The Perpetual Panic of American Parenthood

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/opinion/the-perpetual-panic-of-american-parenthood.html

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Paris — I spend a lot of time listening to parents around the world complain. In Kiev recently, a working mother told me the joke about how Ukrainians are raised by same-sex couples: their mothers and grandmothers.

How hard or easy it is to raise kids, especially while working, is a big part of people’s well-being everywhere. This topic rarely gets much traction in American politics, but it’s become an issue in this election. Even Donald J. Trump, when he isn’t boasting that he can grab women by their genitals, claims he wants them to have a better work-life balance.

There is a dawning sense among voters that our lack of government support for child care, and the anxiety this causes, isn’t normal. In other rich countries — heck, even in Ukraine — parents get the state’s help in their children’s early years. Americans get practically nothing.

What we do get is a pervasive national angst. A forthcoming study in The American Journal of Sociology finds that Americans with children are 12 percent less happy than non-parents, the largest “happiness gap” of 22 rich countries surveyed. The main sources of parents’ unhappiness are the lack of paid vacation and sick leave, and the high cost of child care, the authors said.

I might have thought America’s parenting misery was inevitable if I hadn’t moved from the United States to France (where parents are slightly happier than non-parents). Raising kids is consuming here, but not overwhelming: The government offers high-quality day care, billed on a sliding scale, and free preschool for children 3 and up. Older kids have subsidized after-school activities and summer camps. On average, college costs less than $500 a year.

Early childhood offerings vary, but everywhere in Europe and in Canada they’re far more generous than in the United States. Ukrainian dads may not change enough diapers, but their government offers paid maternity leave; practically free preschool; and per-baby payments equivalent to eight months of an average salary.

America’s parenting customs can shock foreigners. When the British writer Ruth Whippman got a bill for more than $46,000 for a routine C-section in California, she found herself longing for the “inedible food and Victorian plumbing” of the London public hospital where she’d had her first baby, at no charge, she writes in her new book, “America the Anxious.”

And that was just the birth. Back in Britain — which isn’t generous by rich-country standards — there was paid parental leave and 15 hours a week of free preschool. In America, she had no paid leave, and discovered that the government offered nothing for most kids until age 5. The strangest part, for Ms. Whippman, was that Americans considered all this normal, and blamed themselves when they couldn’t make it work.

The stress of managing all this alone also struck the Finnish journalist Anu Partanen, who, soon after moving to New York, had her second-ever panic attack (her first happened when she was lost in a Lapland forest).

“While Nordic citizens often don’t realize how good they have it, Americans seem not to realize how terribly they are being treated,” she writes in her book “The Nordic Theory of Everything.” Ms. Partanen points out that many Europeans pay only slightly higher income taxes than Americans do, while Swedes and Britons pay less, and all get far more in return. She concluded: “Maybe I wasn’t racked by anxiety because I came from a foreign country. Maybe I was racked by anxiety because I was becoming an American.”

Leaving America for Paris had the opposite effect. Suddenly it wasn’t all on me. I gradually understood why European mothers aren’t in perpetual panic about their work-life balance, and don’t write books about how executive moms should just try harder: Their governments are helping them, and doing it competently.

Both candidates in the American election have taken stands on this. Mr. Trump (who once boasted that he never changed a diaper, which could explain why he married two Eastern Europeans) said a year ago that he was skeptical of paid family leave and opposed universal pre-K. The candidate wasn’t even clear on his own company’s parental policies: He claimed it offered in-house child care for employees, when in fact this was a paid service for hotel guests called Trump Kids.

Recently, in need of female votes, and at the behest of his daughter Ivanka, Mr. Trump presented a plan for six weeks of paid leave for mothers and tax credits for parents. He would also reduce regulations on child care “to allow the market to work.”

Hillary Clinton’s proposals include 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave for men or women, capping child care costs, raising wages for child care workers (they’re now paid less than janitors); and providing pre-K for all 4-year-olds. She recently named Heather Boushey — who specializes in the issues of working families — as chief economist of her transition team.

Janet Gornick, an expert in gender and income inequality at the City University of New York, said members of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign team had approached her several times to get statistics and ask how various programs work. “If Ivanka wants to call me, I would absolutely give my statistics and my numbers to anybody, but they don’t call me,” she said.

Jane Waldfogel of the Columbia University School of Social Work said that Mrs. Clinton “knows these issues better than any set of issues, maybe short of foreign policy.” Dr. Waldfogel’s on the advisory council of Too Small to Fail, an organization Mrs. Clinton helped found in 2013 to support children 5 and under.

Dr. Waldfogel said Mrs. Clinton’s proposals formed a “national child care strategy — addressing cost, quality and access.” She predicted that Mrs. Clinton could “work with a Republican Congress to find some middle ground and get this stuff done.”

I’ve already mailed in my ballot. It’s a vote to make America great, by making it a bit more like the rest of the world.