Just when you thought every conceivable group with a grievance had already mobilized itself and rented offices on K Street, a new one is threatening to rumble.
Its members come in every color and every size. They are not poor -- indeed, they probably have more money than most people. In fact, according to journalist Elinor Burkett, in whom they have at last found a sympathetic voice, they can be described as "the walking embodiment of strong and invincible." So what's their complaint?
They don't have children -- and they don't want them. They're tired of being made to feel that they should want and have them. They're resentful of having to pinch-hit on the job for those who do. And they'd like some of the parental pork for themselves.
In her new book, The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless, Burkett tells the poignant story of a woman named Cheryl. Cheryl is a forty-year-old concrete inspector who has endured many slights over the years. She has uncomplainingly worked extra hours when her co-workers pleaded child-care problems for "the umpteenth time," although none of them have ever returned the favor so that she could pursue her hobby of cutting stained glass. She has politely deflected the meaningful looks from friends and relatives hoping for happy news. She swallowed her fury while calculating the taxes she'd save if she could claim some "kiddie credits" -- credits that she bitterly reckoned would give her the money to buy "antique glass at thirty dollars a square foot."
But the final straw landed on her back at a video store. It had been a hard week in the concrete-inspection business and she wanted to relax with a movie. But when she parked her truck at an empty spot at the mall, she was confronted with what she calls "The Sign": The space was reserved for expectant mothers and parents of infants. As if that weren't enough, the clerk let a mother with an empty infant carrier jump to the front of the queue.
"Does not having kids make me a second-class citizen, unworthy of the most basic consideration?" Cheryl erupts to Burkett. "When does it get to be my turn to have my interests respected and honored in America?"
People like Cheryl, Burkett claims, form the heart of an increasingly defiant and vocal movement: the child-free (a name that sounds like some new brand of aerosol child repellent for old ladies protective of their furniture). Burkett, who is child-free herself, regards the group's plight as analogous to that of blacks in the segregated South. This will probably strike some as a rather off-putting comparison, but then, The Baby Boon is a rather off-putting book. It's full of characters who talk like Sandy Graf, a 37-year-old designer who is "childless by choice": "Breeders get so much time off to tend to the emergency sicknesses or the accidents or the school this and that. Who covers for them, who works more hours? The non-breeders, that's who. And no one notices. We are punished for not squirting out spawn."
Yet despite its wince-making crudity, Baby Boon is a curiously interesting book. The child-free may be resentful, embittered, and whiney. But to uphold their cause, Burkett -- a self-described liberal feminist -- has backed herself into the same position as the social conservatives she dislikes nearly as much as she dislikes babies. A dogged reporter, Burkett has tracked down and calculated the cost of every one of the benefits parents and children receive, from the "family-friendly" workplaces at companies like IBM to the boondoggles and pork rolls buried in government policy. And she points out that nearly all these benefits are wasted.
Companies may claim their costly day-care facilities help attract women workers. But, as Burkett wonders:
How can turnover and absenteeism drop so precipitously in response to child-care assistance, family leaves, and scholarships for employees' kids when, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only one-third of the workforce has children at home under the age of eighteen? How can day-care centers account for 50 percent reductions in turnover when only 8 percent of women workers have kids under the age of six? How can a company like Chase Manhattan Bank spend seven-hundred thousand dollars a year to run a day-care center in Brooklyn for 110 children and justify the expenditures by citing 'return-on-investment' analyses showing savings of $ 1.5 million in avoided absenteeism alone? Were the parents of those 110 children missing that much work?
She concludes: "Adoption allowances, maternity and paternity leave, child care, sick-kid care, after-school care, and summer camps don't do all that much for workers who do have kids since the vast majority don't adopt, don't seem to want institutional day care, and can't take long parental leaves because they can't afford six months without income."
Don't seem to want institutional day care. Burkett may be the first feminist willing to acknowledge that previously unpalatable truth. So what are mothers supposed to do? Burkett concludes that modern women's unwillingness to deal with the responsibilities of children causes them to foist that responsibility onto others.
In her view, all but the poorest of mothers (she says "parents" but we know what she means) should either stay home altogether or work part-time while their children are young. She is quite willing to sacrifice the thirty-year-old idea of the working mother if that's what it takes to "throw 'parental' entitlements into the dustbin of bad ideas." Which puts Burkett in the same feminist camp as, oh, Pat Robertson. And also Brian Robertson (no relation), who criticizes parental entitlements from the point of view of the pro-family right in his new book, There's No Place Like Work: How Business, Government, and Our Obsession with Work Have Driven Parents from Home.
Robertson, unlike Burkett, recognizes that the exodus of mothers into the full-time workforce has been a greater catastrophe for children than it has for the childless (he also shows -- contra Burkett -- that the rising tax burden has fallen hardest on traditional families with kids, not on childless couples).
Recent social science data, which Robertson adduces in detail, reveal disturbing effects of parental absence from the home: It has been linked to an increase in early sexual activity, poor academic performance, feelings of worthlessness and loneliness, depression, and even "borderline psychopathology" among children. A study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association "concluded that teens who feel they are paid attention to by their parents are less likely to use drugs, drink alcohol, smoke or have sex."
But how are they going to get that extra attention? The incentives to work these days are much greater than those to stay home. They are bolstered by social attitudes that value paid work over unpaid, and working mothers over those who depend upon their husbands for support.
For most of this century, Robertson observes bitterly, groups claiming to help women -- including self-described feminist groups -- recognized the need for the special protection of mothers. They championed such inequitable, out-of-fashion policies as baby bonuses, government support for widowed mothers (but not those who had babies out of wedlock), and the "family-wage," which paid more to a father supporting a wife and kids than one without. He cites the work of massively popular organizations like the Mothers' Congress (endorsed by Teddy Roosevelt) that worked to help mothers leave the workforce as well as old-time feminist Katherine Anthony, who said in 1915, "The program of feminism is not the mere imitation of masculine gestures and motions."
Today, self-proclaimed women's organizations work to do the opposite (and opposite to modern women's wishes, the majority of whom still profess a desire to stay home with their children). The result is the Band-Aid efforts by governments and corporations alike to make up for the loss of parents -- something they can't possibly do, even under the most generous circumstances. What's more,
That a devaluation of the housewife and mother has been achieved in both our popular culture and our public policy -- largely by feminists -- is difficult to deny. Perhaps less apparent has been the simultaneous devaluation of the home. Part of the older ideal of the home entailed the notion of a sacrosanct haven from the sometimes harsh, market-driven realities of the competitive economy, a place where man and woman could exercise a high degree of autonomy within a limited sphere. That freedom was, of course, circumscribed by the needs and demands of other family members -- primarily one's children, whose education and moral formation took precedence. But within that sphere of genuine freedom, there was a recognition of the vast possibilities and responsibilities, particularly for the wife and mother: to create a home environment and bring up the children precisely as one wishes -- no small power.
Robertson fears that the full consequences of our child neglect will manifest themselves in the next generation, when the children who grew up under the new dispensation come of age. And they will fall most heavily on elderly women like the Elinor Burkett of 2030, as she wonders whatever happened to all those good-for-nothing spawn who were supposed to pay her Social Security.
Danielle Crittenden is the author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman (Simon & Schuster).