FAMILY POLICY AND WOMEN'S PREFERENCES: Neil Gilbert

...In contrast to the United States, Western European countries are well known for having a powerful arsenal of day care and other family-friendly benefits. For example, over 70 percent of the children from age three years to school age in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom are in publicly financed child care. Given the general direction of U.S. policy, it may be instructive to examine how motherhood and family life have fared in light of the changing levels of family-friendly benefits available in the industrialized countries of the European Union. The question is not simply are they "family friendly," but for what kinds of families and female life styles are they friendly?

Overall, marriage and fertility rates have declined and female labor-force participation rates have increased throughout most of the European Union over the last few decades. ...

Overall, these findings lend themselves to at least three broad interpretations. Believers in the salutary effects of family-friendly policies would argue that although such policies did not appear to strengthen the formation of family life (by increasing the presence of children and marriage), in the absence of these benefits the declines would have been even sharper--that is, these benefits acted as a brake to slow things up. As evidence, they might point to the fact that in three of the countries--Denmark, Sweden, and Finland--that had significant positive correlations between fertility rates and public expenditure on family benefits, the rates of expenditure were proportionately more than twice as high as that of most of the other countries. This suggests that the decline can be diminished if significant resources are invested in family services.

Invoking the mantra "correlation is not causality," skeptics find little reason to assume that these policies are either friendly or unfriendly to families, and read the results as confirming that family-friendly policies make no palpable difference. They point out that if indeed these benefits served as a brake on declining rates of fertility and marriage, then one would expect to find the lowest marriage and fertility rates in countries that lagged behind in the family-friendly benefits, of which the United States is a prime example--except that the American rates are higher than those of the European Union. Skeptics would no doubt refer to the history of children's allowances in France which were initiated under the Family Code of 1939 with the explicit goal of increasing the birthrate. Although the French birthrate increased considerably in the decades after World War II, during the same period the United States--with no children's allowance--also experienced a dramatic rise in the birthrate, while the birthrate in Sweden declined despite its allowance system. The skeptic argues that decisions concerning marriage and family size address fundamental conditions of human existence, which do not yield readily to social policy.

Finally, disbelievers conclude that so-called family-friendly policies are not really family friendly at all. ...

The second reality is that the main threads of family-friendly policies are tied to and reinforce female labor-force participation--and are more aptly labeled "market friendly." These policies are largely, though not entirely, associated with publicly provided care for children and supports for periods of parental leave. To qualify for parental-leave benefits it is necessary to have a job before having children. The incentive for early attachment to the labor force is bolstered by publicly subsidized day care. Child-care services both compensate for the absence of parental child care in families with working mothers and generate an economic spur for mothers to shift their labor from the home to the market. In Sweden, for example, free day-care services are state-subsidized by as much as $11,900 per child. They are free at the point of consumption, but paid for dearly by direct and indirect taxes—in 1990, Swedish taxes absorbed the highest proportion of the gross domestic product of any OECD country. Paying in advance for the "free" day-care service tends to squeeze mothers into the labor force, since the crushing tax rates make it difficult for the average family to get by on the salary of one earner. State-sponsored welfare activities accounted for about three-quarters of the net job creation in Sweden between 1970 and 1990, with almost all of these public-service positions being filled by women. Thus much of the voluntary labor invested in care for children, disabled kin, and elderly relatives was redirected to providing social care to strangers for pay. ...

The reality is that family policies can be friendlier to some life styles than to others. Recognizing this, we should explore alternatives to the conventional perspective on family policies designed to harmonize work and family life. The conventional approach is implicitly oriented toward helping mothers work while raising children. It is informed by male work patterns, which basically involve a seamless transition from school to the paid labor force along with a drive to rise as high as possible in a given line of work. This "male model" of an early start and a continuous work history imposes a temporal frame on policies to harmonize work and family life, and it stresses the idea of "balancing" the concurrent performance of labor-force participation and child-rearing activities. Child-care services, and even periods of parental leave, facilitate an ongoing and relatively stable work history--which is preferred by many, though clearly not all, women.

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