Chart of the Week: The Unexpected Challenges of Parenting
I'm rebranding this substack from "Chart of the Day" to "Chart of the Week" and giving it a more defined focus: delving into one chart from my reading notes of the previous week.
This week's chart comes from the paper "The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood?" by Ilyana Kuziemko, Jessica Pan, Jenny Shen, and Ebonya Washington. Instead of covering the well-known dynamics of mothers' earnings around their first child's birth in the US and UK, I want to examine the paper's unique findings on gender role attitudes and expectations.
I'll highlight a different chart than I chose as the "Key Table/Figure" in my reading notes. Figure 6 compares the expectation of being a homemaker (hollow shapes) with the actual prevalence (solid shapes) in various surveys, by cohort. If you compare within surveys (colors), you'll see that the expectation of being a homemaker is lower than the actual rate in recent cohorts in both the NLSY and the MTF/CPS.
The authors also found that women (not men) reported that parenthood was harder than they expected. This could explain why gender norms measured by questions such as "All in all, family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job" declined after childbirth.
The authors argue that women may invest too much in human capital because their expectations of future employment are overestimated. This theory is supported by Mariel Schwartz's paper "The Spillover Effects of Maternity Leave Policy on Young Women's Schooling Choices." Schwartz found that young women whose sisters received maternity leave invested less in education than those whose sisters didn't. The results of Schwartz's paper still seem counterintuitive to me, but if maternity leave helped their sisters stay connected to the workforce, and because of that faced more of the challenges of balancing work and childrearing, that may have allowed younger sisters to make a more informed decision about their own likelihood of staying in the workforce and the potential benefits of investing in more education.
Why are expectations about the difficulty of parenthood different from reality? The authors point to the increase in breastfeeding and time spent on childcare in recent decades, as documented by Valerie Ramey and Garey Ramey in their paper "The Rug Rat Race." In the Mommy Effect paper, the authors provide evidence from surveys which show that people think it's harder to raise a family now than it was in the past.
However, for me what really made parenting harder than expected is not something that has changed since I was a child but it is the fact that kids get sick all the time. Even after enrolling children in daycare, there are still interruptions and the need to be readily available to stay home if they get sick or have a fever. This is worse for me, who moved to the other side of the country from my family, than for my sister, who lives within 1/2 an hour of potential grandparent care. Garrett Anstreicher and Joanna Venator’s paper "To Grandmother's House We Go: Childcare Time Transfers and Female Labor Mobility," found that women are more likely to move back to their home state after having a child.
But at least I have sick leave. Many families don’t. Only 79% of workers had sick leave in 2021, and only 35% of workers in the lowest decile of earnings. Illness for my kid means my productivity and focus at work declines, illness for a kid of a worker without sick leave may mean they lose their job, or at least lose income on the days they cannot work.
So, having kids is hard. Lack of support in the forms of no universal maternity and sick leave, and expensive childcare makes it harder. As does living on the wrong side of the country from family. I’m not a homemaker. I don’t think my family suffers because I have a full time job. But being a parent was harder than I expected too.