Families: The Parent Perks

Imagine a world where middle-class families are subsidized while poor ones are pushed off welfare, where employee compensation is based not on production but on reproduction, and where a war is brewing between folks who have children and folks who forgo them. According to Elinor Burkett, author of The Baby Boon, you're already living in it.

Parents don't come off very well in Burkett's book. When they're not whining about how hard it is to be parents, she complains, they're bilking the government by claiming exemptions for child care they use for socializing, demanding preferential treatment on the job, hogging more than their fair share of employee benefits, filing spurious lawsuits for ever more privileges, coming to work late or slipping out early, and belittling the childless colleagues who cover for them. In short, Burkett's parents behave like a bunch of badly brought-up brats. Childless adults, as she represents them, are mature, sensible--and exquisitely patient. Therein lies the chief weakness of this provocative book: a bifurcation of the human race into the selfish and the selfless, the latter being those without children. The dichotomy is so sharp as to undermine Burkett's argument that pervasive pro-family policies in government and industry unfairly profit parents at the expense of the childless.

Which is too bad, since the case she makes does have merit. Burkett argues persuasively--though she won't convince everyone--that childless taxpayers should not be required to subsidize middle-class parents and children through a raft of recently legislated tax breaks, like $500-a-child credits. And, yes, companies that provide an array of family-friendly benefits (from child-care reimbursement to company scholarships) aimed solely at employees with children should revise their offerings to include all workers. It is similarly unjust to provide opportunities for leaves of absence, flextime and telecommuting exclusively on the basis of parental status and on the assumption that the concerns of parents are inherently more deserving than those of the childless. And most intelligent readers will share her revulsion at the knee-jerk family-fawning rhetoric of politicians on the left and the right.

However, while Burkett freely airs complaints from childless workers that they continually log longer hours so their colleagues can attend soccer games and school plays and cites a 1997 study documenting anger over family-centric policies at two companies, she ignores a finding in the same study--by Mary B. Young for the William Olsten Center for Workforce Strategies--that there was in fact no difference in the number of hours worked by parents and nonparents. Similarly, Burkett profiles a well-to-do mother who claims child-care tax credits for a job undertaken for "stimulation" but fails to acknowledge that even in the current economic boom, few dual-salary parents can relinquish half their household income without painful consequences. Suggesting that work is a luxury rather than a necessity is cruel in an era when half of all marriages end in divorce and--according to Burkett's own figures--38% of single-mother families live below the poverty rate.