Who knew the aim of socialism was putting more mothers into cubicles? The Democratic debate on Jan. 14 showed a political class that believes mothers should be out growing the GDP rather than at home raising their children. Mothers in the United States don’t agree.
“You do universal child care, and you’ve got a lot of mommas who can go to work,” Elizabeth Warren said in the Iowa debate.
Warren was speaking from her own experience. She almost had to quit her first university teaching job to raise her children. She lamented “how many of my daughter’s generation get knocked off the track and don’t get back on.” That is, many women never get a chance to be a professor, a senator, or a bank regulator because they sacrificed a career for motherhood.
Where Warren was able to leave her children with Aunt Bea, she says other women should turn over childrearing to Uncle Sam. Warren said the federal government should “cover child care for all of our children and provide universal pre-K for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in America.”
“That’s an investment in our babies,” she says of her effort to get more mothers to ditch diapers for the desk.
That may be Warren’s preference, but it’s not the preference of the average mother.
About 50 million women have children at home under 18, and at least half of those mothers do not want a full-time job, surveys show.
A clear majority of women with children under 18 would “prefer a homemaker role” to “working outside the home,” a Gallup survey in 2015 found. Most working mothers would prefer to be homemakers, and only 37% of women not in paid employment wish they were working mothers, this Gallup poll found.
Other data show similar results. A Pew Research Center poll from 2019 found a little more love for the grind among mothers but still not the single-minded desire for a paycheck that Warren imagines. In the Pew study, 51% of mothers said “it would be best for them personally” to be working full-time, while 30% said part-time was ideal, and 19% said they’d rather stay at home (“not work for pay at all,” was the precise poll wording).
Here’s another way to slice the Pew numbers: More mothers in America work full time but would rather not (about 4.5 million) than there are mothers who don’t work for pay but wish they had a full-time job (about 3.5 million).
Millions of mothers want to stay at home more than they currently do. Our political class disapproves.
