The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.
For all of the professional gains women have made over the past several decades, one stubborn measure of inequality—the gender wage gap—has been especially difficult to stamp out. And it’s a disparity that can be traced in large part to parenthood. In nearly every country on Earth, the arrival of children tends to coincide with a lasting drop in employment and earnings for moms but not dads.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot in common.
Carolyn Vigil has spent most of her career in Big Tech. She is also the primary caregiver for her 23-year-old autistic son, Jax. Managing these two roles has never been easy, and at various times over the years, Vigil has had to step back from her job for the sake of her kid. It is somewhat remarkable that when schools shut down during the pandemic and Vigil became not only her son’s carer but also his teacher, she didn’t quit her job.
Many American schools are failing to provide all students with a quality education, and policy makers don’t seem to know what to do about it. Even before schools closed during the pandemic, 30 percent of graduating seniors failed to reach a basic level of competency in reading, and 40 percent failed to do so in math, according to national data. Performance gaps across race and socioeconomic status in both subjects have persisted to some degree for decades.
A little over a decade ago, Lori and David Sims were on the brink of a divorce. Lori had one son from a previous relationship, David had four, and although blending the two families went swimmingly at first, “everything went to crap” in year two, Lori told me. She felt that David was too lenient with his kids, but they wouldn’t listen to her and seemed to deeply resent her involvement in their lives.
My dad didn’t believe my mom when she announced that she was leaving him. Desperate, after years spent begging him to accept treatment for a worsening mental illness, she threatened to move out if he didn’t comply with his doctor’s recommendations. “Where will you go?” he asked.A former stay-at-home parent of five grown children, all just beginning their careers around the country, my mom had no money of her own and no job.
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When my father’s heart stopped, I had no choice but to keep moving. He had lived alone, and I understood that managing the logistics of his death—planning his funeral, settling his debts, divvying up his belongings—would be an enormous task. Those looming practical matters infuriated me; I hated that my world-shattering news had not, in fact, shattered the world. It kept spinning along, so I did too.
Last year was a blur for Miranda Turner, but she remembers the day her kids’ school shut down like it was yesterday. On a Friday in March 2020, Arlington Public Schools, in Virginia, announced that it would close the following Monday because of the newly circulating coronavirus, sending working parents like Turner scrambling to figure out what to do with their kids.
In 1920, following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, the lawyer and feminist Crystal Eastman turned her attention to the future. The new goal of the feminist movement, she argued, should be to ensure that women are free to pursue careers outside of child-rearing—but also to guarantee that if women chose to focus on parenting, their labors would be “recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward.