Warner – rights of children

I live in the United States which has a very poorly elaborated sense of citizenship for children: they can’t vote, they don’t get access to social security. They really have very limited citizenship rights. When you hit 18 you get a few more, and when you get old, when you get over 65, you get more citizenship rights than you have at any other time in your life—because of our social security system. 

So why do we so under-invest in children? Part of that is part of the ecology of our political system which has defined child as the private responsibility of parents not the public response of society, with the exception of public education. So when you think about these things in the ecological context you figure out that these returns to the child, that children’s petal on the trillium flower is only one piece of the picture. Then there is paying attention to the returns to the parent which is another very important piece. And we discover that women particularly pay a very high price for motherhood. They pay a price in lost earnings, lost career trajectories, and in their retirement benefits [which] are also going to be lower for the rest of their lifespan because of these lost earnings and lower wages and career trajectories that come as a result of their investing in caring and reproducing the next generation.  

Then you have the broader society that when you begin to realize that child care is a social infrastructure for economic development, that’s even giving returns back to the community in the short-term: firms aren’t facing labour shortage, turnover employees goes down, the community has a higher quality of life which attracts new creative industries into your local economy. You realize that when you could add up, if you could just look at the kid piece, which is what economists are totally focused on right now, I’m glad they are but they’re ignoring the ecological context. When you add to it the parent piece, the employer piece, and then the broader societal piece, you’re getting much higher returns than if you just look at the kid piece by itself. And you’re also likely to design more relevant and useful policies.