The overall cost of supporting children is one thing, but from the point of view of family welfare what is important is the distribution of those costs between parents and the pattern of their overall contributions. This section of the chapter examines these issues and argues that women bear a disproportionate share of the costs of child care and socialization, and therefore of the reproduction of human capital. The key question here is ‘What are or should be the consequences for policy of recognizing that women shoulder a larger proportion of the costs of reproducing the human capital on which future economic prosperity will depend, and that they do so from a diminishing resource base in many instances?’
The distribution of income and labour time within the family is closely connected to the costs of children. An important determinant of the cost of children is the level of contributions they will make as they mature (Caldwell 1982). These contributions may be in the form of labour time, waged income, remittances and support in old age. The perceived level of these potential contributions influences fertility and decisions about investment (including school fees). However, another important determinant of the cost of children is the contributions that will be made by society as a whole, including health care, education and family allowances. When the levels and nature of both forms of contribution are considered alongside the distribution of the costs of child care between parents, a clear distortion emerges.
Several studies from various countries have shown that mothers work longer hours, consume less and devote more of their resources to their children (Dwyer and Bruce 1988; Sen 1983; Folbre 1986). The commitments that women make to motherhood reduce their earnings, labour market experience, promotional prospects and general potential for economic independence (Folbre 1991). Women, as mentioned earlier, carry a disproportionate share of the costs of child-rearing and the reproduction of human capital. But do they recoup those costs in particular ways? It has been argued that under certain conditions of production and reproduction in the developing world, with a strict division of labour and defined cultural expectations, women are partially recompensed in two ways. First, regulations governing kinship and marriage clearly set out men’s responsibilities to dependants. Second, women can expect economic contributions from their children (Nugent 1985; Cain 1982).
But, as Folbre (1991) argues, increases in the cost of children due to processes of modernization and market integration have intensified the economic stresses on families. The rising costs of family life have intensified conjugal conflict and negotiation, rendering women in some contexts even more vulnerable in consequence of the unequal distribution of power in conjugal unions. This augments the probability of individuals reneging on formalized contracts, such as marriage, and on informal contracts, such as expectations of support for kin, elderly parents and other household members. Children and the elderly are increasingly unable to participate in a wage-based economy, where education is crucial, and they become more vulnerable to poverty. In this situation, parenting becomes a commitment with many costs and potentially few rewards. Each case must be analysed in specific terms, but what is evident is that in these sorts of circumstance women are no longer receiving any recompense—or very little—for the disproportionate costs of child-rearing and nurturing that they bear.
It is not possible to make global generalizations about family structure, family law and welfare policy. But transfers (pensions, family allowances) are often structured to provide benefits to waged employees and to reinforce a family structure based on a male breadwinner (Folbre 1991). The result is that social security programmes discriminate against female wage earners despite attempts in many countries to reform the law (Brocas et al. 1990), and they do so in a situation where women are already discriminated against in the labour market. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that levels of family benefits are quite low in relation to other public transfers. Working women pay the same level of taxes as men and thus contribute equally to total public transfers, but the proportion of such transfers reallocated to family benefits is relatively small in a situation where women are still bearing a disproportionate share of the costs of child care. Benefit levels and welfare legislation vary enormously around the world, but women who are raising families on their own are not receiving sufficient support compared to families with a male breadwinner. A review of current social insurance programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean concluded that such programmes subsidize children in families headed by full-time wage earners, effectively redistributing money away from most families maintained by women alone (Folbre 1994). Female-headed households might represent a significant proportion of the state’s welfare bill in some contexts, but this is not because they are dysfunctional families, but because they are bearing the full costs of child-rearing and nurturing in systems where public transfers do not adequately address the fact that all women shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden of social reproduction.