Moms feeling majority of impact on parenting amid the pandemic: RPT

Misty Heggeness, U.S. Census Bureau Principal Economist, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the impacts of the pandemic on parents.

Video transcript

- Millions of parents, mostly mothers, have left their jobs because of the childcare crisis brought on by the pandemic. But for many more who have held on to their jobs, child care demands have also affected their careers, often in less visible ways. Here to talk about it is Misty Heggeness, principal economist at the US Census Bureau. Misty, thanks for being with us and for shining a light on this important subject. Outline for us ways in which parents' careers were impacted or perhaps stalled because of the pandemic.

MISTY HEGGENESS: Sure. First, thank you for having me. You know, I think there's a lot of ways in which the pandemic has been extremely disruptive in our lives. And for parents, particularly parents who work, one of the biggest struggles has been trying to balance formal paid labor with domestic unpaid labor that we do in our house with our families every day.

And so I think, you know, in-- in some ways, kind of trying to balance school closures and virtual school not only had an impact on mothers in particular leaving the labor market. It also had an impact on the mothers who stayed working in terms of reducing their hours worked, reducing the percent of mothers working full time. And in particular, it also had an impact on mothers in lower-earning wage brackets.

- So Misty, I'm curious to know with just with so many moms essentially seeing their careers fall behind or some mothers just having to leave the workforce altogether, what kind of drain are you predicting? Or as you're looking out ahead, do you see this having on the labor market going forward?

MISTY HEGGENESS: Yeah, so listen. I mean, I think, you know, we-- I think in the media and then we just in general as humans kind of fall back on this fallacy of mothers as being primarily, you know, responsible for domestic tasks in the household and then working if they have the time or the luxury because they have the resources to pay for childcare. But actually, you know, we don't live in the 1950s anymore. And so mothers are breadwinners. And I think that that is something that we need to keep in mind when we are thinking about the pandemic and its impact.

So you know, not all moms have a choice to quit paid labor if they need to provide additional assistance to their children and other people in their household. And so what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of strain. We're seeing a lot of strain on working mothers who need to keep their jobs in order-- because their income also contributes to essential components of living for their family like a roof over their head, food on the table, clothing for their family.

And so you know, I think we need to get over this idea that mothers kind of can come and go out of the labor market as they please. For a lot of mothers, that's not an option. And actually, if you look at the data, you know, there hasn't been a huge shift in moms leaving in droves the labor force. There was a big hit when the pandemic first happened. But they have recovered. And so I think we need to be thinking about this a little bit differently.

- So let me see if I'm hearing you right. Are you saying a lot of the-- the women who left the workforce, particularly mothers here, have actually returned to-- to the workforce at this point?

MISTY HEGGENESS: Right. So if you look at the data-- so there's been a lot of recovery. And actually, if you look at parents, both mothers and fathers, they are doing better in the recovery than adults without dependent children. And so they're making a comeback faster and quicker.

And you know, I think part of that reason is because they have a different set of choices. So if you have dependent children at home, you're not only assessing the health risk of going out in the community and working and exposing yourself to a potentially deadly virus. You're also assessing the risk of not working and not having an income to put food on the table.

And so you know, I think that parents have been having to make kind of different choices around working and maintaining jobs. And you know, the data bears that out. So if you look at the data based on parents of school-age children compared to adults without dependent children, you can see that the recovery has been quicker for parents.

- But, still, as you just laid out, difficult choices for those parents to have to make and in many cases sort of the lesser of two evils. Misty Heggeness, principal economist at the US Census Bureau. Thanks for being with us today.