Tessa- I’m sorry to hear your daughter’s teachers aren’t treating you respectfully. I read Ann Crittenden’s book back when I was pregnant with Jasper and it was one of the things that made me really worried — that my career was shot, basically, because I was becoming a mother. Well, fast forward close to 4 years, and my career is miles ahead of where it was 4 years ago. So I think the situation is complicated. When men or women take time out of the workforce, they incur a penalty. Obviously, they lose the wages they would have earned during that time, but they also lose years of raises, and that’s if they manage to get back in (which isn’t that easy either). On the other hand, one of the main points of 168 Hours is that you don’t have to take time out of the workforce in order to spend lots of time with your kids. If you work 40 hours and sleep 8 hours a night (56 per week) that leaves 72 hours for other things. You won’t spend all that with your kids, of course, but you can spend a lot of it.

I think that all parents consider the cost of having kids. It is possible that the marginal cost for each additional child a family has may be less and less but for women there are hidden costs that have to be considered.

Ann Crittenden in her book the Price of Motherhood http://www.amazon.com/Price-Motherhood-Important-World-Valued/dp/0805066195 examines many aspects of the Motherhood Penalty in the USA. Also this article in the New York Times on the The Different Costs of Motherhood http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/the-different-costs-of-motherhood/ provides yet another piece to the puzzle.

Currently, the Social Security system penalizes anyone who spends time working as an unpaid caregiver, and anyone earning significantly less than there spouse – that is, the great majority of married mothers.

So as a mother the bottom line for me is that there is a significant price that families especially mothers pay to raise their children and even if the cost of having a third child is way less than having only one it is a very small point to consider when the hidden costs are so huge and being largely ignored.

It should be noted that the generations of young women entering the workforce now are accustomed to equality. They spend 2-3 decades educating themselves and competing with men for the chance to do jobs they love, they insist on equal pay and benefits. Then suddenly they become mothers and they realize that they are suddenly in the underclass because of the heavy financial penalty placed on anyone who chooses to spend any serious amount of time care giving.

I suspect that the reason that more women are choosing not having larger families is because they are what was referred to as the “Economic Woman” a species that came into existence as a product of the 1970’s feminist movement. The Economic Woman sees her time as being worth money – $150 and hour or more as a professional, $50 or more in some business, $15 an hour as a teacher, $5-$8 as a day care worker and zero as a mother. Its is a hard pill to swallow year after year.

I am a currently stay at home mom of two. Prior to being a mom I worked for a decade in international development at the UN and was regarded as a savvy, worldly, professional, with a paycheck and experiences to be envied. Nowadays, even the teachers at my daughter’s private elementary school, who work for me (because the annual tuition I pay pays their salary), and who have significantly less education and in some cases work experience than I do, have a hard time taking me seriously when I demand that they account for the service that I buy from them. The bottom-line is that society does not value care-giving and prefers to ignore the fact that it is the heart of the economy.

So the question to be explored might be how much greater a penalty is incurred by a third child. I guarantee you that the cost of food, clothes, education, and extra activities will be peanuts compared to the loss in wages, opportunities and benefits over a life time.

@Denise – re the individual sports thing, this is what bugs me about gym class too. I recall spending time playing kickball and then learning the rules of basketball when no one is going to do these things growing up. They would have been so much better off teaching an aerobics class every day… but that was probably not seen as manly, and there’s a big macho element in gym class. The vast majority of people are not going to do team sports as adults, and if they are, they will do them like once a week, maybe twice — not enough to meet the guidelines for exercise. Kids need to pick up an individual sport they can do their whole lives.