What would you think about a country where one-quarter of the children are poor, where 50 percent of the children can expect to live part of their lives in a female-headed household, and where an estimated two million to seven million children are left alone after school every day? Unfortunately, this is the case in the United States today.
One of the reasons for this situation, a new study says, is the lack of recognition by the country's employers of changes that have taken place in the American family in the past 20 years. That the average family no longer consists of a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and 2.5 kids is well known, and the fact that more and more mothers are in the work force has also been widely discussed.
A group called the Family Policy Panel (of the United Nations Association of the United States) reports that both men and women are feeling increased conflict between their jobs and their families, and that U.S. employers, unlike those in other countries, have not caught up with the times in their personnel policies. The old image of the family composed of the breadwinner husband and the housekeeper mother now applies to only 10 percent of the population. And yet the panel--composed of prominent business, education, labor, and academic leaders--found that policies regarding maternity leave, fringe benefits, child care, health care, and equal pay are still mostly greed to the old family makeup. Even our schools and most other societal institutions do not take the changes into account.
Panel member Rosalie Wolf of the International Paper Company says: "Employers prefer to assume that solving family problems is the employee's job, a position that evolved when employees were mostly married males who were presumed to have homemaker wives. With more women in the work forces…employers assume that treating women equally means ignoring their family problems, too."
The Family Policy Panel believes that the government and private industry must work together to allow working parents "… to concentrate on their jobs without neglecting their families. We can no longer leave to chance an area of policy so primary to our country's social and economic fabric."
If these women lived in any of 100 other countries in the world, they would have had some type of job-protected maternity leave with at least partial wage replacement. In the Western industrialized countries new mothers get anywhere from 16 week to one year of partly paid leave, with their job position and benefits fully protected. The report comments, "Women in the United States, more frequently than men, have work histories punctuated by periods of absence from the labor force. Studies have shown that even short employment breaks, especially when not job-protected; often result in a decline in long-run earning potential. These breaks partially explain the male/female earning gap."
The New Poor
The panel says that women earn, on the average, 64 percent of what men earn, even though 54 percent of all women work. This wage gap, combined with a high divorce rate and the increasing number of female-headed households, including teenage mothers, is what has brought a new category of poor into American society--the child. Close to one in four children in the
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