Tuesday, July 14, 2009

"Nonworking parents"?

I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting this letter published in The New York Times. But as The Daily Show* would say, who needs the old media? I have a blog!

Therefore:

To the editor:
A phrase in the July 5 article “Safety Net Is Fraying for the Very Poor” made me scratch my head. “Nonworking families with children”? As a parent of two small children, I know that no parent is nonworking. I think the phrase the reporter was looking for was “nonearning parents.”

This isn’t just semantics. Accepting that parenting is a socially valuable job that the market fails to remunerate implies providing social benefits to parents, such as paid family leave and what you might call parental wages—welfare without the stigma, without the punitive restrictions and narrow time limits, and with benefits robust enough to actually remove becoming a parent from the list of leading causes of poverty spells. This would mean a repudiation of welfare reform’s insistence on “pushing single mothers into jobs” (as if they didn’t by definition already have them), a policy whose shortcomings your article highlighted.

* Ridiculing newspaper reporters for...using land lines? Excuse me, but just where does Jon Stewart get the loads of good information that go into his monologues? The New York Times and other sources of "aged news." Criticize The New York Times for its failures of journalism, like boosting the case for the Iraq War (which the Daily Show did, briefly), but not for using land lines. (How many times has your cell phone dropped a call--do you want to be the reporter getting the big scoop from a whispering source and having to say, "Can you repeat that louder? What was that? You're breaking up"? Let's hear if for land lines.) This segment was juvenile, unfunny, and plain old mean.

No comments: