Incentives for Motherhood, Take Two
HarryCH
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
(With an apology for the first try)
from ABCNews.com, 5/3/25:
"The White House has been fielding proposals aimed at persuading people to marry and have children, an effort being pushed by outside groups focused on increasing the nation's birth rate after years of decline.
One such proposal that has been pitched to White House advisers is a $5,000 "baby bonus" to every American mother after she gives birth."
This seems preposterous to me. If you want to offer money to a woman to have a baby when she would not have one otherwise, I think half a million, along with free prenatal care and child care, would be more reasonable. I'm not sure half a million is enough. (I also think the money should not buy any control over who gets to be the father.)
What do you think?
from ABCNews.com, 5/3/25:
"The White House has been fielding proposals aimed at persuading people to marry and have children, an effort being pushed by outside groups focused on increasing the nation's birth rate after years of decline.
One such proposal that has been pitched to White House advisers is a $5,000 "baby bonus" to every American mother after she gives birth."
This seems preposterous to me. If you want to offer money to a woman to have a baby when she would not have one otherwise, I think half a million, along with free prenatal care and child care, would be more reasonable. I'm not sure half a million is enough. (I also think the money should not buy any control over who gets to be the father.)
What do you think?
Comments
As for payment as a means of “paternity control”😆
If he/they really gave a shit, there is a huge list of things that could be done to make bringing children into this world seem like a real possibility. Of course they're not doing any of it.
No surprises there
For our second child I had no private health cover, my prenatal care was covered between GP visits and the free maternity health care clinic at the local public hospital, a shared care model. The Obstetrician did not attend our son's delivery, but stuck his head around the curtain when he did the ward round (and I'm sure he was paid for doing so). I had free midwife visits at home for a week post-delivery because I went home on day 2 after birth. I was discharged early from that program because things were going well with the boy wonder. I think they suggested a different hold for breastfeeding him and that was it.
Our biggest expense for daughter was formula when I had to return to work early because husband lost his job. For our son the biggest expense was disposable nappies (which I had not used with our daughter). Of course a really major cost is childcare and our government is proposing free childcare being made available to all. I'm not across the detail because I'm far out of needing that now. I think it's a great idea and I wish it had been there when I needed it.
The far bigger expenses came not when our son was an infant, but in the costs associated with his cancer treatment, not medications or hospital but in the loss of income due to being unable to work. There is government support for Carers, but there are many gaps in what that covers and so many things to keep things on track.
From a friend who wanted to have children but was unable to I have an inkling of the pain that can cause too.
Average cost just for childbirth: US$18,865
https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-baby-in-america-6745508
I suspect that there ARE things that could be done to make it possible for people to have more children if they wanted them--I certainly did, I would have had four if I could have chosen!--but simply dropping a paltry amount of money on the family isn't one of them. We need reliable childcare, for starters--AFFORDABLE childcare. We need guaranteed healthcare for children and parents. We need to stop penalizing women at work for getting pregnant or for caring for children already born (for example, when they fall ill). We need to put safety nets under people's housing--if it's bad to be homeless, and it is, it's worse to be homeless with children.
The real question is how people find enough hope to actually go through with bearing children in the kind of world we have right now.
Childcare is a real killer financially, particularly for good childcare. I was lucky to find two good centres for my kids and I don't know how it is in the US, but there are places here where there are no centres (think rural and regional small towns). Those kids miss out on social and learning opportunities and that inequity continues into their later years. Governments provide education and I see childcare as an extension of that, it's early learning and should be funded.
Our healthcare system is pretty good, but can be improved. I consider our family lucky to have been able to survive what was a real killer of a few years.
That was kind-of our position - with a lump of 'do I _want_ to just work to pay for someone else to bring my kids up?', another lump of 'I happen to have been schooled alongside some kids whose parents were wealthy but didn't have much time for them - how did that go?' and a helping of 'living somewhere cheap and rough means we could afford this; let's hope the schools are OK!'.
In our case it was my wife who earned more and who was much more motivated in her career, so it was me who took the 'little job' and brought the kids up. Because of what I did, that was a career-ending decision - no going back. To get back on-thread, it certainly f***ed my pension
The government could make all maternity care free.
There is a lot of evidence of women delaying having a family for financial reasons. If you make the actual pregnancy and delivery free, there would no doubt be some who would choose to have children with such a tens of thousands of dollars saved.
Of course, it would be the wrong kind of women who did...
AFZ
Even as a childless man, I can't imagine that a woman with children had much input.
@Ruth shouted, understandably, about experience outside the US not necessarily being of great relevance, but there isn't a lot of the world where $5k would cover enough of the cost of rearing child to be a reasonable incentive.
That's true; although the difference being discussed is illustrative of a related issue. When discussing the costs of childbirth alone, the parts of the world world at similar stages of development to the US have mostly decided that this cost should be socialised in some way.
There's an argument for extending this principle more broadly to cover childcare generally, but the Anglo world in particular has been somewhat allergic to this approach, preferring to focus on the narrowest individual incentives which are generally both insufficient and create massive gaps in provision (not helped by the fact that at least one party has usually been wedded to more 'traditionalist solutions')
Mine did (take all my salary in childcare) for the first five years. But leaving or going part time would have messed up my career progression. I was lucky because, as a teacher then headteacher, I had school holidays.
The cost is far more than merely financial. Your body and your life are no longer your own.
I feel it was worth it for us, but the cost was huge.
Yep.
Doublethink, Admin
When I had my child, 20-odd years ago in the UK, I got:
Free antenatal care, free hospital birth, free post-natal care including several home visits, free dental care and free prescriptions for both the pregnancy and the year after the birth.
I also got maternity pay, although because I didn't go back to the same job I had to pay some of it back.
It still cost us somewhere in the region of £20,000 for me to have the baby and take a year off work. That's not even factoring in the cost of childcare when I went back to work (more than we were paying on the mortgage) or the ongoing costs of feeding, clothing and housing for the child.
Five thousand dollars is an insult.
Even 35 years ago we were hard put to it with two full time careers and a house payment to be able to afford a child, and that doesn't seem to have changed, but only gotten worse as late stage market capitalism grinds itself to a halt.
When my daughter arrrived, though, I became acutely conscious of the fact that no matter what else I was doing for wage earning, SHE was the career. Raising and equipping her for life, helping her to grow and discover her talents and overcome her flaws, bringing her up to make her own mistakes but not ours, so much time, effort, care and attention. It was a 24/7/365 on call mission.
So the way I think of child bearing and rearing now is that it's a career decision and an investment that we should make as a society in our own health and prosperity.
The model I imagine for a full time parent, male or female, is a career model with a full time entry level career salary with social recognition, pay rises, and even promotion title benchmarks for child emotional well being, health, fitness, and socialization as the child matures. Parents with children with special needs should be additionally supported, recognized and compensated. Education and physical health care should be free for all children, and mental health care should be free for parents.
The end of a career that has launched a fledgling and criminal record-free adult into the world should receive a pension.
Anyway, it's something I only imagine but in no way feel the world would be ready to support on account of how cheaply business models hold the value of the hour and day of a human being's life. Humans are always on the wrong side of the balance sheet, and until our economic models correct this, I think I can hardly fault men and women for valuing children similarly.
AFF
Does taking into consideration whether you're going to be bringing a child into a life of poverty automatically make one "the wrong kind of woman"?
I presume it inevitably would. Let's be clear, the idiots pushing this policy as advocates of The Great Replacement Theory and only want certain kinds of babies.
If we step away from the wannabe Nazis, there is a serious conversation to be had here. On a society level, a falling birth rate creates particular challenges. It is not unreasonable to look at this.
To be absolutely clear, I absolutely do not mean requiring, expecting, pressuring, demanding, intimating, or any other construct we can come up with, that women who do not want to have children/more children should be getting pregnant. This does need spelling out, of course.
But, but, there are lots of women (/couples etc.) who do want to have children who cannot or do not. Some of the reasons are not solvable but some are. Given that it is in society's interest as well, there is a compelling case for a society response that supports these people. It is possible, I believe to do so without disadvantaging or harming those who wish to choose a different path for themselves. Of course, I'm talking about serious, careful, deliberate and detailed policy making. Is there anything less likely to come from the current administration?
AFZ
Almost certainly. As I pointed out in another thread Victor Orbán's Hungary spends more than 5% of its GDP promoting and supporting pro-natalist policies and yet the Hungarian birth rate continues to fall. For reference, in the Times op-ed I used as a reference points out that the U.S. currently spends less than 5% of its GDP on defense, so Hungary is spending a crazy amount of its national output attempting to convince more women to have children and failing massively in the endeavor.
Probably not. From the aforementioned op-ed:
One of the big takeaways from this analysis is that government subsidies are a poor substitute for redistributing childcare duties in ways contrary to traditional gender stereotypes. For the U.S. in particular, since you asked, I'd say that a lot of the current social and political moment is backlash against the gains made by women and racial/ethnic minorities. Whether this affects birth rates in the long term probably depends on how effective that backlash is and how retrograde the results.
I agree.
Adding my 2 cents as a single parent.
Five thousand dollars is a massive insult. However, I would have welcomed any kind of financial help. It wouldn't have lasted very long, though. My daughter was born with severe health problems, which plague her to this day. There were very few specialists for children in this area at the time. Not only did I miss work on the days she had doctors' appointments, but some of the medical offices were about a three hour drive from our home.
The hardest thing I ever did in my life was trying to give my dear daughter a decent childhood with adequate food, fun and attention. There was very little in the way of government help those days. I was grateful for the WIC program. Until she was almost six years old, she had intermittent health care with Medicaid, and after that, my new at the time workplace provided health insurance for both of us. The insurance provider dropped her after just a couple of months because of the high costs of her medical care. Back to intermittent Medicaid after that.
I won't bore you with more about my experiences, except to say I was exhausted.
The lying US PTB, for all they claim to care about the lives of unborn babies, have shown constantly how they don't give a darn about the babies that have been born. If you see lightning off in the distance, that's me raging about the situation in which our government puts struggling parents.
My daughter is the joy of my life. The hard times were so worth it. However, if before I got pregnant, some person had offered me $5000 to bear a child, I would have laughed in their face.
AND NOW it transpires that the birthrate is falling well HOORAY we ought to be saying, and even better that the biggest falls are in rich countries where extra population takes up more resource.
But instead as soon as population shows the slightest signs of levelling off apparently this is a "Problem"!
Let's try a thought experiment. Rather than worry about nations, how about this: Someone looks for 100 intelligent, healthy, talented, unemployed young women with significant debts and no bad genes (there would be plenty) and hires them to have babies by artificial insemination using a genius sperm bank. How much should they offer (an amount after taxes)?
(This sounds like a plot for a rather dark science fiction story, maybe not original. There is plenty of room here for nightmares)
This will only persuade people who are truly stupid. I hate using the word stupid, but I don't know if I have a better one.
Sounds like Musk's fantasy.
And please do keep on centring own voices of people who can give birth/have given birth/ might do/ could have done etc.
Thanks!
Louise
Epiphanies host
[ edited to include more]
You hear the stories of the women who desperately want a child, but less of those of us who, relieved of societal pressure and given control of fertility, quietly step away.