Mainstream economists have never expressed much  interest in the distribution of the costs of raising children. They are so focused on how individuals make choices that they seldom explore the constraints that social institutions impose. Back in 1988, Victor Fuchs wrote a book entitled Women’s Quest for Economic Equality, in which he explained that women were held back largely because they enjoy taking care of children more than men do.

Likewise, Nobel prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin emphasizes that many women have preferences that lead them to choose jobs that pay less, and  most employers prefer workers who can commit to long hours on the job without interruption.

Both Fuchs and Goldin state partial truths. What both miss is that many Americans would prefer a world in which private commitments to family are more equally shared. This is a long way from the world we live in today.

Plenty of research shows that mothers, on average, earn significantly less than fathers over their lifetime, a finding that has been labeled the “motherhood penalty.” In the United States in 2024, full-time employed mothers earned about 74 cents for every dollar full-time working fathers made.

Many  women who become mothers are counting on the fathers of their children to share enough of their earnings to make up for their lost earnings. The probability that fathers will actually come through represents the “motherhood gamble,” and the odds are much better for some mothers than for others.

Black and Hispanic women are at a disadvantage, not only because their partners tend to earn less, but also because they are less likely be married and have a lower probability of receiving child support from a non-custodial parent than divorced moms do.

Unmarried mothers account for about 40% of births in the United States today, and about 21% of children under 18 live with a solo mother. In 2020–2022, only 23% of women  living in female-headed families with one or more of their own children under age 18 reported receiving any child support from a non-custodial parent.

 Some of these mothers may be cohabiting with men who are not biological fathers but still help out to some extent with childcare and expenses, but we lack reliable data on how much they contribute.

Marriage itself is no guarantee of support. Spouses are required by law to cover one another’s basic living costs, but not to share their earnings. For women who are married, the economic consequences of divorce don’t matter much by race or ethnicity—women experience drops in family income that average 46% to 50%, nearly double the drops experienced by men. By age nine, more than 20% of children born to married parents will experience a parental split.

White custodial parents are more likely than others to have a child support agreement/order in place (57% relative to 40% for Blacks) and they also receive higher levels of support. (I could not find estimates for other racial/ethnic groups, or for gay/lesbian couples). Legal disagreements over custody and child support can be very costly, putting women without economic resources of their own at a serious disadvantage.

The personal involvement of non-resident parents is quite uneven. A report based on data from 2017 found that 34% had not seen their children even once in the preceding year, and 38% had seen them at least once a week (the rest were somewhere in between).

Economists often argue that gender specialization is “efficient”: If one parent takes primary responsibility for childcare, the other can earn more money by concentrating on wage employment. Even feminist economist Claudia Goldin makes this point.

But “efficiency” can’t be defined simply as maximizing household income in the short run. In the long run, extreme specialization in family care hurts mothers and children by increasing their economic vulnerability. And mothers who are just “a husband away from poverty” may find it risky to disagree with their breadwinners.

Fathers, too,  are harmed when a focus on earning money limits their opportunities to develop relationships with their children deep enough to survive the challenges of living apart. Many dads today say they want to be more involved with their own children than their dads were with them.  Like many mothers, they recognize that some definitions of “efficiency” are too risky to gamble on.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Artwork by Nancy Folbre.