Pundits are tearing into Romney for saying that poor mothers should put their kids in daycare, so they could understand the understand "the dignity of work." Under TANF, childcare is not considered work, unless you are watching someone else's kid.
And then government cut back on subsidizing low income childcare.
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OK, this is now officially awesome.
Apt. 11d 
Mutual dependence between spouses is morally uplifting. Dependence on the state is morally degrading.
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But is it really “mutual dependence” if, after a divorce, he would be stuck with frozen dinners and dusty shelves, and she would be destitute?
As usual, the Republicans are taking their weaknesses and bragging that they are their strengths.
Sometimes it works, and people actually believe that Republicans are the “party of fiscal discipline” when, in fact, they are responsible for most of the deficits.
Other times, they seem genuinely shocked that nobody believes that they are the “natural party for Hispanics” because Hispanics are big on Christian family values. (They also think they are the “natural party for Jews” for exactly opposite reasons.)
I would hope that claims of being the “party that cares about women” will fall into the latter category, categorized by lots of eye rolling, but you never know when something like “Democrats hate SAHMs” will stick and the Big Lie gets believed.
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Sad, isn’t it, that his own wife has not experienced “the dignity of work”?
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“Mutual dependence between spouses is morally uplifting. Dependence on the state is morally degrading.”
That’s a pretty way of saying “Poor single women who need welfare are stupid sluts whereas the wives of rich men are not.”
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Or a pretty way of saying, “If you don’t have a husband to value your work as a stay-at-home mom, that work isn’t actually valuable.” Or perhaps, “Kids deserve a stay-at-home parent only if that stay-at-home parent reaps moral benefits from staying home.”
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I recommend you actually read what Romney said in January. You may disagree with it but it’s not a clearly objectionable statement. He actually suggests raising state daycare expenditures to make a faster transition to work possible.
Wendy – Your “paraphrase” is in no way related to the original statement. Why don’t you try to address the actual issue being raised? If you’re capable of it.
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TANF laws are a little crazy. A single mother with three kids between 2 and 5 must go to work. Her job won’t pay enough to cover the daycare costs for those three kids. The government is supposed to subsidize those childcare costs. When it does, they may end up giving more to the childcare center than she ever got in welfare benefits. That’s illogical.
The immoral part happens when they start cutting back on those childcare benefits and the mother has to find someone to watch her kids. Maybe it’s a drunk uncle. Maybe it’s a 12 year old cousin. Maybe the kids are left alone for a while. And not only are those kids left alone, but the entire neighborhood of kids are left alone without any parental supervision. Oh, that’s a good idea.
If we are going to demand that all poor women go to work when their kids are aged 2, then we need gold plated childcare centers for their children. That does not exist.
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Jult, tone it down one notch, please. Thanks.
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“The government is supposed to subsidize those childcare costs. When it does, they may end up giving more to the childcare center than she ever got in welfare benefits. That’s illogical.”
That seems perfectly logical, if you assume that the mother is learning good work habits and self-reliance and the children are seeing a healthy role model. Plus, jobs often lead to raises and promotions, but welfare never does. It’s the counsel of despair to say, “Those people are hopeless; it’s cheaper just to give them enough money to prevent them from starving in the streets than to hope for long-term improvement.”
With children (even those over 18), it’s pretty common to make them do things (make beds, clean rooms, write papers with footnotes) even though it would be easier in the short run to do it yourself, because you hope that they will mature into self-reliant adults with useful skills. Evidently Romney hopes to do the same thing with welfare recipients.
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Laura – I’m happy to tone it down, but note how Wendy escalated the discussion from y81’s neutral and concise explanation of why the Romney stance was actually not contradictory. If anyone needs to be warned on this thread, it is Wendy.
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“That seems perfectly logical, if you assume that the mother is learning good work habits and self-reliance and the children are seeing a healthy role model. Plus, jobs often lead to raises and promotions, but welfare never does.”
I think with high-quality daycare across multiple shifts (since a lot of jobs for people who may not be educated are going to be more in the 24/7 realm than the 9-5 realm) and includes sick care that’s possible, maybe.
Without high-quality daycare though, what’s more likely to happen is that the mother doesn’t experience success at all.
She starts a not-great barely-making-it job. Her kids get sick. She gets assigned to a Friday night shift, so she has to get the weird uncle to watch her kids that night. She has to turn a shift or three down. Unlike welfare, which is a set amount, now her budget’s whacked. She can’t quite make her rent. She sets up a payment plan with her landlord.
Then her kid gets another one of the bugs that’s going around daycare, and then it turns into an ear infection and then she’s missed more shifts…she loses her job and what her kids learn (as if at 2 they notice), is that you actually CAN’T make it and this becomes a stronger narrative.
What might work better is an educational requirement for mothers on welfare while their kids are between the ages of 2-6, a course a term with a stipend for a babysitter for the class hours or something like that, including classes on networking and resume preparation as a part of it.
If the idea is to set up long-term success, it really needs to be an environment where success is actually possible.
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Another issue is that while welfare is given with no strings attached as to quality of care, (as ugly as it sounds to put it this way) a SAHM has a live-in supervisor. If the kids have teeth rotting in their heads, they don’t have the glasses that school says they should have, their homework isn’t getting done, their lunches aren’t getting packed, the kids are foraging for themselves and living on pop tarts, the kids aren’t getting out the door in time for school, mom has an out-of-control Walmart habit, creditors are starting to call, the baby’s diaper has always has a not-so-fresh smell, and the house is slowly but surely turning into “Hoarders” material, all but the least observant/least functional husband will eventually say something. There is built-in accountability in a way that there has never been in the federal welfare system.
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For an example of accountability at work, here’s an advice forum question from a guy who is losing patience with his SAHM wife:
“I am getting closer and closer to being at my wits end with my wife. We have a toddler and another child on the way. This hasn’t been the easiest pregnancy thus far, so I am trying to cut her slack; however, these problems existed before she got pregnant (indeed, before we had any kids). The issue is that I do most of the work around the house and run most of the errands; furthermore, I am also the breadwinner of the house. Actually, for the past three years since our first child was born, I’ve been the sole income earner with my wife as the stay at home.”
“I know some of these things may seem like minor issues, but that is also part of the point. Why does every single, minor issue having to do with the home need to be on my plate? These are things that I think that my wife–as the stay at home mom and homemaker (I sort of say this tounge-in-cheek as she shouldn’t even have the right to call herself a homemaker)–can and should take responsibility for. Even small chores like vacuuming the rug many times will not get done unless I have to complain about it first.”
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=653970
Now, obviously, this is not June and Ward Cleaver’s house, and I think he should probably cut his wife a bit more slack while she’s pregnant, but note how even in a less-than-ideal home with less-than-ideal married parents, the basics get done. Imagine for a moment that the wife in the letter was a single mom and had no picky husband around to pick up the slack–I think things would spiral out of control very quickly.
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Totally agree with Shandra. Don’t have much to add there.
Amy, ugh. A husband as a live-in supervisor? ugh. A single mom can’t be as good of a parent as a married parent, because she doesn’t have a man to check her slovenly ways? ugh. ugh. You obviously have never seen my bathroom. I prefer y81’s position better to yours (as long as there is real job growth opportunities, excellent daycare, job training and all that.)
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y81’s neutral and concise explanation
You are living in a different universe than I if you read his explanation as neutral. A sincere question: do conservatives actually believe explanations like this or is it just a show? I’ve always assumed that it’s a convenient cover for their true feelings which are that they really just don’t care about poor people and they don’t want to spend money on them.
There is built-in accountability in a way that there has never been in the federal welfare system.
And what if the husband decides at some point that he wants a divorce? It happens all the time. Should we view his ex-wife’s lack of job prospects and poverty as punishment for not being a good housekeeper?
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Just because I don’t just toe the line between civility and incivility, I wrap it around me like a scarf, doesn’t mean someone else should go over it.
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The kind of scarf that goes over your head like a little hat or the kind that goes around your neck when it’s cold?
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“You obviously have never seen my bathroom. I prefer y81’s position better to yours (as long as there is real job growth opportunities, excellent daycare, job training and all that.)”
I’m not disagreeing with y81, I’m just supplementing.
I know my phrasing is not very appetizing, but people do need accountability (especially people who are prone to depression and apathy). I think that that accountability is part of the magic that makes married-couple families function better than other family structures. (The accountability flows the other way, too–non-resident fathers are famously less involved with their children than resident fathers.)
As to your bathroom, we could send Steve away to Portugal for a month or two and then do a random check (although we’d have to not warn you in advance–forget I mentioned this). The question is not how you do things now, but the difference between how you’d do stuff as a married parent versus how you’d do stuff as a lone parent. (Before we had kids, I once subsisted on Easter chocolate during a short absence by my husband–the lack of a responsible adult presence at home led me to abandon everything I’d ever known about adequate nutrition. After a day or so of that regimen, I felt so weak and sick that I had to leave work early. Lesson learned! People do funny things when no one is watching.)
“And what if the husband decides at some point that he wants a divorce? It happens all the time. Should we view his ex-wife’s lack of job prospects and poverty as punishment for not being a good housekeeper?”
Nope, because if she’s such a disaster, leaving the kids to her tender mercies would be a very irresponsible, selfish thing to do. (It always kills me on Hoarders when we find out that the spouse has left the hoarder–leaving their kid behind to grow up in the hoard. It always gets much worse after that, of course.)
I’m speaking from nearly a decade of personal experience as a SAHM and so-so/adequate housekeeper. I have a borderline hoarder household among my near relations, so I have a vivid image in front of me as to what happens when people just stop doing the ordinary stuff, and how easy it is to go down that road.
By the way, I have a substantive policy recommendation. How about creating a system of negative co-pays for routine care to go along with Medicaid? Take the kids for their yearly medical visit–get $20! Get your kid’s glasses that they need for school–get $20! Take your kid for their dental cleaning and exam–get $20! I am much happier with the idea of paying people to do good stuff for their kids than just paying them money just because they happen to have kids living at their address that they may or may not be taking adequate care of. I also am quite happy with the idea of paying kids to go to school and behaving themselves and doing their homework.
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“The kind of scarf that goes over your head like a little hat or the kind that goes around your neck when it’s cold?”
I’ll let Laura pick because she has more fashion sense than I do.
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By the way, I have a substantive policy recommendation. How about creating a system of negative co-pays for routine care to go along with Medicaid?
These are called “conditional cash transfers” and have been very successful in Brazil. It’s probably something worth trying, in general, if it works as a supplement too current systems rather than a replacement.
Of course, it also strike as exactly the sort of thing that would come out of a right-wing think-tank, and then get labelled as “Socialist” as soon as a Democrat suggested it. (“Popularized by Lula, that noted Brazilian Socialist . . .”) So, you may want to check your paper trail before promoting it too much.
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Also…with poor people, many of them don’t take their kids to the dentist because they can’t afford it. Dentists don’t just treat anyone who walks up with no insurance, no credit, and no cash. Low-income dentists have years long waiting lists. Same with glasses. A mom can know pretty damn well that her kid has a toothache, but it doesn’t do much good if she can’t afford to do anything about it. Should she numb the kid’s gum with whisky and pull it out herself? Several years ago a boy died of a tooth infection. Did his mom not realize her kids needed dental care? No. The mom was fighting tooth and nail to get her OTHER son to the dentist, since he was complaining of a toothache. We have a barbaric system that sets people up for failure and then blames then when they do.
In addition, since the mom is now working some minimum wage job, she doesn’t have the time or flexibility needed to do all the bureaucratic red tape to get her kids the services they need. Because guess what? She has to work (and commute) about 10 hours a day. Free basic services for poor people assume waiting around and being on call is your full time job. That free dentist appointment is at 2pm on Wednesday, you ask for an hour off, and then the dentist doesn’t see you until 4:30? Too bad. Fired. Oh, and don’t expect the dentist’s office to care, after all, poor people’s time means nothing, and you should just be grateful to be seen at all, much less have an appointment time honored. When you show up 15 minutes early for everything but the doctor/bus/caseworker is three hours late? Nothing you can do about it. You can plan like nobody’s business, you can be punctual and reliable and the paragon of middle class respectability, but if you have to rely on unreliable forces you can’t control, then you can only be so reliable. Of course, the poor get the least leeway, so they suffer the most for being at the mercy of the system.
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Amy P,
In my experience, in the families I’ve worked with, the 10-12 year old kid quickly the “supervisor” of which you speak. (And a damn better one than many spouses, I might add.) In my experience, poor families are just as good as I am at packing lunches and changing diapers.
In my experience, the problem isn’t that the single mother needs a “supervisor” – the problem is that she’s trying to work a job across town that pays $10 hour, has unreliable transportation, has 6 kids, and lives in constant fear of her section 8 housing disappearing.
I get very frustrated with the assumption I read/hear just about everywhere that poor families don’t care enough about their kids (or aren’t smart enough) to get medical care/healthy lunches/clean houses.
In my experience, that just isn’t true and the idea that we need to offer an “incentive” to take a kid to a doctor is, to me, downright insulting. How about bringing the doctors/dentists to school to give free, convenient check-ups instead? (Our school already does some of this…)
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