Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
Challenge/September–October 2005 39
Challenge, vol. 48, no. 5, September/October 2005, pp. 39–61.
© 2005 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 0577–5132 / 2005 $9.50 + 0.00.
MARCIA MEYERS and JANET GORNICK are coauthors of Families That Work: Policies for
Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003).
Policies for Reconciling
Parenthood and
Employment
Drawing Lessons from Europe
Marcia Meyers and Janet Gornick
Other industrialized countries have adopted policies
that simultaneously promote early child care and
gender equality. In both, the United States lags
significantly. Many economists claim that the lack of
such policies will reduce the nation’s productivity.
The authors analyze the policies of other nations and
present a bold set of policies for the country that
support families without sacrificing favorable
economic outcomes.
F
AMILIES IN THE UNITED STATES AND OTHER INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES
are grappling with the twin dilemmas of caring for children
when so many adults are in the workforce, and of achieving
gender equality in the home and in the labor market. In U.S. policy
debates, proposals to address these dilemmas often force tradeoffs—
promoting child well-being at the expense of gender equality, or sup-
Meyers and Gornick
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porting gender equality at the expense of children’s time with their
parents. In our view, an examination of social policies in several European
countries suggests that government can significantly help reduce
conflicts between work and family without forcing these
tradeoffs. Policies in much of Europe allow mothers and encourage
fathers to provide care for their children during the critical first year
of life, promote high-quality reduced-hour employment, and ensure
affordable and high-quality substitute care for children. The continuing
expansion of these policies in Europe suggests that they are
politically popular and also compatible with high productivity and
economic growth. By looking abroad we may find models for U.S.
policy that reconcile rather than force tradeoffs between gender equality
and the welfare of children.
In all the industrialized countries, families are navigating new terrain
in their efforts to balance the demands of employment with their
children’s need for care. In the majority of U.S. families, all adults
are now employed, and the annual working hours of U.S. parents,
already among the highest in the industrialized countries, have risen
in recent years (Jacobs and Gornick 2002). Parents are increasingly
squeezed for time and, at the same time, struggling to negotiate gender
divisions of labor that are both fair and economically viable. Although
female labor force participation is relatively high in the United
States, the employment rate and earnings of women with children lag
behind those of both men and women without children. This reality
is largely due to reduced employment associated with caring for children
(Budig and England 2001; Crittenden 2001; Waldfogel 1998).
Because men have not increased their hours of caregiving in proportion
to women’s increased hours of employment, many mothers—
especially those with preschool-aged children and full-time
jobs—spend longer hours in combined paid and unpaid work than do
their male partners (Deutsch 1999; Mattingly and Bianchi 2003). When
women do commit long hours to employment, they often rely on
substitute child care that is both expensive relative to their own earnings
and of uncertain quality. Ironically, while child care is costly for
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
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parents, the child care workforce, which is overwhelmingly females,
is among the most poorly paid in the United States.
Observers of work and family life in the United States generally
agree on the facts outlined above. Surprisingly, however, there is
considerable disagreement on exactly what the greatest concerns are.
Child development experts emphasize the importance of parental care
during the early months and years of children’s lives, and many are
voicing concern that increasing maternal employment may be compromising
children’s health and well-being. Experts concerned with
“work/life” balance emphasize the time pressures and stress experienced
by women who are juggling competing demands, and the consequences
for their careers and their health. Experts who are more
explicitly feminist in orientation emphasize the persistence of gender
inequalities, arguing that women’s disproportionate assumption of
unpaid work in the home is both cause and consequence of persistent
gender inequalities in the labor market.
These discourses appear most at odds when proposing solutions.
Some observers suggest that the solution is to shore up “traditional”
family arrangements and gender roles by increasing supports for women
as caregivers at home. With sufficient financial remuneration and social
approbation, women may be persuaded to retain primary responsibility
for caregiving and forgo employment opportunities that are
equal to those of men. On the other hand, others suggest moving even
more caregiving work out of the home. In the more extreme view,
often called a universal-breadwinner society, all parents would be in
the workforce full-time and children would be cared for mostly by
other adults who are paid by the family or the government.
These disparate prescriptions share common weaknesses. They locate
solutions for what is a social problem in the private sphere of
family decision making. They generally neglect the possibility that
fathers might become much more active partners in caregiving. In
doing so, they, too, require tradeoffs between the equally important
social goals of raising healthy children and equalizing opportunities
between women and men.
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42 Challenge/September–October 2005
Envisioning a Solution
Can we envision a social and economic arrangement that is consonant
with both child well-being and gender equality? British sociologist
Rosemary Crompton (1999) illustrates alternative arrangements
along a continuum. The left end of her continuum corresponds to a
“male breadwinner/female carer” arrangement in which men devote
their time to waged work and women spend theirs caregiving in the
home. One modification to this arrangement—in which both mothers
and fathers are employed but mothers combine part-time work
with caregiving—increases but does not accomplish gender equality.
A second modification—in which both mothers and fathers are fully
employed and children are mostly cared for outside the home by
other adults—achieves gender equality but leaves parents with little
time to care for their own children.
At the right end of her continuum, Crompton describes a social
arrangement that fully reconciles parental caregiving time with gender
equality. A “dual-earner/dual-carer” model would engage both
mothers and fathers, and the family and the state, in the care of children.
First, unlike arrangements in which men are the primary earners,
it envisions symmetrical engagement by men and women in both
paid work and in unpaid caregiving. Second, unlike arrangements
that achieve gender equality by shifting most caregiving outside the
home, it proposes that parents would have the time to care for their
own children, at least during the critical first year of life. Finally,
unlike arrangements in which parents bear the full cost of caring for
young children through employment reductions and private child
care purchases, it assumes the government will provide paid parenting
leaves and high-quality public child care.1
The earner/carer arrangement resolves the tension between respecting
caregiving and promoting gender equality by valuing both market
and caregiving work and distributing them equally between men
and women. It helps to resolve work/family conflicts by assuming
that both mothers and fathers will reduce their employment hours
when caregiving demands are very high. And it balances support for
parents’ employment and for children’s well-being by assuming that
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
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parents combine temporary employment reductions with the use of
good quality out-of-home child care.
What Would It Take?
What would an earner/carer society look like? Using data from the
Current Population Survey (CPS), we can compare the average actual
hours spent in paid work among U.S. mothers and fathers (including
those working zero hours) with those in a hypothetical “earner/carer”
society. As of 2000, U.S. mothers were working for pay an average of
twenty-four hours per week if they had children under the age of six
and about thirty hours per week if their youngest children were of
primary and secondary school age. Men, in contrast, worked for pay
an average of forty-four hours per week regardless of the ages of their
children.
As a thought experiment, we consider mothers and fathers who are
raising their children in couples, and ask: What if male and female
parents shared more equally, and still had time to care for their young
children? The primary impact of this shift would be on the intrafamily
allocation—rather than total supply—of parents’ time in market labor.
Suppose mothers and fathers adjusted their employment hours so that
they could provide equally shared, full-time care for children under
the age of one and most of their children’s care until age three, and
then increased their work hours to about thirty-five to thirty-eight
hours per week, as their children reached school age? In comparison
to current levels, total parental employment hours would decrease—
by about fifteen hours per week—only among families with children
As a thought experiment, we consider mothers and fathers
who are raising their children in couples, and ask:What if
male and female parents shared more equally, and still had
time to care for their young children?
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44 Challenge/September–October 2005
under age three. In all other families with children, mothers’ employment
hours would increase and fathers’ hours would decrease,
but their combined total hours would remain the same on average.
Despite their potential benefits for child well-being and gender
equality, earner/carer arrangements such as these are simply not a
realistic option for most American families. Among all but the most
privileged families, parents cannot realistically choose to reduce
and are often unable to reallocate their employment hours. Given
limited options, couples rarely find it economically advantageous—
or even feasible—to craft gender-egalitarian caregiving and employment
arrangements.
What would it take to make dual-earner/dual-carer arrangements a
viable choice for American families? For mothers and fathers to share
the caring, women, and especially men, would need opportunities
and incentives to shift hours from the labor market to the home when
their children are young. When their children are older, women would
need opportunities to shift a modest number of hours from the home
to the market, while their male partners would need opportunities to
do the reverse. Both women and men would need employment arrangements
that allow them to take temporary breaks to care for children
and options for high-quality, reduced-hour, or part-time work
that do not impose excessive penalties in wages, benefits, and job
advancement.2
Parents would need access to nonparental care arrangements
that are both affordable and of good quality for their children.
Workers who provide this care would need reasonable compensation
for their work.
The Role of Government Policy
Although limited in the United States, public policies that support
these options are increasingly standard in several European countries.
Mothers, and to an increasing extent fathers, have access to paid
leave in the months following childbirth. Many countries are redesigning
leave benefits to increase the incentives for fathers to take
their share of time away from paid work for caregiving. National poli-
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
Challenge/September–October 2005 45
cies and collective bargaining agreements are shortening the standard
workweek. Labor market policies, some mandated by the European
Union (EU), raise both the quality and availability of part-time
work. Beginning at the age of two-and-a-half or three, children in
several countries have the right to a place in a high-quality early education
program, and this entitlement is being extended to the underthrees
in a growing number of countries.
To draw a contrast with existing policies in the United States, and
to allow us to envision alternatives for the United States, it is helpful
to examine in some detail the “package” of assistance available to
families in parts of Europe. Although none of the European countries
has a fully developed earner/carer policy system, Sweden and
France provide useful examples of how family leave, working-time
regulations, and early childhood education and care (ECEC) can be
combined.3
The Swedish Case
Family policies in many of the Nordic countries have been adopted
with the explicit goals of promoting child well-being and supporting
gender equality, and Sweden provides a particularly useful example
of this approach. Leave policies in Sweden provide parents with extensive
and flexible time away from the workplace in order to care
for young children. Couples have an entitlement to sixteen months
of paid parental leave, shared between mothers and fathers. Leave
policies encourage gender equality in participation by designating
two months of this leave as “use-or-lose” or “daddy quota” leave for
fathers and by providing high wage-replacement rates (approximately
80 percent of earnings) that reduce the financial penalty of withdrawing
the higher earner (often fathers) from employment.4
Swedish
parents are allowed to “tick down” their leave entitlement over
several years (until the child’s eighth birthday). Parents are also entitled
to other forms of leave at the same wage replacement rate—
including up 120 days each year to care for a sick child and short-term
leaves for other family reasons—although actual take-up of benefits
Meyers and Gornick
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is far below this legal maximum. The average standard work week is
38.8 hours (set largely through collective agreements), and all workers
have twenty-five to thirty days of annual paid vacation. Parents
have an additional, statutory right to work six hours per day (at prorated
pay) until their children turn age eight.
Beyond periods of paid leave, Swedish parents have access to highquality
and affordable alternatives to parental child care. Extensive,
educationally oriented public care is provided as an entitlement for
all children. Nearly half (48 percent) the children between the ages
of one and two are in publicly supported care, as are 82 percent of
those between the ages of three and five and virtually all six-yearolds.
Standards, set nationally and adapted in local municipalities,
ensure high-quality care, provided by workers who earn wages at about
the national mean for all women workers. Public child care during
the preschool years is typically full-day, full-year. Primary schools
are generally open for many hours beyond the instructional hours—
as long as sixty hours per week in some parts of the country.
Government and parents share the costs of this early childhood education
and care. Investments by national and municipal government
averaged $4,950 per child under school age in the mid-1990s, covering
about 82 percent of costs. Parent fees covered the remaining 18 percent,
paid on sliding fee scales that adjust for family income. Given
extensive public provisions, use of privately purchased care is rare.
The French Case
Countries in continental Europe have taken a somewhat different
approach to work/family and working-time policies. Family policies
are typically less generous than those of the Nordic countries, and do
less to explicitly promote gender equality, while some forms of working-time
regulation are more generous in their protection of workers’
time. Among the continental countries, the policies of France are
arguably most consistent with the earner/carer model.
French mothers are entitled to sixteen weeks of paid leave following
the birth of first and second children, and twenty-six weeks after
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
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the birth of third and subsequent children, with 100 percent wage
replacement (up to a cap). French parents are also entitled to share
three years of job-protected parental leave with low flat-rate benefits,
and short periods of paid leave to care for ill children. Although maternity
leaves are well established, France has been slow to address
the resulting gender inequalities. Since 2002, fathers in France have a
right to a short period (eleven days) of paid paternity leave. The low
benefits provided for extended parental leave, however, continue to
create incentives for mothers, much more than fathers, to take extended
breaks from employment.
France has been at the forefront of European efforts to reduce working
time. Since 2000, the French workweek has been legally limited
to thirty-five hours. The law covers nearly all workers, and lowerwage
employees were protected from pay losses following implementation.
France’s thirty-five-hour law was originally enacted to reduce
unemployment; later, the government’s emphasis shifted to the twin
goals of supporting work/family reconciliation and promoting gender
equality.5
France has also taken steps to increase the availability
and quality of part-time employment—for example, enacting provisions
that allow caregivers to temporarily reduce their working hours
with prorated pay and benefits.
France is also a leader in the provision of high-quality alternatives
to parental child care, particularly during the years before public
school. A dual system of early child care and later public preschool
(école maternelle) provides care for about 20 percent of French children
under age three and nearly all children between age three and
the start of public school. From the ages of two-and-a-half or three,
children are entitled to a place in these free public preschools, and
nearly all children attend. Public care for those below age three, provided
through subsidized crèches with parental copayments, is more
limited, and many parents arrange private in-home or other care
(which is partially subsidized through the tax system).
Quality standards for early childhood education and care in France
are set by national policy and curricula. Teachers in preschools have
the equivalent of graduate training in early education, and compen-
Meyers and Gornick
48 Challenge/September–October 2005
sation is correspondingly high—the earnings of preschool teachers
are above the mean for all employed women in the country. Although
high in quality, the hours of early care and education in France are
not fully consonant with the needs of earner/carer families. Schools
in many part of the country still close, for example, for a half-day on
Wednesday. Ironically, French parents may have access to longer and
more continuous hours of care for their young children, in crèches,
than for their preschool and school-age children.
Early childhood education and care in France are financed through
a combination of government, employer, and parental contributions.
Parents pay an estimated 17 percent of crèche costs and a larger share
of care in family care settings or for in-home care. Preschools are
financed by national and municipal government and free to parents.
As of the mid-1990s, total public expenditures averaged $3,161 annually
per child under school age.
Lessons for the United States?
In comparison to either of these cases, the United States is a policy laggard—lagging
both in generosity and in supports and incentives for gender
equality. In this section we describe the contours of current parental
leave, working time, and early childhood education and care policies in
the United States. We then draw on the European models to suggest a
policy package for the United States that would provide generous and
gender-egalitarian support for parents balancing earning and caring roles.
Paid Family Leave
The United States remains one of a handful of countries in the world
that has no national program of paid maternity leave, and one of the
few Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) member countries without paid parental leave. The federal
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 provides twelve weeks
of unpaid leave per year for mothers and fathers who are employed in
covered workplaces and who meet eligibility requirements. Small
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
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employers are exempt from the FMLA, however, and more than 40
percent of those in the private-sector workforce work in firms that
are not covered by the law.
The FMLA is limited even more fundamentally by the lack of wage
replacement. Some states extend workers’ rights to unpaid leave, and
five states mandate some wage replacement to mothers at the time of
childbirth, via state Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) programs.
These programs assist new mothers but are categorically gender-inegalitarian.
In 2004, California became the first state to extend any
paid leave to fathers, providing six weeks of paid leave to mothers and
fathers, paid at approximately 55 percent wage replacement, subject
to an earnings cap.
Outside of these state programs, paid leave is available to some
workers—especially high-earning workers—through their employers,
either as part of a standard employee benefit package or negotiated
on a case-by-case basis. As of the mid-1990s, only 43 percent of women
who were employed during their pregnancies received any paid leave
during the first twelve weeks following birth or adoption through
either public provisions or voluntarily-provided employer benefits—
including the use of maternity pay, sick pay, or vacation pay (Smith et
al. 2001). Fathers’ access is even more limited. A recent study of personnel
managers found that only 7 percent of employers, nationwide,
provided any paid leave at all for new fathers (U.S. Office of Personnel
Management 2001).
What could the United States do to provide more generous and
gender-equalizing support for earner/carer families? The Swedish case
suggests key elements for such policies.
First, in a comprehensive paid family leave program, all employed
As of the mid-1990s, only 43 percent of women who were
employed during their pregnancies received any paid leave
during the first twelve weeks following birth or adoption.
Meyers and Gornick
50 Challenge/September–October 2005
mothers and fathers would be granted six months of paid leave following
childbirth or adoption. As with the current FMLA provisions, each
employed parent would have his or her own nontransferable leave entitlement.
This is a significant adjustment to the Swedish model, in
which couples share a family entitlement. While nontransferability
restricts individual options, it substantially increases the incentives for
fathers’ participation.
Second, employees would receive 100 percent wage replacement
during these leave periods, with an earnings cap on benefits to contain
costs. A social insurance fund, similar to the current Social Security
Trust Fund, could be used to finance wage replacement through
employer and/or employee payroll contributions. To minimize discrimination
against potential leave takers, it is crucial that employers
not be expected to replace the wages of their own workers when they
leave and that social insurance premiums not be experience-rated to
reflect the share of employees who draw benefits.
Third, flexibility in paid leave entitlements would allow parents to
take up their benefits either full-time or in combination with parttime
employment, and to draw down their six-month entitlement
incrementally, until their child’s third birthday. In other words, each
(employed) new parent would be granted a six-month allotment of
leave time and permitted to flexibly choose how and when to “tick
the clock down.” To accommodate employers’ needs, employers should
have the right to require substantial notification periods before workers
exit the workplace and before they return. Government could
provide additional help for employers—particularly small employers—
by making referrals between potential workers seeking employment
or training opportunities and employers seeking to hire temporary
replacement workers.
Fourth, employed parents would have the right to take paid time off
occasionally to attend to other family-related obligations. For example,
employed parents might have the right to twenty-four hours per year of
leave with pay in order to care for sick children and other family members,
or to attend to children’s school or other medical needs. These
benefits would be paid through the contributory family leave fund.
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
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Working-Time Regulations
Working time in the United States is regulated through federal and
state laws and, to a lesser extent, collective bargaining agreements.
The most important mechanism is the national Fair Labor Standards
Act (FLSA) of 1938, which establishes the standard workweek by requiring
employers to pay time-and-a-half for each hour worked above
forty in a seven-day week. The FLSA’s protections are comparatively
weak in two respects. First, that forty-hour threshold in place for
over six decades is high in cross-national terms; most of the countries
of western and northern Europe have moved to weekly standards
in the range of thirty-five to thirty-nine hours. Second, according
to the U.S. General Accounting Office (2000), as of 1998, as many as
26 million workers, or 27 percent of full-time workers, were exempt
from FLSA coverage. The share of the labor market that is exempt has
grown sharply in recent years, increasing by 9 million workers during
the 1980s and 1990s alone.
In comparison to the working-time regulations in place in many
European countries, the FLSA is most notable for what it does not
address. The FLSA neither mandates maximum total hours nor prohibits
mandatory overtime. In the United States, employees who refuse
overtime hours have no protection from job dismissals, demotions,
or other repercussions. As Golden and Jorgensen (2002) report, about
one-third of overtime workers in the United States report being compelled
by their employers to work overtime. With the exception of
the minimum wage, the FLSA is also silent on issues of compensation
and benefits for part-time and other reduced-hour workers, and it
offers no extra compensation for workers in nonstandard shifts. Nor
does it address daily or weekly rest breaks, or annual vacation rights.
Although not generally viewed as “working-time policy,” regulations
that govern employer benefits also have important consequences
for the relative quality of part-time work in the United States. Both
the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 and
the U.S. Internal Revenue Code set rules that give employers the right
to offer different benefits to part-time and full-time workers. In the
United States, this is especially consequential with regard to health
Meyers and Gornick
52 Challenge/September–October 2005
insurance. A disproportionate share of part-time employees are employed
by firms that offer no health insurance; other part-time workers
work for employers that do provide coverage, but they are excluded
due to their part-time status. A parallel situation exists with respect
to the regulation of private pensions because ERISA, in combination
with the Internal Revenue Code, allows employers to exclude from
pension plans those workers who work fewer than 1,000 hours annually—which
translates to about half-time work.
Working-time policies in Sweden and France, which correspond to
those in much of Europe, suggest the elements of more progressive
and family-friendly regulations for the United States
First, statutory reforms would reduce standard weekly employment
hours in the United States to 37.5 hours a week to provide all workers,
and most especially parents, with more time for family responsibilities.
A 37.5-hour work week is near the current average in the EU
and actually consistent with average actual hours currently worked
by U.S. parents. Mandating reductions in the standard workweek
would increase parents’ opportunities to seek employment that is
institutionally “full-time” but at less than forty hours, and decrease
the concentration of these jobs in a subset of firms, occupations, and
industries that typically provide lower wages and restricted career
opportunities.
Second, employed parents with children under age three would
have the right to shift temporarily to part-time employment, without
changing employers. Employers would reasonably need substantial
advance notification from employees and, as is common in much of
Europe, employers would have the right to refuse “on business
grounds” with their refusals subject to government review. To accommodate
the needs of small employers, the right to work part-time
might be restricted to workers in enterprises of a minimum size—say,
ten workers (as is the case in the Netherlands) or fifteen workers (as
in Germany).
Third, part-time workers would have the right to pay and benefit
parity—in comparison to full-time workers performing similar work
in the same enterprise. Such protections, aimed at preventing discrimi-
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
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nation against part-time workers, have been required in all EU member
countries in the wake of the 1997 EU Directive on Part-Time Work.
Early Childhood Education and Care
About three-quarters of preschoolers in the United States spend some
portion of their time in nonparental care while their parent(s) are at
work. Families may qualify for assistance with child care through
one of three main policy vehicles: means-tested subsidies, state or
federal preschool programs, or state and federal tax credits for outof-pocket
expenditures. Public expenditures have increased in recent
years, particularly for means-tested subsidies and state pre-kindergarten
programs in some states. Even with recent increases in spending,
however, nontax public expenditures on ECEC in the United States
averaged only about $680 per child under age five as of 2000—less
than one-seventh of per-child spending in Sweden and about onefifth
of spending in France. State and federal tax benefits combined
provide a small additional benefit—averaging only about $440 per
claimant family.
The costs of substitute care remain mostly private in the United
States and highly unequal across families. Only an estimated 12 percent
of employed families with a child under age thirteen receive
some type of nontax assistance from government or other organizations
(Giannarelli et al. 2003). Out-of-pocket child care costs consume
an average of 9 percent of family earnings per month. For
families earnings at or below the poverty line, however, the costs are
an estimated 18 percent (Giannarelli and Barsimantov 2000).
Although care is expensive for families, observational studies suggest
that it is highly variable, across settings, and often of mediocre
to poor quality—due in part to variable and generally weak public
(state) regulations of private service quality and provider training
(Helburn et al. 1995; Galinsky et al. 1994; NICHD Early Child Care
Research Network 2000). Expensive care of dubious quality has implications
for children’s well-being. It also has implications for gender
equality. Without affordable and acceptable alternatives to parental
Meyers and Gornick
54 Challenge/September–October 2005
care for young children, it is women, rather than men, who reduce
employment hours and incur employment penalties. And efforts to
keep private care “affordable” translate directly into reduced economic
and social status for the highly feminized, poorly paid, and often
poorly trained child-care workforce (Whitebook 1999).
What could the United States do to create an affordable and highquality
system of care that builds on the best elements of the Swedish
and French systems?
First, the federal government would establish universal, child-based
entitlements to early care and education. With the provision of paid
parental leaves, we assume that parents will provide a portion of care
for children in the first three years of life. This assumption suggests
the need for limited amounts of infant care; modest amounts of toddler
care; more extensive care for three- and four-year-old children;
and services to extend the kindergarten school day for five-year-old
children. To equalize children’s access to high-quality care, these services
should be provided as a child-based entitlement that does not
impose complex eligibility screens based on family income or parents’
employment status.
Second, national funding for early care and education would reduce
and equalize out-of-pocket costs for families. The current patchwork
of federal and state funding for early childhood education and
care in the United States has resulted in limited support for parents,
a complicated system of uncoordinated programs and tax credits, and
substantial regional variation in assistance. National funding, linked
to child-based entitlements, would both simplify and equalize assistance.
To contain public costs, government could assume 82 percent
of total costs (about the European mean), paid for through general
revenues. The remaining 18 percent of costs could be covered through
a uniform system of parental fees, adjusted to family income and
exempting the poorest families entirely.
Third, provision of care through multiple settings would provide
parents with the choice of arrangement type and caregiver. Parents’
preferences for care arrangement vary with the ages of their children
and with their own family and cultural beliefs. Given consolidated
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
Challenge/September–October 2005 55
federal funding and oversight, the existing and highly differentiated
supply of family child care homes and child care centers, public and
private preschools in the United States could provide the foundation
for an expanded and integrated service system. High levels of nonstandard-hour
work among U.S. parents, higher than in most of Europe,
create special child care demands. For parents who work outside
a regular forty-hour workweek, publicly subsidized care (e.g., in family
child care homes) could provide care options in combination with
universally available preschool to ensure that these children do not
miss the early educational opportunities available to other children.
Fourth, the adoption and enforcement of national standards would
ensure high quality in all subsidized early childhood education and
care. As the European models suggest, national standards for service
quality and program content can be combined with local, community-
or program-level adaptations to provide consistent quality that
is responsive to family preferences. Along with protection of health,
safety, and, where appropriate, program content, the most crucial input
into quality care is staff education, training, and commitment to
caregiving work. These caregiver features are, in turn, dependent on
wages, benefits, and working conditions that attract and retain highquality
workers, standards for which would be an essential component
of national quality standards.
What Would It Cost?
In imagining universal policies that support gender-equal engagement
in caregiving and employment, while ensuring the highest quality of
care for children in their developmentally sensitive early years, we
have proposed programs that are substantially more generous than
current U.S. policy. How much more generous? And how much revenue
would be needed?
We present our estimates of the direct costs of these paid family
leave and early childhood education and care proposals in Table 1.6
The proposed working time regulations do not require direct public
outlays, so we omit them from our estimates of direct costs.
Meyers and Gornick
56 Challenge/September–October 2005
We estimate that the total direct cost of the paid family leave proposal
outlined above would be approximately $22.5 billion to $45
billion per year in new social insurance spending, depending on the
average number of days claimed by leave-takers. These costs are based
on the provision of a six-month benefit for both mothers and fathers,
payable at 100 percent wage replacement (with an earnings cap of
about $69,000 per year in 2004), and no minimum enterprise size.
The lower-bound estimate assumes that leave-takers claim an average
of 50 percent of the days to which they are entitled; the upper-bound
assumes that they take up the entire period to which they are entitled.
While these estimates include administrative costs, they do
not include the cost of paid leave for caring for ill family members.
They account for paid leave for maternity and parental leave only,
and a small amount of leave for other family reasons.
Universal early childhood education and care—for about twentysix
hours a week on average for children under three, full time for
Table 1
Estimated Direct Costs: Paid Family Leave and Early Childhood
Education and Care Programs (under alternative assumptions about take up)
In U.S. dollars As a share of
(billions) U.S. GDP
Paid family leave
High take up (100%) $45.0 0.43%
Moderate take up (approximately 50%) $22.5 0.22%
Early childhood education and care
High take up (100% of children) $111.1 1.07%
Moderate take up (50% of children <3) $84.4 0.81%
Total
High family leave take up and high ECEC take up $156 1.50%
High family leave take up and moderate
ECEC take up $129 1.24%
Moderate family leave take up and high
ECEC take up $134 1.28%
Moderate family leave take up and moderate
ECEC take up $107 1.03%
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
Challenge/September–October 2005 57
three- and four-year-olds, and half-time for five-year-olds (the majority
of whom are now enrolled in public kindergarten part-day)—would
cost an estimated $111 billion if government assumed 82 percent of
costs and take up was 100 percent among families. If family take up
for one- and two-year-olds was closer to the 50 percent of Swedish
families, the total public cost would be about $84 billion. Given current
federal spending of about $16 billion on subsidies, tax benefits,
and Head Start, the programs would require an estimated $95 billion
(high take up) to $68 billion (low take up) in new spending for the
federal government—and free additional funds that states are currently
devoting to child care and early education.
Are these direct costs a lot or a little to spend on the well-being of
families and children? This level of spending would be comparable
to what some of our European counterparts now invest in these programs.
The paid leave and child care/early education benefits combined
represent about 1.0 to 1.5 percent of the current U.S. gross
domestic product (GDP) for moderate take up and high take up, respectively.
In comparison, Sweden spends about 2.5 percent of its
GDP on the combination of family leave and ECEC; France, with
somewhat less extensive leave benefits, spends about 1.3 percent. The
United States currently spends about one-tenth of the higher amount:
approximately 0.15 percent of its GDP on publicly financed child
care and a negligible amount on publicly paid leave.7
The social benefits of investments in public education for older
children are well understood. The United States now commits about
3.4 percent of GDP to public primary and secondary education. Together,
the benefits we have proposed would require about 30–44
percent of what the United States now commits to public education—
a comparable public commitment to children in the years before the
start of public school.
Would It Work in the United States?
Would the United States gain or lose, economically, if we were to
move toward shorter workweeks and universal programs of paid fam-
Meyers and Gornick
58 Challenge/September–October 2005
ily leave and early childhood education and care? The answer depends
on both the costs of these policies and their potential shortand
long-term returns to society.
The United States is ranked first among OECD member countries
in per capita income, using purchasing-power–adjusted exchange rates.
This level of total output comes with a steep price, however. Americans
also work the longest hours among these countries, creating a
particularly heavy time burden on those with children. It is also the
case that Americans may be so hard-working that we are on the diminishing-returns
portion of the productivity curve. While the United
States leads the world in GDP per worker, it ranks eighth among OECD
member countries in GDP per worker-hour.
The United States may also be paying both a short- and longerterm
economic price through its failure to ensure that all children
have a healthy start in life. Leaving the costs of child rearing almost
entirely to parents is unlikely to produce optimal social and economic
outcomes, because the costs that parents incur on behalf of
their children produce benefits that are widely dispersed. In other
words, as Nancy Folbre and Paula England have argued, children are
public goods—in the sense that their capabilities benefit society as a
whole and others can reap the benefits without paying for their “production”
(England and Folbre 1999; Folbre 1994). To the extent that
children’s capabilities are public goods, private investments in their
care are likely to be suboptimal, and society as a whole may eventually
pay a collective price in the form of children who fail to achieve
their full potential, at best, or who become a drain on public programs,
at worst.
Government policies that help families reconcile employment and
caregiving, and that ensure high-quality care for children, are likely
to produce both short- and long-term economic returns. Whether
these returns are greater than the social investments depends, in part,
on whether the social spending itself is a drag on economic productivity
and growth. In a comprehensive study of this question, Peter
Lindert (2004) concludes that, contrary to the intuition of many
economists, social spending in the industrialized countries has con-
Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
Challenge/September–October 2005 59
tributed to, rather than inhibited, economic growth. Lawrence Mishel
et al. (2005) concur. Their empirical results suggest that although
productivity increased in the United States in recent years, the United
States underperformed relative to some higher-spending OECD member
countries for most of the past twenty years.
In the end, the question of whether we can “afford” more generous
work/family policies is political rather than fiscal. Providing
support for parents in high-employment societies does not demand
that we trade the interests of women against those of men, or the
interests of children against those of their parents. As the European
experiences suggest, social policies can be designed to promote economic
security, child well-being and gender equality without sacrificing
economic productivity.
Notes
1. Throughout this paper we focus on two-parent, heterosexual couples in order
to examine work/family balance and gender equality in tandem. The issues are
equally relevant for same-sex couples and for single parents. In the case of single
parents, gender-equal work/family reconciliation policies could increase noncustodial
fathers’ involvement and reduce the gender bias resulting from the disproportionate
share of childrearing assumed by single mothers.
2. We use the term “reduced-hour work” to refer to paid work that is institutionally
“full-time” but at less than forty hours per week, generally in the range of thirtyfive
to thirty-nine hours. By “part-time work,” we mean paid work at less than
approximately thirty-five hours per week, the standard cutoff in the United States.
3. See Gornick and Meyers (2003) for more detail and for sources of countryspecific
information.
4. Although mothers continue to take more leave than fathers in Sweden and
other Nordic countries, fathers’ participation has risen sharply since the introduction
of “use or lose” and other gender-equalizing provisions. As of the mid-1990s,
more than 40 percent of eligible fathers took some parental leave in Sweden, and
more than 70 percent did so in Norway (Ellingsaeter 1999; Leira 1999).
5. The French thirty-five-hour law has been contentious in part because it sets
the work week two to three hours below standards in most of Western and Northern
Europe. In 2005, the French thirty-five-hour law was substantially weakened by
changes that lessened the limits on overtime options.
6. The details underlying these cost estimates are available from the authors.
Cost estimates for paid family leave are based on estimates for the California program
by Dube and Kaplan (2002), adjusted upward to reflect a longer benefit period
and higher wage-replacement rate. Arindrajit Dube (personal communication, May
Meyers and Gornick
60 Challenge/September–October 2005
6, 2004) provided helpful suggestions for this estimate. Estimates for early childhood
education and care costs are based on Helburn and Bergmann (2002), adjusted
for the number of children receiving care on a part- or full-time basis, and
increased by about $2,000 per child annually to improve providers’ salaries and
service quality. The resulting per-child estimates are similar to the actual price of
high-quality preschool services currently provided in public settings.
7. The estimated 2.5 percent of GDP in Sweden and 1.5 percent of GDP in the
United States represent roughly equivalent levels of expenditures per capita because
per capita GDP is higher in the United States than in Sweden. See Gornick and
Meyers 2003 for a more extended discussion.
For Further Reading
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Crompton, R., ed. 1999. Restructuring Gender Relations and Employment: The Decline
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Deutsch, F.D. 1999. Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Really Works. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Dube, A., and E. Kaplan. 2002. “Paid Family Leave in California: An Analysis of
Costs and Benefits.” Labor Project for Working Families.
Ellingsaeter, A.L. 1999. “Dual Breadwinners Between State and Market.” In Restructuring
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England, P., and N. Folbre. 1999. “The Cost of Caring.” Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science 561: 39–51.
Folbre, N. 1994. “Children as Public Goods.” American Economic Review 84, no. 2:
86–90.
Galinsky, E., C. Howes, S. Kontos, and M. Shinn. 1994. The Study of Children in
Family Child Care and Relative Care: Highlights of Findings. New York: Families
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Giannarelli, L., and J. Barsimantov. 2000. Child Care Expenses of America’s Families.
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Golden, L., and H. Jorgensen. 2002. Time After Time: Mandatory Overtime in the U.S.
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Gornick, J.C., and M.K. Meyers. 2003. Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling
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Helburn, S., and B. Bergmann. 2002. America’s Child Care Problem: The Way Out.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
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Helburn, S., M.L. Culkin, C. Howes, D. Bryant, R. Clifford, D. Cryer, E. PeisnerFeinsberg,
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U.S. General Accounting Office. 2000. Contingent Workers: Incomes and Benefits Lag
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