As children in America, we learned an English nursery rhyme that begins:
“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.”
This description is unfortunately a lot more current than it sounds. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 44 percent of American children live in families that cannot cover basic expenses. Imagine that: half of American kids are poor.
Raising children in a country without an adequate social safety net can be extremely difficult. A girl I knew — let’s call her Alice — found this out when she got married at age 20 and started having children a year or two later. Alice agonized over whether or not to keep her job. “If I stay home to raise my kids,” she said, “all of us will have to live on my husband’s income. If I go back to work, I will earn only enough to pay someone else to raise my kids.”
For two years, she was a stay-at-home mom. But when her husband turned violent, she had no choice but to take the kids, move back in with her mother — 1,000 miles away — and get a full-time job.
I’m sure everything turned out all right, but I do feel sad that Alice’s life turned so serious so quickly. She was a hard-working student with ambitions of using her German degree to travel to Europe. Her main justification for getting married so early was that in the Midwestern state she came from, “20 is almost too old”.
If she’d made it to Germany, she could have waited a while and had years of paid leave, a guarantee of returning to her job, and much larger tax deductions. While Americans are given a small amount to offset their expenses, Germans are basically paid to have children — and German children have a pretty good life.
The difference in fertility rates explains it. In America, where the average woman has 2.05 kids, children are a given. You expect to see them all the time. People buy large, sturdy cars so they can transport them comfortably. Kids are everywhere. Single people and older adults often try to get away from them at restaurants, swimming pools, and outdoor events.
In Germany, where the average woman has 1.41 kids, children are given an almost mystical reverence. Some parents even seem to expect a pat on the back for doing their part to prevent German extinction. Baby carriages are pushed around with pride. Former co-workers regularly turn up in our office to display their new offspring, as if to say, “Look! I made this!”
Of course, some of these same mothers then spend years worrying about whether their children will ever get into day care.
In America, day care is widely available. Unfortunately, you have to be able to afford it — and not live in a shoe.
