Do Kids Make Women Happier?

This was the title of a segment featured on the TODAY show, which acknowledged that more women are admitting to being unhappy and frustrated because they feel overburdened and overstressed. With or without children, 40 percent of women in the United States are now finding themselves in the breadwinner role. In this economic climate, job security is uncertain. The pressures to fill the coffers and fill multiple roles and juggle multiple tasks are taking their toll on women’s happiness.

What some women thought would bring them happiness—money, the fancy home, and children—fail to deliver. The Today show reported what many studies have shown—that parents report lower levels of happiness than nonparents. The experts featured in this segment confirmed that women’s happiness is not tied directly to having children. It is tied to finding happiness in all aspects of their being. Often that means looking for happiness outside of the confines of the mother role, or asking for help when you need it.

Working Wives, Unemployed Husbands

In the current recession, two things are happening which we need to address politically and individually. One, women are increasingly becoming the breadwinners in their families and two, when the breadwinner loses their job the whole family is at risk of losing their health insurance.

A fascinating and timely article titled Women Breadwinners, Men Unemployed written by Heather Boushey, the Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress examines these current realities and their impact on our lives. Boushey notes:

The reason that more married couples now boast women as the primary breadwinners is because men have experienced greater job losses than women over the course of this recession, losing three-out-of-every-four jobs lost. This puts a real strain on family budgets since women typically earn only 78 cents for every dollar men earn.

What’s equally worrisome is that most families receive health insurance through the employers of their husbands. So when husbands lose their jobs, families are left struggling to find ways to pay for health insurance at the same time they are living on just a third of their prior income.

Worrisome, indeed. Even though my husband and I are married and have been for over twenty years we have a “single + one” health insurance plan through his work that, if he were to lose his job, would be very expensive to replace, even though we are only insuring two relatively healthy people with no life threatening pre-existing conditions.

My income as a writer would not come close to covering this cost. Which is why I’m tempted to contact my representatives in government during their summer break and encourage them to move fast to make sure we pass some kind of health care reform bill.

Families of all incomes and sizes need to be protected, recession-proofed, so that even more people do not become uninsured.

Flickr Photo by keltickelton (cc)