The NYT Sunday Magazine has a cover story titled, “When Mom and Dad Share it All.” Sadly, the term “Generation X” isn’t used, but that is clearly who this article is about. Author Lisa Belkin cites research showing that the majority of housework and parental care is still done by women, yet the story focuses on Generation X parents who are changing the rules by sharing things equally. Seems to be a contradiction, yeah? Not necessarily.

As I point out in my forthcoming book Slackonomics, Generation X does share parenting more equally than previous generations, but it doesn’t show up in the stats. Why? There is a big difference between the entire demographic of parents, and the subset of middle class, educated couples in their 30’s and mid-40s. This is the cultural definition of Generation X and the people Lisa Belkin focuses on. Because they are a small portion of the overall parenting population, the extent of the change is diminished. But not only is this subset of the population embracing shared parenting, they’re having more children than the average because of it.

As I wrote in my book:

Educated women in their thirties who earn a decent living are … having more children than the average. The rate of women of childbearing age giving birth to three or more children rose by 7 percent in the late 1990s (during the economic boom), attributable to both Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites. The economic downturn after the dot.com bubble burst slowed the rate of third births, but it still remains above the average of baby-boomer women, largely because female managers and professionals are having more children. In 2002 professional women had double the number of children under eighteen at home as women in similar positions in 1977, and women with a four-year college degree or more had triple the average number as women with similar educational backgrounds in 1977.

In fact, two of the three families the Times piece focuses on have three kids, and those mothers are the more educated and career-oriented. “I was scared that if we had kids,” one told Belkin, “I would be left home with the cooking, the cleaning and the children.” The other wife and mother of three in the story said, “My career is extremely important to me. It’s a big part of how I define myself.”

As I report in my book, two economists have come to the conclusion that professional women are having more children as a direct result of shared parenting and household chores among American Gen Xers. By contrast, Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak* note that in advanced industrial economies where gender roles are inflexible, marriage and fertility among educated, professional women is significantly lower than among their counterparts in the United States.

Ironically, it turns out that in a culture where shared parenting and housework is more accepted — otherwise known as flexible gender roles — professional women are much more likely to get married and have more children. So while the couples devoted to shared parenting are a small percentage of the entire population raising children, it is unquestionably a significant cultural shift.

• When Mom and Dad Share it All [NYT Magazine]

*Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak, “The American Family and Family Economics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives21, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 3–26.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 12:21 am and is filed under Gen-X-onomics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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