Megan asks, "why are babysitters paid so poorly". She thinks that it’s a supply and demand thing. Also, watching kids isn’t skilled labor.
It make take talent (like the
patience of a saint), but the actual skills of doing laundry, spooning
formula into one’s mouth, and changing a diaper are not hard to learn.
I rant in the comment section that parenting is actually very skilled labor. Also, babysitters are poorly paid, because people think it’s easy, because women’s work is always undervalued, and because society doesn’t want to pay for work that they still think should be freely given. Sometimes you can’t understand economics without looking at the politics.
Check out this commenter who can’t believe that she has to pay for childcare, because her mother in law doesn’t want to watch her kid. This is exactly what’s going on.
Kieran Healy chimes in, too.
Apt. 11d 
Not that you haven’t hit the big points, but don’t forget that group care providers are competing with private nannies, many of whom come with the sort of low overhead that can only be achieved by avoiding the IRS and the SSA. And, even on-the-books-nannies start to look cost effective when you hit two or more kids. This can keep the wealthier parents out of the group care system and thus remove those who would be willing and able to pay higher wages to get better care.
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I think babysitters aren’t paid well, because people don’t have the money to pay them well (or at least most people).
and, “It make take talent (like the patience of a saint), but the actual skills of doing laundry, spooning formula into one’s mouth, and changing a diaper are not hard to learn.”
thus speaks a woman who has never spent a day taking care of a kid — “spooning formula”?
Taking care of children is a hard hard job. People who do it well have skill and talent.
We don’t pay them well enough because most don’t have enough money (say, except for folks like Jolie & Pitt, who I suspect pay their nannies quite well) and because it’s not a tournament skill, where people take big risks in the hope of a payoff, and because (as with teaching) we don’t know metrics to measure success.
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I don’t know if I can agree that parenting is skilled labor. Maybe I don’t understand the definition of “skilled labor.” I see that you’re trying to dispute the stereotyping by a childless blogger about SAHMs doing nothing but eating bonbons and watching soaps, but I’m not sure we can argue that parenting is skilled labor.
I think caring for other people’s kids, particularly in group situations, is skilled labor. I’m not sure caring for your own kids is.
I (like to think I) am a good friend. When my friends have problems, I listen to them, offer advice, help them figure out what to do or how to deal with something. People with PhD’s also get paid to do that and are called psychologists/therapists. But that doesn’t mean friendship is skilled labor. Do you see what I mean?
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On the difference between “skilled labor”–well, that’s part of a difference between what is a skill, and what people define as skilled labor (having to do with professionalization), no? Listening to friends and offering advice is a skill (the phrase “social skills”), it is something that requires learning and practice to master. Same with caring for your own kid. But caring for your own kid isn’t part of the economic system, neither is doing favors for or listening to friends–it’s only when this is farmed out beyond a social unit (family, friends) and currency is involved that it becomes an economic exchange, and part of the economy.
Then you get accreditation (PhDs, accountability, licensing). Professional organizations, perhaps prestige.
Women aren’t born knowing to take care of babies. You need only to look at some parenting of the unexperienced and unsupported to see that. However, it seems to be a “hidden skill,” like knowing how to budget (does anyone teach that anymore?)–it’s only when you fail spectacularly that its presence as a learned skill becomes easy to see.
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Wendy — I suspect you think that it’s not skilled labor because it comes naturally to you. Being attuned to your child’s needs, responding to them, and not being overwhelmed by it takes skill and talent. Some mothers have it in spades; others don’t.
Taking care of your *own* children can’t be a commodity, but that doesn’t make it any less of a skill.
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Skill factor: our nanny was absolutely swell, had a wonderful sense of our kids, we were very confident that she was making good decisions with them. She was wholly uncertified. But the mommy network in our neighborhood had figured her out, and everybody wanted her. This credential-less reputation-building took several years and was very neighborhood-specific, if she had moved she’d have been right at the back of the queue like every other nanny applicant.
Result: towards the end we were paying $45000 plus employer-side Social Security plus Kaiser to our nanny, and that was how we fended off the other parents who tried to poach her away from us. So, the market was working!
My wife’s salary is substantially higher than mine, so we considered my quitting. I was making a profit, however (not much) by going to work. We hired a nanny even though the immediate financial balance was close, because if I stepped out of the work force it would be hard as hell to step back in, and because we wanted not to interrupt my pension eligibility. So the long-term financial consequences of my leaving work while the kids were small looked severe to us.
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Couple things:
a) I am the last person to dispute that being a SAHM is way harder than what I do–every time I visit my friends who do it, I am stunned by how hard they work. Hard work is not necessarily skilled work, however. Cleaning houses is also incredibly hard, but it is not skilled.
b) You’re using a non-standard definition of skilled labor. Everything that one does except breathe takes skills. But when a majority of the population involved has the skills, it is definitionally not skilled labor. People are treating the word as if it is a synonym for many other valuable concepts: “difficult”; “valuable”; “involved”. “Skilled” refers simply to the relative prevalance of basic task knowledge in society. Being a lawyer is highly skilled labor and being a secretary is not, even though a good secretary is worth her weight in gold.
c) Many childless women romanticize motherhood (I don’t think I’m one of them) but there’s also a fair amount of romanticization of single life by SAHMs. When you hit your thirties, regardless of whether or not you have children, you spend more and more time dealing with the mechanics of life. I do not spend my days flitting through an endless series of brunches and shopping trips with my girlfriends, in between exciting dates, doing the New York Times Crossword puzzle, and watching a few guilty episodes of reality television. I have real furniture, a real car, a real dog, real complicated taxes, a job that wants sixty or eighty hours of my time a week, and so forth, all of which has to be cared for just like your stuff. Just as SAHMs hate it when their single friends assume that they have endless supplies of free time, we resent the assumption that our lives are one long episode of Sex in the City. If your children vanished tomorrow, you would still not get your twenties back. I haven’t either.
d) Childcare is not substitute parenting. Childcare is doing the least skilled aspects of parenting–over and over and over, for someone else’s kids. The modern-day Mary Poppins that everyone seems to be fantasizing about disappeared when women started to have employment options other than childrearing, cooking, cleaning, and caring for the sick; temperamentally, there just aren’t that many women (and even fewer men) who choose childcare as a career over a wide variety of other options. That means that for the foreseeable future, parents will continue doing the most skilled bits of childrearing, from toilet training to deciding what to do with the terminally shy.
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I am the last person to dispute that being a SAHM is way harder than what I do–every time I visit my friends who do it, I am stunned by how hard they work.
This reminds me of the time I was shunned at a dinner party, because all the working mothers around the table (of which I am one) took turns professing how much harder being a SAHM was than what they did. When it got to me, I refused to play that game — my job is delightful yet very, very skilled and challenging.
It did not go over well.
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1) Yeah, I still think that parenting is highly skilled work. I see too many people, who are trying hard, screw it up massively. It really takes a lot of time and constant updating of skills to do it right. You have to figure out how to get a two year old to share, to coax a second grade teacher to check homework, to keep the little hyper, mute boy from disturbing old people at a library film festival, to get them to eat an occasional vegetable.
If you want to raise your kid to be a kind, respectful, hard working, member of society, then it’s really skilled work. It’s takes experience, smarts, and energy. Of course, there’s the slacker road to parenting, too.
Ever see Super Nanny? Lots of examples of parents with no skills on that show.
2) Didn’t mean to say that your blogging was easy. My style of blogging is easy. 1/2 an hour in the morning and periodic comment monitoring during the day.
3) Bad childcare v. good childcare. In good childcare centers, parenting is happening there. It has to. Some kids are there for 40+ hours and their needs are bigger than just eating and sleeping. In good childcare centers, they also have formal education curriculum, too. Of course, real parenting is better than the best childcare centers, but there’s still a lot going on there.
4) We pay childcare workers badly for a whole lot of reasons, but I don’t think it has anything to do with supply and demand or with it being unskilled labor.
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Megan, hope you’re going to post on the NYT’s childless article. I am.
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It’s some kind of axiom of economics that a good secretary isn’t highly skilled, compared to a good lawyer, no, premised on the fact that we pay lawyers more than we pay secretaries? Aside from that, I don’t know how we prove that lawyers have more skills than secretaries. You’re applying the same circular standard to child-raising (we don’t pay well for it, and therefore it must not require high levels of skills).
I will raise the possibility that care of non-verbal, non-moving children (i.e. until they are 6 months old) might not be skilled labor. At that age, amazing though they are, their needs are mostly physical.
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“It make take talent (like the patience of a saint), but the actual skills of doing laundry, spooning formula into one’s mouth, and changing a diaper are not hard to learn.”
thus speaks a woman who has never spent a day taking care of a kid — “spooning formula”?
Megan apparently seems to be talking about spooning the formula into her own mouth. Knowing that you’re supposed to spoon the formula into the kid’s mouth would appear to be somewhat basic. (Also, you don’t spoon formula – formula is the stuff they drink from bottles. You spoon various kinds of unpreposessing rice or vegetable glop.)
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I think most wages do come down to supply and demand, in the end. (But my degree is in economics, so I tend to think everything is related to supply/demand in one way or another.)
If the cost for childcare goes up too high – more parents will stay home. If my childcare provider makes the same $$ that I did, would it make sense for me to work?
If no one was willing to work for the paltry sums we pay child-care providers, we’d have a huge shortage. Wages would have to rise to attract more people to the profession.
Of course, it gets more complicated than that – but at the core, I do think supply/demand plays a role.
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K — I think economists are supposed to think about these questions (I mean, economics is not all about the supply/demand curves you learn about in Microeconomics 101). But, there must be some other variable in play here — perhaps the bottom line is that one can complete the job, even if one does it rather poorly. So, if child care costs become too high, one can hire less skilled people, who will manage to care for the children, and ultimately stay home with your own children yourself, even if you’re not very good at it.
The same thing seems to play out with secretaries, where eventually, they become so bad at what they do that you start doing it all yourself. There’s also the fact that you need the money to pay for it, and unlike other services that we pay heftily for (i.e. movie actors) there’s no real way to make childcare work with huge economies of scale. Therefore, even a really really excellent child care worker can stretch that ability to cover a few children.
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I think that people are missing the “part time/ avocation” issue in pricing.
Outside of child care, if a person has a big house and wants to rent out some rooms “to make some extra money,” but isn’t in the “Real Estate” business, she will usually rent at a below-market rate. $400 per month is money in my pocket now, even if I could probably hold out for $600. And it’s just “extra money,” not stuff you are counting on to live on or “profit” from. If a few people do it, its not a big deal, but if “everyone” is renting out rooms, it can effect the rental market.
Child care is the same, I think. High school girls are doing it for spending money. College kids are nannying to “defray costs.” Grandmas are doing it “for fun” and to “help out.” Moms are caring for their own kids “for free.”
So many people are providing the service outside of “professionals” and “full timers” that it is skewing the salary market for full timers.
On top of that, it is usually the well-off who use the below-market kids and grandmas, leaving the full timers to be supported only by the lower working classes.
That, I think, is what drives down salaries.
Meanwhile, “underpaid child-care workers” is only half of the story. The other half is “unaffordable child care.” There is a disconnect there, and explains why taking care of other people’s kids is just not a successful profit model.
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Rich B. – I have worked on child care and public policy for 10 years, and I assure you that the people who do care for free or cheap (what is known in the industry as kith & kin care, or informal care) has no to little impact on the salaries of “professional” child care workers. Many people who use informal care choose it because the provider has a personal connection to their children, or because it keeps money in the family. Some do choose it because it is the only thing they can afford or because it is the only type of care available in their community. Almost all parents who choose informal care report that they would prefer that older children attend a center-based program, but that they cannot afford it or there is not one in their area or that it is not open during the hours they work (i.e. – nights and weekends).
Ultimately, quality child care at a facility is labor- and space-intensive and the vast majority of American parents cannot afford to pay what it would cost for care if child care workers were paid higher (aka fair) wages. Thus the wage is not influenced by demand or supply. It is influenced by the salaries of other working parents. Unless there is some sort of subsidy involved, child care workers will inevitably earn less than the people who pay them. Since most Americans do not earn more than $50,000 a year, it is a foregone conclusion that their child care providers will earn significantly less than that.
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Re: the comment about the mom not retiring to raise her kids kids. She should not have to retire as she’s already raised kids of her own.
IMHO having kids is not about adding a new accessory to your life. It is a lifestyle, plain and simple.
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Kip, I read the Christina comment, and yes, you take on kids and they are yours. However ” I’m pretty annoyed at my mom who promised me when I got married 5 years ago that she would retire and take care of my children when they arrived. She took a week off of work to care for DD the first week I went back, but she has no intention of retiring anytime soon, and she’s 71!…” This does sound like bait and switch. There was a promise, and Mom’s gone back on it.
Now, hungry-to-be-grandmas have been known to do all manner of things to encourage procreation – money, buy the kids a house, pinholes in the condoms, etc. But if they make promises, I think they ought to keep them.
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Suzanne, not to quibble, but you say “the wage is not influenced by demand or supply” in the midst of a comment that is almost entirely a discussion of how wages are set by supply and demand (i.e. if we paid the workers more, not enough people could afford it).
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I think that the cost of childcare isn’t just kept low, because of the ability of parents to pay for it. We enjoy other services, which are too expensive for individuals to pay for on their own, because the costs are subsidized through private insurance or government support, ie open heart surgery, public school education. The question is really why are childcare costs falling solely on parents. Then we come to the political explanations — conflicting messages about women and work; the belief that childcare is unskilled, manual labor; low respect for traditional female work; the lack of an organized group to demand higher wages, and so on.
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I’m not saying that it will never happen, but this doesn’t seem to be the type of situation that leads to effective organization. For one potential group of organizers, you have parents of small children. Those parents with the most resources have the easiest exit to private care and most parents will have a personal interest in the day care for only a few years. This is also a group that is known for a lack of spare time. On the other side, you have the child care workers themselves. Unless they have some sort of a barrier to entry for new workers, the likely effect of a subsidy is lower fees for the parents, not higher wages (not a bad thing, but not what you’re going for). And, any subsidy that comes for day care will have parents who stay at home arguing (with justification) for a similar break for themselves.
I’m certain that changing attitudes about the skills needed for child care and respect for traditionally female work would help. However, those sorts of changes tend to happen very slowly.
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