Dear John,
Tomorrow, we celebrate Mother’s Day—a day commemorating the mothers in our lives, and the essential labor they do. This is a big day for the greeting card, flower, and candy industries.
But the mothers in this country need more than flowers—they need affordable access to childcare, paid family and medical leave, and for their care labor to be not just appreciated, but compensated and counted.
This week, a coalition of 81 advocacy, service, children’s, and anti-poverty organizations wrote a letter urging Senate leaders to introduce legislation that would expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC). If passed, the expanded CTC would “help lift half a million children out of poverty by 2025 and provide critical relief to women and families who are struggling to make ends meet,” and benefit 16 million children in low-income families in the first year alone—including “one in three Black and Latino children and three in ten American Indian/Alaska Native children.”
Economic relief efforts like the CTC and guaranteed income programs have a proven track record of helping low-income families and the mothers who are (disproportionately) responsible for keeping their households running in the face of economic insecurity.
“I had to work a lot of overtime before I started receiving [guaranteed income]. Now I get to spend more time with my kids,” writes Lentrice, a 25-year-old mother in Jackson, Mississippi who receives guaranteed income as a part of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, in our Front and Center series. “In this moment, I’m just finding so much joy in my kids. They make me so happy. I wake up and see them and remind me of why I keep pushing.”
It’s not just the lack of federal policies to support care infrastructure that’s the problem. To date, only 13 states and the District of Columbia have passed paid family and medical leave policies. Far more lack even basic policies and protections when it comes to family care, according to a recent analysis from the Century Foundation. States like Alabama, West Virginia, Florida, Wyoming and Idaho lack a statewide paid sick day policy or paid family medical leave policy.
“The persistence of historical and present-day oppressions are embedded in the lack of commonsense public policies on care and the working conditions for care workers today,” write researchers from the Century Foundation.
And as Danielle Campoamor writes in Ms. this week, there’s a certain hypocrisy in celebrating Mother’s Day in a post-Roe America, where conservative lawmakers have made it clear that they couldn't care less about the wellbeing of mothers—particularly those who are young, or low-income, or Black or brown.
“In a country that has the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world, abhorrently overpriced and scarce access to childcare, a growing maternal mental health crisis, and no mandatory paid maternity leave, it’s clear that society does not ‘adore’ mothers,” Campoamor writes. “It punishes them.”
A box of chocolates is always nice. But this Mother’s Day, I think substantial investments in care infrastructure and maternal healthcare would be a far better gift.
Wishing equality for mothers everywhere,
