A parent trap
Something has been making me mad recently. I'm parenting a toddler, two and half years old, so I've been at it now for a couple years. I love Thisbe dearly, in a kind of cosmic way, but when I get to thinking about the social structure around my parenting I get annoyed in a kind of cosmic way.
In my research on marxist educational theory, I've spent a lot of time thinking about social reproduction. The basic idea in social reproduction theory is that rather than changing society--making it better in some transformative way, for instance--schools maintain the continuity of society as it is; or, more specifically, how a ruling class prefer it to be. Take the mission statements of most schools as an anecdotal example. Most of them say something like: we teach students how to be productive members of society. What does that mean? Getting a job and maybe voting; again, making sure kids succeed in the society as it is, thus keeping it the way it is.
I co-wrote a paper revisiting the framework's lineage in education and feminism with an amazing friend/colleague/childhood studies professor Kate Cairns last year. We show how social reproduction in education was largely understood as a framework emphasizing the reproduction of social relations, like citizenship or work. But social reproduction feminism, since the 1960s, has focused on the reproduction of life itself; in other words, how feminized carework is socially reproductive: giving birth, feeding, clothing, and generally making sure that children stay alive is an essential part of what keeps societies going.
Without new humans to work and live in the society, what would the society be? Like the brilliant film Children of Men, the human social world would slowly and painfully collapse. The takeaway here is that it takes work to maintain the continuity of the life and relations a society needs to keep going. We tend to think of workers as people who go to the office, factory, warehouse, or other kind of workplace and get paid. But, as Tithi Bhattacharya asks, who produces the worker?
Sue Ferguson, the marxist social reproduction feminist, has an important insight in this vein. There are a bunch of contradictions in capitalism, she says. The most famous is the antagonism between worker and boss. One of Ferguson's main claims (along wither others like Nancy Fraser) is that social reproduction marks another basic contradiction of capitalism. The capitalist economy needs us to make babies and raise them, but simultaneously makes it harder for us to do that by not paying us the full value of what we produce.
Rather than giving power, ownership, and resources to the working class--most people in an economy--capitalism gives those things to a small group of owners, who ultimately look out for their own self-interests rather than spread the wealth. But it takes resources to reproduce that society the owners cherish so dearly. So, since the Wages for Housework campaign, socialist feminists have demanded that the work of social reproduction be valued and remunerated properly. In the 1970s, they demanded women be paid wages for doing housework. More recent calls for guaranteed income echo this sort of demand.
I've done organizing and study along these lines for awhile. But it's only after being a parent myself that I've become more deeply mad about this contradiction of capitalism. As a parent, I feel like I'm doing an unpaid internship, or a volunteer gig--what sometimes gets called a "passion project"-- to maintain the continuity of a social structure that ultimately makes it harder for parents like me to parent! I'm doing all this work and I'm just giving it away for free to the capitalists. And I have it easy. I look around and see all the kids who need so much, all the parents and guardians who can't give it to them, and all the generations of trauma that cycle down through the decades because it, and I'm like--c'mon!
There's an educational angle to this too. For decades now, the refrain in US public education has been "the schools are failing." This is largely based on test scores and various performance measures. Does it every occur to anyone singing this terrible tune that we're not exactly setting our kids up for success? If the social structure doesn't support its parents when they give birth to and raise their kids, is it any surprise that those kids don't do better in school? Education is part of the social reproduction contradiction that Ferguson points out. Capitalism needs school to keep going, but it's constantly getting in schools' way.
There are countries where it's easier. Quebec has a great childcare policy for instance, as does France. Northern European social democracies have generous family leave policies as well as resources like at-home nurses that come to your house everyday for the first four months of your child's life (we have friends in the Netherlands who got this), along with programs that provide diapers and formula and other benefits.
But the US is famously bad at this. Family leave, childcare, healthcare, housing and so much else is a pathetic patchwork of privatized, de-centralized, and byzantine policies that make it much harder to bring up the people who are supposed to be the ones that carry the society forward in time. It's so much work and they don't pay us a dime to do it. They actually make it harder! Parenting is such a social-structural trap!
As much as I love Thisbe, I'm mad! They don't tell you any of this in advance when all the ideologies come at you about growing up, getting married, having kids, etc. All you really hear about is about falling in love, getting married, and having kids, but never the material reality of that last part, particularly in a society that, while claiming to the greatest country ever, behaves with contempt towards those who are making and raising the people who will be its future.