There’s been a lot written about the fact that most families now need two incomes to survive. Soaring housing costs and competition for schools have forced both parents into the workforce. Is that true? Childcare costs are so high that the second income can hardly amount to much.
Maybe both people are working because work is more pleasurable than home, as Arlie Hochschild mainstains. When you’re at home, there are no expense account lunches, no annual reviews with raises, and no bullshit sessions in the hallway.
If you are in a two income family, is it worth it after childcare costs? If you’re just breaking even, why do it?
Apt. 11d 
My kids don’t live with me anymore, nor do they require child care (they’re 14 and 18), but I did that (double income with small kids) until recently. I live in a small city, with good public transit, and we found neighborhood daycare when they were under school age. We also chose a neighborhood with a good public school, on a year-round schedule, and then worked to bring a very good private, non-profit daycare to operate a branch in the school.
So, when they talk about all the costs of working eating up the lower-paid job’s income, there are ways to get around it. For a few years daycare was definitely our biggest expense, but eventually you’re not paying for any (about the time the kids start eating like hogs and growing out of their clothes every few months, granted). We didn’t drive two cars to separate work sites and pay for parking: my then-husband had free parking, and I took the bus; plus because we were in a small city, we could live near where we worked, and had at most a half hour commute each way.
I didn’t buy any clothing that had to be dry cleaned: I had a job where I could wear business casual most of the time, and chose washable fabrics and styles. And we both had jobs with employers that not just allowed but approved of taking care of your kids when you needed to: we could take sick time to stay home with them when they were sick or needed to go to the dentist, and take a vacation day if school was out for teacher training but the daycare was closed.
We didn’t take a single vacation for years, except for camping (which is only slightly more expensive than staying home). We didn’t really have a social life other than with our kids; after all, we were already gone from them so much (say, 50 hours a week including commute time.)
We could not have lived on one income and had children at all, so that was never a possibility. Even looking at it in the worst light, i.e., charging every additional expense to my income, there was enough of a surplus that we lived better with me working (and paying child care and other expenses) than without. (I made about two thirds as much as my then-husband did.)
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And even if you do only break even, it is only for a few years. I’m sure a lot of people don’t want to get out of step in their working lives, perhaps never to catch up.
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I’m with mj – between the nanny for the now-3-year-old and extended day at the boys’ school we were going through my entire take-home pay and living on my wife’s check, but it is only for eight years before they are all in school. We had kids late – I had 16 years on the job, with longevity raises and health care and increasing pension entitlement – we can’t afford to let that go. I think the kids are doing fine (I HAVE to think that, right?) reading above grade level, happy with their friends. So, not more pleasureable than home, but absent winning the lottery, no regrets, no.
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I work part time, so I never quite feel at home in either the “SAHM” or the WOHM” camp. The kids are in some sort of childcare 20-25 hours/week.
Why do I do it?
1. We have found extraordinarily wonderful childcare. A combination of a small preschool and an at home daycare. Yes, it eats up most of my income, but the children love it and really benefit from it. They learn things I would never think to teach them.
2. My husband has become an incredibly involved father. We stagger our hours to reduce childcare time. I think if I were home all the time, he quite possibly might be less involved. He gets the kids up, dressed, fed, organized and out the door, single handedly, at least 1-2 days/week. If I were home, I doubt he’d need to do that.
3. We live very far away from both of our families. My kids are as attached to their childcare providers as they are to their extended family. It is nice to have other adults who love them so.
4. I enjoy working. I adore being with my kids. Why shouldn’t I be able to do both?
5. My mom worked part time. And I turned out just fine. ( :
My ideal arrangement would be for *both* parents to work part time. If each could work 3-4 days a week, you could have a bit of childcare, a bit of mom home, a bit of dad home, and a lot of juggling. But I think it would be nice.
Alas, someone needs to carry the health insurance.
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When I worked part-time my work paid for the child care, with a (very) little left over. Now that one child is in school and I work full-time, we’re much better off financially with me working.
I would like to work part-time, but I think it would be career suicide. The four years I spent doing it definitely put my career well behind my peers. If I could work part-time without the career penalty, I would do it in a heartbeat. So would my partner. Last year he did work part-time(four days/week), but his workload was not decreased along with his salary, so although he was home with the kids for that day (which was excellent) he had to do the same amount of work. That’s why he’s not doing that this year, and neither am I (we both have that option).
One thing that always worries me about these discussions is that the WOH ‘option’ is almost always framed as a woman’s issue. I agree with Kristen that my preferred option would be for both of us to work part-time. I think the kids would like that best, too.
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We both work full-time, and we both love our work. But we also do it because we could not afford to live here (SF Bay Area) where my family is, and our roots are, without two incomes. We have wonderful in-home day care for our 2 year old (and as of last week we are done with diapers!) and great after-school care for our 5 year old. My mother also helps by taking the 5 year old to dance class.
And we both parent full time (as if there is any other kind of parenting), and we both love that too.
Would I like to have more hours in the day — yes, of course. Will I be up late tonight grading 8th grade essays on the American Revolution? Yes. And my husband will be working late too, but we work together at the dinning room table (no office in this 3 bedroom house).
What makes it work is good day care, a little help from family, my husbands somewhat flexable hours (he can take the 5 year old to school at 9) and my getting done by 4 or 4:30 every day.
But you are right, parents do work hard, and we don’t talk about it much. It seems like complaining when I talk to non-parents at work. But with the other parents of young children we have long talks at lunch about how to make lunches the night before (get those lunch boxes with the plastic box insert and put it in the fridge) or what the options are when children are sick.
As someone else said, it is only for a few years that it is this crazy. In our case, things get much easier next year when the younger one goes to preschool at the same school the older one attends — one drop off and one pick up!
I love this discussion.
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We’re a two-income family that still can’t afford daycare in the Los Angeles area. Therefore we stagger our work hours in order to each care for our son. I start work around 7am (I telecommute) and work until around 2pm, while my husband watches our boy. Then he leaves for work and I take over until bedtime, after which I usually go back to work, sometimes until midnight. It works in that we avoid childcare costs and that my husband is far more involved than most fathers in hour-to-hour childrearing. But it fails in that by 2pm I am so exhausted from a stressful workday that I am often poor company for the remainder of the afternoon, and my husband and I never see each other or have a meal together. At the same time, I can’t see trying to get another job for more money only to let someone else raise our kid.
I would prefer to work part-time, because I’m not worried about career slippage; in fact, if I had the leisure to work part-time it would mean I had the ability to make a career switch entirely, which is what I’ve been dreaming of for years. Changing careers seems like an impossibility at the moment.
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I’ll confess to being one of those who work because I enjoy working more than staying home (the money is a big reason too–my salary is higher than my husband’s). I feel good at my job and I don’t feel that I’m very good at the home stuff–although my kids seem happy enough (but they’re young enough to be at that lovely uncritical stage). One down, one to go!
Childcare is hugely expensive but, on the bright side, it gives us the discipline to live on less money. When my eldest started school I started socking away some of the money we had been spending on her childcare in a college fund (the rest goes to saving up for summer childcare).
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I am a mother of a 3-yr-old and a full-time tenure track professor at an NYC women’s college. I am not married but have a long-time male partner who also works full-time as an acting director of a not-for-profit organization. I make more than double his salary, yet was also the only one with any parental leave. Mine was paid. So I took what I could and then put our child in full-time care and then went back to work full-time.
I have no relatives nearby to rely on. I absolutely rejected the nanny model of child care, as too expensive (if you pay properly and since my partner’s salary is paltry), exploitative (if the pay and benefits are too low, and perhaps in general), and not a good way to stimulate a young kid. My institution claims to offer help, but doesn’t offer on-site child care options even for kids that are weaned and potty-trained. Waiting lists are so long that there’s not really much meaning to having “priority” due to my campus affiliation, there is no subsidy other than a flexible spending acount, and the locations are not particularly advantageous. Nor was I particularly impressed by the options right near campus anyway.
Instead, I stumbled onto a good option while attending a La Leche League meetings. After many anxious months on a waiting list, I was lucky to start my kid at 13 months in a full-time group family day care in my neighborhood. Group family day care is a NY State and NYC term. It means more than a licenced in-home babysitter, but not a full-blown “center”. Where my kid spends from ~8:30 am to ~6 pm M-F is with a mixed-age group of kids (12-15 kids, aged 0-4) in an cramped but very tidy apartment that nobody lives in and where the staff uses the kitchen to cook the breakfast lunch and snacks. There are other rooms for play and nap and other impressively stimulating activities. For a while they seemed to be relying a bit more than desirable on DVD watching, especially late in the afternoon. As of September there is no TV whatsoever and everyone seems happier … kids, staff, parents. Also, despite my job and my partner’s often infringing on evenings and weekends, and my occasional need to travel to seminars or conferences, we manage to spend time together as a family. My partner and I manage to go out for an occasional evening of opera or a concert, maybe 10-12 times per year, thanks to student or neighbor babysitters. The real stress happens when the day care is closed for something like Veterans Day (when we both work) or when we or our kid is sick.
As with others mentioned above, we are very frugal people. We drive an old, compact car. We live in one of NYC’s less expensive neighborhoods. We go camping. We rarely shop.
Also, it is very important to point out that child care costs are relatively temporary, but even after a child is in elementary school, there is still the burden of paying for after-school programs and summer camps. Throughout, it is very hard if your incomes are marginal and you lack relatives who can pitch in.
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My wife works half days to raise money for 4 things:
1. overseas trips to visit the grandparents
2. college funds
3. financial support for our parents
4. our own retirement (try not to be an expense for our children)
Her salary goes directly into savings funds.
With both kids in childcare, net is a few hundred a month. Not much, but it makes things somewhat possible. We’re very lucky that the half-day job pays well enough to do this. I’m not sure what we’d do if my wife had to work full time in order to make enough for both childcare and the other things. It hardly seems worth it having children if someone else gets to bring them up.
Certainly her career is on hiatus. The job pays OK, but halfday mothers don’t get any respect in the workforce – no raises in the last four years, etcetera.
Childcare seems expensive from our perspective, but most childcare workers aren’t making much over minimum wage. I couldn’t afford to pay a nanny a living wage.
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We are a two-income household who is making it through the one-income period via student loans. When I worked, it was not a situation of just breaking even; we had much more money available for the small luxuries in life although we by no means had much money at all. But both of my children are school-age, go to public school, so we’ve escaped the days of $700/month daycare expenses. (Since the purpose of this forum is to exchange and educate, I should remind that daycare expenses vary across regions and I’m sure other areas have much higher expenses.)
The people I know who seem to thrive on only one income have one parent netting a great deal. But then one never knows about the private financial matters of others; they could be living on credit, who knows.
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I think it’s especially manageable with the first kid–both parents keep working, yes daycare for infants is expensive but it’s only one. You keep working so you can save money for when you have the second kid; so you can get more credibility with your employer when you ask for part time and/or telecommuting; and so you can know that you can do it while you make the mindset adjustment to this thing called parenting.
With the second and subsequent kids, it becomes harder to justify working on a cash flow basis. Many families do it because 1) they get parental help, either in the form of cash gifts or daycare; 2) they are living on credit and accumulating debt; 3) one kid is in public school and needs less child care; 4) many “full time” workers still have a lot of flexibility in their jobs–teachers, esp. at the post secondary level, are a great example. Yes, they work hard and more than 40 hours a week, but there’s a great deal more flexibility regarding where they spend that time than an office worker.
Another factor that helps both parents work and still feel like you are coming out ahead is living in a less expensive area (I know this doesn’t help you, Laura–I don’t understand why families choose to live in the NY region or California). We live near a metropolitan area in the midwest. We have good public schools, reasonable commute times (less than an hour one way), and affordable housing. Even with no relatives nearby to rely on for child care, you develop a support system of friends and neighbors–your child’s classmates’ parents become your friends, not because of any ideological affinity, but because you need each other.
And, many people do it (both work) for the long term benefits. No, it doesn’t make sense on a day-to-day cash basis, but you are investing in your career and you are (maybe) socking away a little for retirements and educational expenses.
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