Social conservatives now assure American women they can still “have it all” if they just do it in sequence, starting with early motherhood and later taking on a job. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Report claims it’s a mistake for women to postpone childbearing to pursue higher education and begin their careers. Heritage spokeswoman Emma Waters advises women: “Use your twenties and early thirties for babies and brainstorming. … Then, in your forties and fifties, accelerate professionally as your children grow older if you want to.”

Yet analysis of recent Census Bureau data suggests one huge problem with following this cheerful advice. More than half of American mothers become the family breadwinner, responsible for more than 60% of household earnings, by the time their first child turns 8. More than 70% of mothers become the chief household breadwinner before their first child reaches 18. The average time a mother spends as the primary wage earner for her family is more than six years. A further 20% of women start motherhood as the family breadwinner. If families planned around the Heritage Foundation’s advice and forwent mothers’ earnings, far more children would grow up in desperate poverty.

The growing phenomenon of moms becoming their children’s primary provider can’t be blamed on more nonmarital births or divorce. Nor is it confined to racial-ethnic minorities or low-income populations. There is no group of mothers — married or not, college educated or not, African American, white, Latino or Asian-origin — whose probability of becoming their family’s breadwinner for at least a year is now less than 50%. Most of the rapid growth in mothers’ breadwinning has come from partnered moms, the vast majority of whom are married.

Even in families in which a mother is not the primary breadwinner, women’s earnings have become increasingly essential to income security during the early years of child-rearing. Yet children’s growing reliance on their mothers’ wages is occurring when the gender wage gap has stagnated at about 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. Mothers without higher education or significant previous job experience are especially disadvantaged as breadwinners — as are their children. “Home health aide” and “cashier” are among the top 10 jobs held by breadwinning mothers, hardly secure jobs that allow women to support families with children, let alone “accelerate professionally” as they get older.

Whether they choose to work or are compelled to work, mothers deserve better workplace protections and social support systems. For that matter, so do fathers. Instead, government has made it even harder for women to control the timing of childbearing, diverted money from child-care support, and opposed restrictions on employers’ arbitrary schedule changes and mandatory overtime. All these things hurt mothers and the children they must financially support, and lower U.S. fertility in the long run.

Children are not a luxury good or a personal indulgence for parents. They are a public good. They are the ones who will fund Social Security for the next generation and fuel new innovations in our economy. Yet we continually privatize the costs of raising our future workers and consumers. No wonder the U.S. has one of the largest gaps between the number of children women say they desire and the smaller number they actually end up bearing.

There’s no easy answer to the dilemmas posed by falling fertility. But government policies encouraging women to give birth early and often and “worry about career later” will most likely be ineffective, while leaving those who do bear children early in life more vulnerable to poverty and distress. The real mystery may not be why American women are having fewer children, given their growing economic responsibility for supporting them; it’s why policymakers continue to pretend mothers are just ancillary workers who can financially depend on the men in their lives, rather than the essential family breadwinners most turn out to be.

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Jennifer Glass is a professor at the Population Research Center of the University of Texas, Austin, a senior researcher at the Council on Contemporary Families and past president of the Population Association of America.

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