episode. Despite bipartisan support for things like paid family and sick leave, there has been pushback against including something like childcare in an infrastructure package.

I do think it's appropriate to think about what we mean when we talk about infrastructure. It's not just limited to the roads and bridges within our nation, but it's also about the workforce.

Julie Morita again.

Childcare and caregiving are really critical parts of our infrastructure. When you look over the past 40 years, women entering the labor and the workforce in the workforce have really contributed significantly to the income gains experienced by the middle class over the past 40 years.

Just like people can't get to work if there are no roads or transportation services, they can't get to a job and participate in the economy if they don't have access to high-quality child and elder care. The American Families Plan would make childcare free for lower-income families. Middle-class families would not have to pay more than 7% of their annual income. Currently, middle-class families spend twice that amount on childcare every year, roughly 14% of their income. Lower-income families may pay as much as 35% of their income. Sarah supports these kinds of assistance for working moms like herself, but she says COVID has created additional burdens on caregivers in America.

Women were in a deficit before COVID We have to pull women out of, out of that. We have to provide affordable housing. When I look at how much money that I pay out of my income for housing, it's everything. Pretty much everything that I bring in goes towards the rent, the light, the gas, the water, the sewage.

Sarah has stayed involved with her advocacy work for mothers during the pandemic, even if it had to be remote. The organization she's been working with has been developing a resource directory for working moms.

The resource directory would also have information for childcare. We included self-care options as well, because that's important because we don't realize how, you know, our mental health, how important our mental health is to our overall health. And so we also have resources there for mental health, but pretty much anything that you can think of that moms need.

Finally, Sarah says she would like to see more moms involved in developing and funding these social programs.

I think that America should give working moms a chance. We are powerful and we have a wealth of knowledge and experience and can be helpful at getting that change done.

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