Brittany in Raleigh on How Covid Made Women Reconsider Choices

BUCK: Brittany in Raleigh, North Carolina, fired up about equal pay for women stuff. What’s up, Brittany?

CALLER: I’ve been listening to you, you know, play one of those typical VP Harris clips, and I get a little frustrated when people want to talk about the equal pay and especially with covid, how we keep hearing this line about how covid was actually really bad for women because we all left the workforce to come home and take care of our kids and so the fix is child care, and I actually think what covid did is it reminded parents that they want to take care of their own kids. Sorry. I’m doing laundry. Running up and down the stairs.

So parents need to be taking care of their own kids, and we got to do that during covid, and then with everything we saw that our kids were seeing and hearing and experiencing while we’re busy working, we just had, you know, I don’t think I want to outsource that anymore.

CLAY: Brittany, how many kids do you have?

BUCK: I have four.

CLAY: What ages are they?

CALLER: And — 3 to 11.

CLAY: Oh, my God. So you’re in the weeds. I’ll tell you this — and, Brittany, and I’ll bet you agree — so when we had our third kid, my wife was able to stay home and didn’t have to continue to work. She was a guidance counselor at school. She quit working a little bit before that third kid and was able to stay home with our two youngest. And I’ll tell you this. Our life got a billion percent better.

And I do think, Brittany, there is some of that. A lot of parents out there recognized, okay, we’re a dual income family, but what are we spending on child care, what are we losing by not being with the kids in ourselves and I think a lot of women recognize that maybe trying to reach for that brass ring didn’t make sense when you might feel more fulfilled and happy being home with your kids, especially when they’re young, before they get into that, you know, kindergarten-school age. Do you hear other women talking about that, Brittany?

CALLER: I do. And actually just had this conversation a couple weeks ago with there were four of us in the conversation who all had a different number of children, and we all work, or don’t work, a different amount, you know, intensity of jobs, from very full time to one is a stay at home homeschooling mom. And we all agreed. But actually what we would like, what our families would like, what our husbands and I would like say tax code that doesn’t burden us so dramatically as middle-class families that both parents have to be working.

CLAY: Yes.

CALLER: You know, we would like inflation to be under control so that we can pay the bills and we do have money for the kids to do some activities, you know, for us to take a vacation once a year and not have to require that both parents work for that. And that gets so lost in so much of the national conversation that just think, let’s just provide more day care, more the childcare, more day care, free preschool, let’s separate kids from their parents more and that’ll fix it. And that’s not actually what families want. Families want to be together, and I think a lot of families are frustrated that they don’t even have the opportunity to have a conversation in their home about whether or not they like to be a single income family because it’s less and less attainable.

CLAY: Thank you for the call. We were spending so much on child care that my wife was basically making her income and then it was going back out the door for child care, Buck. And, you know, it turns out that people who are older than you, some of them have some pretty good ideas. And the idea of having — and, by the way, can be a woman who’s working, man could stay home, whatever the situation might be — but having one parent who is able to focus a hundred percent on the kids and another parent who is working outside of the home or working full time is actually — our life got a billion percent better when my wife was able to quit working and stay home with our kids and I was still working.

I know that that can be financially struggle for many people but, like, we did the math on it back in the day when my kids were super young, and we were spending just as much on child care as my wife was making as a guidance counselor at a public high school. And I just — I think there are a lot of people — I think Brittany’s call is right, Buck. There are a lot of people who question many of their life choices during this covid mess and have made significant life adjustments.

BUCK: Yeah, one of the only up sides of it, I think, was that there was so much more time spent in the home for a lot of people together, and we do get very used to this commute, rush to the cubicle, get home as fast as you can after maybe you put in those overtime hours lifestyle. It doesn’t actually have to be that way. Remote work I think will help in a lot of ways too.

CLAY: For many people.

BUCK: Some people don’t mind it. I hate commuting. I think commuting is like being stuck in a penal colony. where I have to —

CLAY: So inefficient.

BUCK: — all day, absolutely hate it. So, you know, for some folks they like to listen to I don’t know, a fantastic radio show when they commute; so that’s fine. But people should have flexibility in how they schedule their days. And there’s something really brilliant that Jordan Peterson often hits on — I’ll paraphrase him. You guys all know Jordan Peterson. We had him on a little while ago: Your life is not pushing as hard as you can to get to that vacation on the beach with that delicious margarita. That’s a break in your life. Your life is how do your children greet you when you come home from work? How does your wife greet you or your husband greet you when you leave in the morning? Whether to go get groceries or to go to your job or whatever the case may be, how do you sleep at night? How do you get along with the people you spend your time with?

And so I think covid made a lot of people think about that, you know, struggling and putting it all into hitting VP by the time you’re 40, some people fine, but a lot of people realize there’s other stuff out there.