I’ve just had quite the argument with my Mother on the phone regarding the reform to the UK state pension. She claims (and also claims that “all the papers” (*) agree with her) that equalising the state pension and taking National Insurance out of the equation is an acceptance that women do two jobs. Her argument appears to be that as a woman can pay reduced National Insurance but get a full state pension then it is an acceptance of more work being done as the rewards are the same for less National Insurance payment. Ignoring things like the women that don’t bring up children still getting the benefit and my argument that if anything it merely equalises the standing of women and men, this did bring up another issue that we disagreed on massively.
Is bringing up children a job?
I personally see it like, I don’t know, the priesthood. It is a calling, something you elect to do that society does not require of you. An actual job is something you do to bring in money so you can provide for your family (even if that family is just you). Bringing up a child is work in the same way that a hobby is work, there is no expectation of financial reward and it is done purely because you want to do it. Frankly, in my opinion, a hobby has a far greater chance of being work as there can be some form of renumeration for what is done as a hobby, for example playing in a band or writing small apps to sell on the iTunes store.
In fact, I’d go as far to say that calling bringing up a child a “job” is an insult to the bond between a parent and a child. Just because something is difficult and takes time doesn’t automatically make it a job.
Thoughts?
(*) I didn’t bring up with her how Palinesque this was.
Note for non-Brits:
National Insurance is effectively an additional tax based on earnings. It is listed separately from income tax on a UK wage slip and is supposed to be for healthcare and unemployment benefits, but effectively just gets slapped in the same big pot. For one reason or another women have been able to choose to pay less NI if they are in a dual income family but they ended up having a reduced state pension because of this. This caused issues as those that paid reduced NI say that they were never warned that this would happen to their pension.
This is one of those debates about “Is X a Y” where there’s a lot of tricky semantic stuff going on. We think of many things when we think of “job” - obligations, accountability to superiors or stakeholders, compensation, ability to change employers, etc. We can describe motherhood along all of these axes, and that’s one way to describe the various aspects of motherhood. But when talking about motherhood, it may not make the most sense to bundle all of these things into a single dimension. Where that would lead is the following reasoning:
Motherhood has trait X that is also shared by jobs
This is an argument that makes motherhood job-like
Therefore, motherhood must share other attributes of jobs as well.
…which makes no sense when you think clearly and lay out the reasoning like that, but can sound pretty convincing in the hands of a clever debater.
This post goes deeper into these bad semantic arguments, using the example “is obesity a disease?”
If you have a child, raising that child is not an option. You can choose to outsource the job to a nanny or other form of child care, you can choose to resign from the job by giving up the child, and either or both parents can take it on. But if you wash your hands of the job you will soon have the British equivalent of CPS or the police banging on your door.
Some days my job is great, some days it sucks. Some days raising our kids was great, some days it sucked. (Mostly great, though.)
I take it you’ve never had kids. A job is something you have to do, like it or not. Parenting is exactly that. If raising children were equivalent to a hobby, you’d be able to find caregivers who do it for fun. In fact, nannies expect to get paid. That in our society the parent who raises the kid does not have an official salary is just an indication that in the old days things were set up so the father implicitly paid through keeping the wife and child using his income. We can imagine a society where there is a government mandated payment by the father to the mother for child care (or vice versa for stay at home dads.)
Ok. We need a new definition of ‘job’ meaning what you go to in order to make money to eat and live and ‘job’ that is something you have to do and have no choice.
I propose we use the word ‘obligation’ for the second definition and keep the first definition for ‘job’ unless someone has a better one.
Whether you label it a “job” says more about how you choose to define the word job, and very little about the actual task of raising children.
There’s also an undeniable undercurrent in the argument that suggests if it isn’t a “job” then it is somehow less important than a “real job”.
Like so many words, job has more than one definition, examples:
-occupation: the principal activity in your life that you do to earn money
-a specific piece of work required to be done as a duty or for a specific fee
-the responsibility to do something
The CEO of my company is rich as hell. He certainly does not have to work to eat. Is what he does a job?
I agree about making money, but I contend that caregiver parents don’t officially make money because of a social accident. Isn’t the value of raising the kids evaluated during divorce settlements?
Exactly. If you want to piss off a stay-at-home mom, just say she doesn’t work. People now often use the phrase “work outside the home” to distinguish traditional income earning jobs from the parenting job.
Voyager: it is optional to bring children into the world, not to care for them once you have. I don’t think anyone is implying that. I do have a child and she is not my job. I have to agree that children are like a hobby. They take up time and resources and raising them is hard work, but it is something you do because you love them, not because you have to.
“I personally see it like, I don’t know, the priesthood. It is a calling, something you elect to do that society does not require of you.”
It is a societal requirement that a reasonable number are taking on this ‘calling’ though, unless you can replace your population with other options, eg immigration.
The major difference with other jobs is that its going to happen regardless, ie people will do it without being paid. But there is an economic impact on peoples reproduction rates - having one child can start looking more practical than two or three if you leave it as a ‘calling’ with no other supports.
Keeping your home clean is a job, though more people would refer to it as a chore.
A job is something you do to get money in exchange. This provides you the means to live.
So it’s not a job in that sense. It’s not an income producing thing.
It’s hard to qualify because raising kids has so many factors to it. I’ve seen horrible kids come from good parents and I’ve seen drugged out, abusive parents have nice respectable kids with good jobs.
So yes, it happens both ways. How a kid develops depends not only what the parents put into it but also what society puts into it, as well as the basic nauture of the child. Some children are better equipped to help themselves than others.
This is why it’s problematic when you say it is a job or not.
Most jobs you can pretty well tell if the performance put in on it will give you the desired output. With kids you can’t tell, 'cause there are so many outside influences
Any thoughts about the developing world? Consider the context in which culturally speaking, gender equality (and everything associated with it) is virtually non-existent. Add to that the extraordinary difference between care burdens between cultures (e.g., women and girls have to collect firewood; fetch water, etc., just to achieve subsistence–forget about modern conveniences such as electricity, baby wipes, etc.). Does your view change at all?
What if you were helping design an aid package that helps establish a social security system. Would it be important to ensure that “retired” women—women that spent 15–25 years raising and caring for a family—receive an income stream? What would you base that income stream on?
If the above does make a difference, as you map this on the developed world, what are the key factors that make the difference?
I have no dog in this fight, but I would imagine that it would totally piss off a working mom if a stay at home tried to get her sympathy by telling her how hard she works.
I have zero problem with women describing staying at home to care for children as their ‘job’. I think it’s rather demeaning to say otherwise, because it implies they don’t have a role in society, as in ‘what do you for a leaving’, ‘I’m a stay at home mother’ as opposed to ‘I do nothing’.
Side question for the OP, I’m confused by your wording of ‘choice’ when it comes to women paying tax through NI. I always thought the reason women have traditionally paid less National Insurance is because they either haven’t worked whilst raising children or have earned less through part-time/less well paid work as a result. It always seemed hugely unfair to me that women suffered from lower pensions than their husbands as a result of not being the primary earner in the household. I didn’t think it was a ‘choice’ to pay less, simply a result of lower or no pay. I stand to be corrected.
Similar to what athelas already said, people just want to use words that suit agendas at the time they use them.
For example, a politician pushing worker benefits could ask Woman-X if she thought of raising her child as a “job” and she’d emphatically say yes. That word “job” has currency and she wants some of it to advance her purposes.
However, her child could ask her in an private and intimate moment of reflection, “Mommy, did raising me feel like a job?” and she’d say with tears in her yes, “Of course not my little precious angel – raising you was not a job – it was a privilege from God!” In this context, the word “job” is an insult to the transcendent bond between mother and child and she’ll want to distance herself from it.
Anyways, if raising a child is a job, who’s the employer? Is a blow job a job? What’s job-ish about it? If someone exclaims, "I just got a new job" do most reasonable people include that it might also mean a new child came into their life among the spectrum of possibilities for interpreting that sentence?
You really, really don’t want to know the full details of how National Insurance works. Trust me.
The point the OP alludes to is the option which working, married women used to have to pay reduced NI (“the married women’s stamp”), though they then got reduced state pensions (and probably unemployment benefit?). The option was withdrawn several years ago. I’m not sure if anyone paying the reduced stamp when the option was withdrawn had transitional rights to stay on the reduced stamp, I’d guess not. Recent changes to the basic state pension mean that women who didn’t earn for a full career now get a better pension. Of course, the basic state pension is way below subsistence level, so a woman who managed to survive without earning during her ‘working life’ is going to have to pull the same trick during her old age.
“We’ve made it to the campsite. Billy, it’s your job to gather firewood. Jane, Chris, it’s your job to put up the tent. My job is to unpack the food and set up the fire pit.”
“My job is to take care of the child 12hrs a day, your job is to earn enough money for us to afford a home and food and other stuff.”
There’s an agenda behind labeling it “not a job”, too. Namely the idea that Lust4Life is promoting, that raising a child is not nearly as hard as “real” work.