Family Values, at Any Demographic

Welfare reform has been the subject of much political and social debate. I recently reconsidered the issue under the most personal of circumstances: the birth of my son. As a professor of social welfare and law at UCLA, I am no stranger to family policy issues, but as a mother of a month-old child, I am new to the inner workings of childrearing.

My partner and I, both workaholics, never planned on children; Ronnie just happened. In an unplanned pregnancy, I found myself resistant to the twists and turns of my body’s response. Unlike most of my friends, for whom pregnancy was a goal, I didn’t welcome each new stage, or celebrate each new development. I hated feeling bloated; I resented his foot in my throat and his head in my bowels. I carried on with my life as though I wasn’t pregnant, traveling to Europe in my last month and submitting a funding proposal for my next research project the day my water broke.

And now, my experience of my son’s arrival makes it seem unfair, even immoral, to do anything but care for him. He is the focus of my and my partner’s entire attention, both because he demands it and because his innocence and dependency compels it. I steal the few scattered moments I have during nap time for little more than making a pediatrician’s appointment or renting an automated breast pump.

As a new mother, I am worried about a welfare-to-work policy that unequivocally values work over family. What great nation enforces a policy that bars poor women from rearing their own children? How can we, the privileged few, decide for others less fortunate that their children should be raised by strangers?

Assuming I could afford it, if I were to stop working to raise my child, would I be branded as lazy? Would I be viewed as deviant? Unlikely. I would be just another middle-class woman who decided that raising her child was more important than working. Are financial resources the only thing that distinguish welfare layabouts from stay-at-home moms?

Proponents of welfare reform in particular and of family values in general argue that the problem is not whether welfare parents should work, but rather that unemployment and reliance on government handouts impart the wrong values to their children. Yet politicians quick to exploit the rhetoric of family values have passed legislation that prevents poor families from achieving the autonomy and cohesion they deserve. Paradoxically, this reform deprives poor families of the ability to rear their children within the family structure so loudly praised by posturing policymakers.

Welfare reform, should it be designed to really work, should provide options, not moral judgments. We should allow people to choose how their individual children might fare best, under their or another’s care. For some, professional considerations will demand most of their attention. For others, family demands will override the need to work, and poverty, in many of these cases, will take precedence over worldly success.

Either way, it seems, regardless of who ultimately pays for your or my child’s care, these are the family values we seek. Seen from this perspective, I can’t believe anyone, especially parents, would choose a welfare reform policy that doesn’t work for anyone.