$5,000 As a Working Parent?

Make me a better offer.

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

Let’s talk about this bullshit proposal to pay families $5,000 a child to have more children.

I have two children. It’s the right number for our family for many reasons. I am content with our little family, and I’m thrilled and grateful every day that we have the lives we do. We, like many families, had The Conversation about whether to try for a third child, and a not-insignificant part of it revolved around whether or not we could afford one. We are a dual-income family, fortunate enough to meet all of our needs and a reasonable portion of our wants, but a third child? The costs grow exponentially for us. $5,000 is not only insulting but fundamentally misses the point of why more kids are a financial and logistical non-starter for the average working family. It is the Lucille Bluth of financial incentives. It’s a baby, Michael—what can it cost? $5,000?

Let’s look at what it costs a family with two working parents to have a second child. We’ll use the birth of my second child as a case study, knowing that I paid less than average for some things and more than average for others but it likely comes out in the wash.

First, I had to have prenatal care. I won’t debate the necessity of this, as maternal mortality from all causes decreases considerably with adequate prenatal care. Go sell your 10-part virtual free-birthing course elsewhere, this is settled science.

Thankfully, my pregnancy with my son was mostly uneventful, but we had an inconclusive anatomy scan at 20 weeks which was referred to maternal fetal medicine. Even with a good PPO insurance plan, those scans cost about $250 each. I had a health complication in my fifth month of pregnancy and needed monthly scans for my entire third trimester to ensure no additional issues. Each of those three scans was also around $250.

We’re at $1,000 and change here if you include the co-pays from my other prenatal care and any lost work days, medications, and office co-pays associated with my hyperemesis in the first and second trimester. I’m being conservative about the cost of losing a day of work (not even counting it) and assuming I was able to cover it with PTO. This is not remotely true but helps illustrate the absurdity of the exercise.

My son’s birth cost us about $800 for my hospital stay, $300 for my anesthesia, and then, when my son was five months old, I received a random bill for $2,500 just entitled “nursery fee.” Setting aside how ridiculous it is to charge a “nursery fee” at a “Baby-Friendly” hospital that did not offer a nursery, when I contacted my insurance to question this charge, I was told it covered all the newborn pediatric care my son received in the hospital, including diapers, wipes, hearing and blood tests, and other services. When I asked if I could have brought my own diapers or other supplies to defray those costs, I was told that wasn’t an option. Besides, he was five months old by then and we hadn’t been advised of these charges in advance. The only option was to pay.

For those keeping score at home, we are at about $5,000 and we haven’t even left the hospital. Again, we are talking about a healthy, full-term birth with no major complications. Yes, I had a c-section, but if you have multiple children it’s common that at least one of them will have some sort of birth intervention if we all agree that healthy, live births are the goal. For those who would argue that babies born with birth interventions are somehow lesser or their moms less fit, that’s just eugenics, actually. Eugenics is disgusting, so I won’t waste time dignifying it with a response.

Keep in mind, there is no paid family leave in the U.S. In order to take twelve weeks (three months) of maternity leave, I needed to combine the four weeks my then-employer offered, take the remainder of my vacation for the year (about two weeks), and then backfill with unpaid FMLA. To get to three months (think of a three-month-old baby! Still so little!), we sacrificed six weeks of my income, which more than swamped the rest of that $5,000.

“But Lauren!” you say, “that’s $5,000 you wouldn’t have had to spend. It can only help!” Perfect, I’m so glad you brought that up.

Let’s look at how the addition of a third child would impact these costs— spoiler here, the cost per child is not fixed; it goes up every time almost exponentially. That $5,000 would be spent before we left the hospital with my son, but the point of this policy is not to encourage people to have two children, it’s to encourage them to have, say, four or more. There is now talk of a medal (yes, I’m serious) if you’re willing to have six. Next they’ll probably do a punch card and if you somehow make it to 12, the government pays for you to have one hour of babysitting. Note: at publication time, this last one was a joke, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they dropped something similar soon.

If I had had two small children already, the costs associated with keeping them in childcare during a period of 50% family income (“unpaid maternity leave”) must be counted here as you can’t simply give up a coveted daycare spot and assume it’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready to resume. Doing that with two, you might as well book a flight to Vegas and bet the entirety of their tuition on 00.

We would also need to purchase at least one larger vehicle, as we can’t afford to move to an area with better public transit or more walkable infrastructure. That vehicle, on the conservative end, would be several thousand dollars down plus a monthly car payment. We would also need, depending on the gap in ages between children, a new car seat, at least one new bed, and based on the size of our home, to potentially start looking at larger houses.

One of the major cost drivers for our family is missed days of work due to children’s illness, which over the course of the fall, winter, and spring, could be biweekly or so. I calculated the cost of one illness this winter— including the hidden fees working families pay, like after-hours urgent care charges because we can’t access pediatricians during our working hours, missed work, added convenience fees to help us juggle everything, and lost activity fees that we can’t reschedule because there are limited after-work sessions—and it came out to $700 for one bout of strep throat.

I mention these admittedly tedious details because, frankly, this proposal was written by someone who does not run these calculations regularly— someone who got their PhD in missing the fucking point. They think— or hope— that working families have so little financial cushion that $5,000 sounds tantalizing even though it’s absurdly short-sighted. That is what we call, well, evil. Making people so desperate in their day-to-day life that even a laughable sum of money is enough to push them into a life-changing choice is not “robust family-friendly policy.”

What would change the game for families like ours?

1. Free or subsidized childcare - similar to the public school model but starting at a younger age so we wouldn’t need to worry about who would watch our children while we earn money.

2. Universal healthcare that would allow us to care for our children and ourselves without incurring huge costs, including care that is accessible outside of the standard workday.

3. Paid, federally mandated family leave covering enough time for birthing parents to heal their bodies and all parents to arrange durable childcare, bond with their children, and do all the things necessary to return to work as productive and contributing members of their team.

4. A federal mandate of enough sick time to actually cover two adults with multiple dependents.

5. Robust public transit that makes it possible for families of four or more to get around without upgrading to large, single-family vehicles full of expensive car seats.

It’s so obvious, and yet this $5,000 seems like a great solution to bureaucrats—why?

Well, first, they don’t really want women in the workforce and so they don’t consider these work-related costs, such as family leave and childcare, worth discussing. The goal here is to make working so unpalatable and difficult that almost no one chooses it, even if it’s in their family’s long-term interest. In the US, it is both mostly impossible to live on a single income and also mostly impossible to manage two. Ultimately, whatever you decide in this tough set of choices, we cannot cede the debate on women having access to the workforce, even if they choose not to use it, which this natalist push is implicitly trying to force. There is no guarantee, especially in this economy, that a single income or a specific job will always and forever be enough for every family. Wages are increasingly stagnant, and up to 73% of workers are not making enough money to keep up with the rising cost of living. The quickest way for most families to scale their income or, hell, even to create redundancy in the event of a job loss, is to add a second income, not to depend on raises and promotions to boost their wages in line with inflation.

The common thread in all of this is the idea that things like well-funded public schools, accessible childcare and pediatric healthcare, and a workforce that works for working families are luxuries rather than necessities. These bureaucrats believe that we should hope for less for our children, even as the children of wealthy politicians and corporate leaders continue to attend four-year colleges debt-free, receive the best medical care, have exceptional early-childhood support and education, and enough disposable income for families to absorb multiple pregnancies without financial ruin.

The subtext here is that you, personally, should not worry so much about giving your children a good life but simply breed enough workers to continue to support the wealthiest Americans in achieving their higher level needs. Literally none of the individuals proposing this policy would consider $5,000 a transformative and game-changing amount of money, and they are hoping that by floating enough bootstraps discourse mixed with manufactured culture war to keep certain factions appropriately frothy (“Do your kids actually NEED school? What if they learn about gay people there?”) they’ll trick you into accepting a lower quality of life than your family deserves. They’ll trade your child’s future in exchange for a few months of groceries. We’re not falling for it this time, okay? Don’t fall for it.

Children are not a one-time expense, and, as much as certain actors would have you believe that once a child is born the important work is over, those of us who believe in thriving families know it’s just beginning. Working mothers in particular are the canaries in the coal mine of this unworkable system. It’s important to center our voices as we enter the uncharted territory of nationalist natalism that nevertheless leaves many of us behind. If we working moms can’t make it work, mark my words, they won’t stop stripping services and support until you can’t, either. I can’t believe I’m quoting The Chainsmokers here, but “if we go down, then we go down together.” There is also a famous poem about standing up before you’re forced to, which I’m starting to think that very few of us actually read.

We are done accepting crumbs. All children and families should thrive and until we can keep that promise, you can keep your $5,000. We want— and deserve— more.