I suspect you're wrong MrChompChomp. I suspect there are two reasons that the state encourages people to have children.

Not because it's good for the econonmy but because it makes money for someone if a person consumes.

Also because it's part of our Christian heritage starting with the birth of Jesus to celebrate motherhood.

While raising our children IS more omportant than ANY job we ever had, it is also our responsiblity to make damn certain that we can provide for them prior to conception!

We also have a twisted sense of entitlement when it comes to raising children. Business owners and their employees should NOT be left with the burden of having extra workloads because someone decided that they wanted to have a kid and did not give one thought of the fellow co-worker who now must pick up the slack. In my opinion, once you make the decision to start a family, you must weigh the likelihood that your job is in jeapardy if you decide to take extended time off. I say this simply because most women more often than not end up taking that six weeks after the birth, then quit their jobs once the entitlement of paid leave is up!

Is this fair to the employer?

Is this fair to her fellow employees?

Now the employer must seek a replacement, train them, and spend the time and monies that should and could have been invested in other hard working employees.

Another little tidbit to chew on is that what percentage of these women are unmarried?

Actually, paid maternal leave is not an entitlement in the US. All that anyone (parent or not) is entitled to is 12 weeks of unpaid family leave (which can be used by any worker to take care of a family member- a child, a spouse, a parent, a sibling...). During this time, the worker can be transferred to another job within the same company, so long as there is not a reduction in pay (there might be something about title, but I'm not sure). This is all provided that the employee has been working there for at least a year. Employers are not required to pay workers (though some do, and others allow vacation time to be used), and if workers aren't being paid, they usually have to make COBRA payments to keep their health insurance.

When I left my last job to return to school full-time, the seven weeks of vacation/personal time that I had accumulated were paid out with my last check. The job I held previously that had accumulated personal time did the same thing. I've been led to believe that neither of these two places did this out of the goodness of their hearts, but that because they were required to by law.

So of what benefit is it for women (or men) to quit like that? Sometimes people's priorities change, but if women in your company are doing so on purpose, they're being awfully silly. Either that, or there was some hyperbole in that last comment.

Parents choose to be parents. It's not like there was a vote and the burden of reproduction was placed on you. Stop acting so high and mighty. Your decision to have kids and take up resources does not make you better or more valuable than me, it just makes you potentially more harmful. For this reason I don't see why you should get more or better anything than me, let alone should I get the short end of the stick in favor of you.

Adrastia,

Most of your annoyance seems directed at what, relatively speaking, is a fairly small potatoes benefit for parents. You write a lot about the "tax advantages" of having children.

The actual tax advantage to having kids is relatively small. The child tax credit is only about $1,000.00 per child. While this is better than nothing, it's certainly not exactly an enormous windfall for my opinion, and not worthy of the sense of injustice you seem to feel toward it.

Of course, parents can also get an additional dependant deduction for each child they have...but this isn't a policy limited to children. Heads of households can also get credit for non-child dependants such as caring for elderly relatives, disabled individuals, etc. So, if you were going to attack the depenacy deduction you are talking about a bigger issue than just kids. I'm personally of the belief that is morally right and makes economic sense for the state to give some credit to those who care for those the state would otherwise be forced to care for.

The tax benefits for parents that you talk about really seem a minor issue to me when compared to the much more massive outlays for children in the area of public assistance payments and medicare coverage spent on children. This spending far outpaces the funds "paid" to middle class families in the form of a flat child tax credit.

I feel that the fundamental flaw behind a lot of the arguments opposing family friendly policies at the work place is that the focus seems to be on who has the "moral high ground." This is just missing the point in my opinion. The focus for policy makers should be on what is in the best interest of the nation in the long term. Europe is way ahead of the U.S. on this issue it seems. Those countries have already recognized that they have to provide actual incentives and accomidations for middle class woman having children in order to ensure the long term prosperity of their nations.

This is yet another area that the American middle class is being squeezed in my opinion (in addition to stagnant wages and rising prices of health care, housing, and fuel of all kinds). The upper class doesn't face hard economic choices about whether or not they can afford to have children and if they can afford to to have one parent stay home to care for them. On the other end of the economic spectrum, state benefits actually pay enough to provide an economic incentives that it encourages poorer parents to have children and stay home to raise them. The middle class is in a relatively worse position than it has been in years in my opinion. It is becomming increasingly difficult for a middle class family to get by on a single income even if they wanted to, so there is not as much of a choice to have a parent stay home and raise the children. At work, meanwhile, there seems to be a movement that treats parents like they are wanting "special" rights if they need time off for any child-related purposes. It echos the mantra radical right-wingers used to decry equal rights for minorities for a long time.

This is even a bigger issue as, over time, the tendancy is going to be for the middle class children to become the middle class adults who keep the whole system going through their productivity. I hate to sound so cynical, but it seems increasingly like the wealthy gerenate more wealth more from collecting dividends than actually producing anything...and in any case their proportion of the population is relatively small. On the bottom end of the demographic spectrum, I'm not saying that you won't have poor children that beat the odds and make good...but the odds are against them in our society...the reality is that they increasingky will be at a comparative disadvantage in a global economy. So you're left with, as I see it, the future economic engine of our ecomony, the middle class, as being generated by the current middle class...and this middle class is not getting a great deal of incentive or help from either the government or business to generate a new generation of workers.

By the way, I don't intend to sound like I'm an advocate of some sort of economic caste system in the U.S. I'm not laying out what I WANT, just what I think is increasingly the reality in America, where upward economic mobility is much less likely than it has been since the 1930s. I've also become a bit jaded by spending a few years as an attorney in child support and human services work. At this point I would gladly, as a tax payer, be willing to pay for a mother on public assistance to stay home with her child if I could just get a promise that she would make that child a priority and make sure they got a good education and become working, law-abiding citizen as an adult. It would flat-out be a bargin because it would be cheaper than all the state has to spend on the jail time and public benefits paid out when the above things don't happen.

All I would ask in return is that the law be changed so public benefits could be forever denied to the mothers who abuse drugs and alcohol chronically while they are pregnant and they keep having children who are have severe mental and physical problems (and usually have to be wards of the state for life). It's one thing that there is no penalty, jail-wise, for this deliberate act. The fact that the state is actually paying the mothers public assistance the whole time is galling to me because I know the money was used to buy the very drugs and alcohol that crippled the children. I wouldn't even have the law apply to first time offenders. The cases I have had recently where it was a third and sixth time it had happened just left me feeling especially frustrated.

Compared to what the government will spend to pay for the decisions of those two women in the cases above, the revenue lost, per capita, due to the existance of the uniform child tax credit is a negligible amount and any indignation over it is much ado about nothing. If anything, I think the U.S. government would be wise to drastically rachet-up the tax and other incentives for middle class families thinking about children. I would predict a net gain to the country over time, as occured with all the money spent after World War II on the G.I. bill...another targeted benefit that a lot of people didn't get, but everyone paid for because we thought it was a good idea and the right thing to do as a society...

Cary Bishop

cbishop wrote: Most of your annoyance seems directed at what, relatively speaking, is a fairly small potatoes benefit for parents. You write a lot about the "tax advantages" of having children.

Sure, it's not a lot for one family but add up every family and the US and it's a lot of money.

It's also the principle. It's paying people to reproduce.

And if you had read the other posts carefully you would note I said it bothers me when people feel entitled because having children is considered doing society's sacred work.

And I also pay school taxes, library taxes and other taxes for infrastructure I don't use all that much or not at all.

I find it very ironic that all you people who are talking about having children=good to society. I won't go into all the points that others have made about it being a choice that you made, etc. etc..

However, if you do any research at all, you will know that the world as a whole is going to be unsustainable if our population numbers keep growing. Simply put, everyone who has children in a way is actually putting more stress on "society" as a whole. Now if the entire world adopted China's one family one child policy, that would change, but unfortunately that is rarely the case.

As it is, there are really not enough resources for everyone to live comfortably as it is, so some live in luxury, some live in "average" levels, and the majority of the rest of the world lives in poverty or below, and the "developing countries" will never be able to catch up with the "modern countries" simply because they use too many resources.

I don't have the statistics on the top of my head, but I think we would need like 3 to 5 more "Earths" to support the average level of resources that people in the US and abstract that to everyone on the planet, and of course it's only getting worse. So all you parents out there who are talking about "good for society", you're not helping and don't kid yourselves that you are, all you are contributing to is your own desire to have children and a legacy. I might feel more neutral towards this if the point of this story wasn't true, but it is, benefits are skewed towards those who choose to have children, which it shouldn't be. I also might feel more inclined if I believed that people were actually PARENTING their kids, but too many, WAY too many are just allowed to do whatever they want, get whatever they want, and are inflicted on anyone at anytime, just because their parents don't want to discipline their kids.

You can't even go to a nice upscale restaurant these days without a few kids wailing at the top of their lungs, with their parents never trying to quiet them down. When I was a kid if that happened, my parents would take me out of the restaurant, or if necessary go home if I was being a pain. Parents DO NOT have the right to inflict their kids on others just because they didn't want to pay for a babysitter, or are fine with ignoring their kids while they run roughshod over everyone else.

Come talk to me when you finally get your kids under control, until then you have no right to bitch about people complaining.

Excuse me I thought I already paid 20-30% of my State and Local Taxes to educate your children, and also endured restrictions on TV programing etc, and paid higher taxes to pay for your child tax deductions. Society already takes up a big chunk of the burden of raising children off the parents as they should. However, shared burdens of this type are the Government's duty alone, and any company that gives more to employees with children is discriminating.

Talk about discipline to the grandfather I know of who has been charged with child abuse for giving his grandson one single swat on the bottom for flooding the bathroom intentionally just to see what would happen. Talk about keeping a child under control for the mother who yelled for her screaming child to be quiet in a department store and was arrested for it. Let society give me the right to discipline my child, and I will. I'm tired of being afraid to use reasonable discipline in a society that is so scared that I will "scar them for life" by giving boundaries that I feel like I'm walking the line between child abuse and child neglect every day.

Want to readdress cbishop.

The focus for policy makers should be on what is in the best interest of the nation in the long term. Europe is way ahead of the U.S. on this issue it seems. Those countries have already recognized that they have to provide actual incentives and accomidations for middle class woman having children in order to ensure the long term prosperity of their nations.

Cbishop, you are aware I hope, that most of Europe is declining in population. Your statement is debatable and too complex to argue here. In Italy they are asking people to have more children because the average family has only one. So what's in the best interest of the country? Over population is a real problem; perhaps not in the US but in the world. We're always going to have debate about whether reproduction is a God-given mandate or something that should require some self-control or even some governmental control.

I feel that the fundamental flaw behind a lot of the arguments opposing family friendly policies at the work place is that the focus seems to be on who has the "moral high ground."

I think you're wrong here. The issue is not moral high ground but a feeling of entitlement. That feeling may stem from some thinking they have the moral high ground but that's not the issue here. The fact is we are raised to believe having children is a miracle, a sacred charge, akin to Mary bearing Jesus. But frankly, people breed like cockroaches (apologies to those who cannot have children) and while the beginning of life is awesome it's hardly a sacred charge. I wish all people would act more like raising their children is a sacred charge instead of just having them.

I don't think I have the moral high ground. I just made a choice. As they say, it takes all kinds of people to make up the world; those who have 18 children and those who have none. One choice is not more sacred than the other, simply different.

I would gladly, as a tax payer, be willing to pay for a mother on public assistance to stay home with her child if I could just get a promise that she would make that child a priority and make sure they got a good education and become working, law-abiding citizen as an adult.

Good Lord, couldn't agree more. But here's what I see as the issue with that desire (and it's getting far off the topic). Most conservatives will die before they see an American woman get paid to stay home regardless of the long term outcome. They will focus on the ones that take the money and whose children end up getting paid to raise their children.

However, most don't seem to bat an eye that nearly ten billion per month is being spent in Iraq with virtually no guarantee of a decent return on investment. They take it on faith that it's making us safer but wouldn't give the same benefit to a social program.

Anyway, my issue as always is the idea that some choices are more right than others. Prove my choice was bad. I think I made the right choice for me. I doubt my choice will collapse society.

Adrasteia:

At the risk of overstating the case, it is absurd beyond parody that you should have an issue with government providing incentives for the continuation of the species.

Declining populations-- the bane of most modern Western democracies-- are a prescription for economic, social and geopolitical decline.

Without at least a replacement level of repopulation, the centuries-long trend of increasing wealth in the US will reverse itself and all of our lives will be diminished.

Just look at France. Yikes.

Raising the generation that will create and sustain a future economy, society and government that will enable us to thrive as senior citizens is ridiculously important, and ridiculously expensive in both parental time and money.

Thus, in purely economic terms, people *like me* who don't have kids are "free-riders"-- and the extent of our free-riding is only marginally mitigated by the taxes we pay to support the upbringing of the next generation.

Complaining that society should force government to stick it to parents even more than society already does is just silly, and smacks of the blind sense of entitlement that plagues my generation and, from what I can tell, those that have followed.

Frankly, the ONLY rational argument against these kinds of incentives is that they are ineffective-- in that they have no bearing on whether couples are willing to bear children-- and so society as a whole would benefit more from allocating government's resources in other ways (or just reducing our taxes).

We are, after all, genetically hard-wired to reproduce and raise our off-spring. The psychic and emotional benefits of creating a family are hardly trivial, so maybe economic incentives just don't enter the equation, and we're wasting our tax dollars, right?

The problem is, decades of European population decline shows us that, for whatever social or economic reasons, these genetic impulses may not be sufficient to convince enough people to take on the profound responsibility and self-sacrifices required to raise children.

Given the fundamental importance of creating and educating the next generation, in the absence of dispositive proof that incentives and benefits do not result in higher birth rates, it's enlightened self-interest to support these kinds of policies.

-- IdjitBoy

Your names say it all. There's no point in discussing with you since you've made up your mind. But I do detect some elements of jingoism.

France! Yikes! Yes they sure have managed to survive a lot. Don't count they out yet.

Declining population is as inevitable as global warming. When it starts to decline as quickly as the earth is warming we may have a problem. However, the US is not in any danger yet.

Christ, you obviously didn't read any of my posts. Next time, read before you post.

Adrasteia:

I'd like to reiterate that I hear many coworkers moan about money going to welfare programs but they become belligerent if you mention their child tax credits.

BIG difference between welfare and child tax credits! Welfare is a means of supporting people who can't support themselves (or won't, and I've known plenty of people who fit both categories so I'm not going to start that argument here). Tax credits are financial compensation to parents for the work they do raising children to make them participating members of society as well as for the obligatory loss of the children's services TO the family mandated by government decree (see my earlier post about children's familial contributions vs imperative education). There is a big, big, GIGANTIC difference between something that is given out of altruism vs something that is given in compensation for a sacrifice.

But then, I'm a liberal. I only whine about welfare benefits when it's clear that people are abusing them--the "won'ts" (I am all for welfare given to the "can'ts" because, as I said before, I'm a liberal).

Man, I'm with you there tryglyph.