The Motherhood Gamble

In conservative circles, the “tradwife” is back in fashion, and not just on TikTok. A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal reads: “When I became a mom, I had to let my partner be the breadwinner.” The author, with earnings in the six figures,  recounts her decision to become a full-time mom, acknowledging it as a luxury. She doesn’t dwell on what might happen if her marriage comes to an end, perhaps because this would seem disloyal, or perhaps because she is confident of her own economic resources. 

Few mothers are in such a strong position, and many seem to feel that it’s somehow taboo to consider the economic risks they face. Yet what researchers refer to as “relationship dissolution” is especially costly for mothers and their children. Mothers are likely to become custodial parents, an expensive proposition, especially if a fathers’ contributions of time and money significantly decline.  

Mainstream economists have never expressed much interest in the distribution of the costs of raising children. They are happy to assume that people simply do what makes them happy, and that is that. Back in 1988, Victor Fuchs wrote a book entitled Women’s Quest for Economic Equality arguing that women were held back largely because they enjoy children more than men do. 

Likewise, Nobel prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin emphasizes that many women have preferences that lead them to choose jobs that pay less, and  most employers prefer workers who can commit to long hours on the job without interruption.

Both economists take preferences as a given, without asking how they are shaped by social institutions, or how they might change. However, cultural norms of femininity and masculinity vary considerably across space and time and are partly responsive to economic pressures. When it becomes apparent to women that they are paying a disproportionate share of the costs and risks of raising children, their preferences for motherhood may weaken.   

Most of us in the United States would prefer to live in a country in which commitments to family and community are not economically penalized. This is not the country we live in. 

Mothers, on average, earn significantly less than fathers over their lifetime, a finding that has been labeled the “motherhood penalty.” In the United States in 2024, full-time employed mothers earned about 74 cents for every dollar full-time working fathers made. 

Many women who become mothers are counting on the fathers of their children to share enough of their earnings to make up for their lost earnings. The probability that fathers will actually come through represents the “motherhood gamble,” and the odds are much better for some mothers than for others. 

Black and Hispanic women are at a disadvantage, not only because their partners tend to earn less, but also because they are less likely be married and have a lower probability of receiving child support from a noncustodial parent than divorced moms do. 

Unmarried mothers account for about 40% of births in the United States today, and about 21% of children under 18 live with a solo mother. In 2020–2022, only 23% of women  living in female-headed families with one or more of their own children under age 18 reported receiving any child support from a noncustodial parent. 

Some of these mothers may be cohabiting with men who are not biological fathers but still help out to some extent with childcare and expenses, but we lack reliable data on how much they contribute. 

Marriage itself is no guarantee of support. Spouses are required by law to cover one another’s basic living costs, but not to share their earnings. For women who are married, the economic consequences of divorce don’t matter much by race or ethnicity—women experience drops in family income that average between 46% and 50%, nearly double the drops experienced by men. By age nine, more than 20% of children born to married parents will experience a parental split. 

White custodial parents are more likely than others to have a child support agreement/order in place (57% relative to 40% for Blacks) and they also receive higher levels of support. (I could not find estimates for other racial/ethnic groups, or for gay/lesbian couples). Legal disagreements over custody and child support can be very costly, putting women without economic resources of their own at a serious disadvantage. 

The personal involvement of nonresident parents is very uneven. A report based on data from 2017 found that 34% had not seen their children even once in the preceding year, and 38% had seen them at least once a week (the rest were somewhere in between).  

Economists often argue that gender specialization is “efficient”: If one parent takes primary responsibility for childcare, the other can earn more money by concentrating on wage employment. As economist Claudia Goldin notes, the “labor market incentivizes” women to specialize in care provision because men earn more. 

But “efficiency” can’t be defined simply as maximizing household income in the short run. In the long run, extreme specialization in family care hurts mothers and children by increasing their economic vulnerability. And mothers who are just “a husband away from poverty” may find it risky to disagree with their breadwinners.

Fathers, too, are harmed when a focus on earning money limits their opportunities to develop relationships with their children deep enough to survive the challenges of living apart. Many dads today say they want to be more involved with their own children than their dads were with them.  Like many mothers, they recognize that some definitions of “efficiency” are too risky to gamble on. 

Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research explores the interface between political economy and feminist theory.