Why Millions of Girls Are Doing Unpaid Care Work This Summer

With summer in full swing, kids across the country are enjoying dawn to dusk free time, heading to myriad summer camps or enrichment programs, and traveling to far flung family vacations. But girls like Maya (all names in this piece are pseudonyms to protect the identities of research subjects), who we met during our research, don’t have that chance. They spend summers stuck at home, filling in for mothers who must work long hours.

Recently, there’s been public outrage as child labor has broken through into the headlines. Over the past two years alone, Republicans in 10 states have passed or introduced bills to relax regulations on child labor to address post-covid worker shortages. But the hazards of kids and teens working in a meat packing facility may just be easier to imagine. Family care work, demanding and endless, happens inside the home, behind closed doors. It is done mostly by girls who step into grown up shoes while parents do whatever they can to buy shelter and food. And like other kinds of child labor, this one comes at great cost.

As researchers of low-income women, motherhood, and labor, we have been conducting sociological research over the last decade, including hundreds of interviews and dozens of focus groups across the country, to look at the impact of low-wage jobs on families. More than half of the women we interviewed were single mothers and all of them were earning wages that were low enough to qualify for some type of public assistance.

We heard many stories like Maya’s where girls were taking on roles traditionally filled by mothers; though far less common, we also heard about boys stepping up. This is not surprising. As seen in a 2019 report by International Labour Organization, women do 75% of unpaid care work. Reflecting these statistics, the women we talked to shouldered most of the burden of the care work in their families. Inevitably, mothers also described this responsibility passing onto girls when they have to be away at work.

According to the Bureau for Economic Analysis, unpaid household labor “isn’t traded in the marketplace” so it is not counted or valued. And in many cases, it may be hidden by families struggling to make ends meet. As feminist critics have long recognized, this rendering of “women’s work” as invisible has been harmful to the economic progress of women. We found that the harm starts in girlhood and the root of this kind of child labor is parents’ low wages.

Maya, for instance, now in her 30s, grew up outside of Hartford, CT in a working class suburb, plagued by low wages and failing schools. She spent her free time working and taking care of her siblings. “I had to, like, ‘step up,’” she explained, and that meant stepping away from camp or extracurriculars or any summer vacation.

In high school, Maya was a straight A-student, member of debate, technology and human relations clubs. “I was like, really, really involved,” she said. But she also shouldered immense family responsibility, caring for her five younger brothers and helping to earn money as soon as she was able to work. Her parents struggled with illness, addiction, and countless unstable jobs, so Maya became the central caregiver in her family.

Women make up two thirds of 22.2 million workers in the 40 lowest-paying jobs and many of them are mothers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics define low-wages as earnings that would bring a family of three to 125% of the federal poverty guideline. For a single mom with two kids, for instance, that is $31,075 for this family.  

While a “regular” middle-class childhood within these families is a luxury, this concept isn’t exactly new. Girls have long been relied on to help mothers with domestic and family care work. But in the late 1990s, a major shift in public assistance policy dramatically reduced poor mothers’ time at home with their children. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, known as Welfare Reform Act, forced poor single mothers who had been at home caring for children to move into paid employment, leaving their daughters to fill in for them. Instead of laboring in the fields or behind a cash register, they've been cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, comforting toddlers, and helping with homework ever since.

Today, through hundreds of interviews with moms, more than half of whom were single, we uncovered a world of parents filled with juggling jobs in fast food restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, and nursing homes. With no access to free childcare in the U.S., kids are often left in the hands of another child. Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, refers to the “forever clock” dictating the lives of these low-income families, pulled between day and night-time shifts and constant needs at home. As a result, children shoulder heavy adult responsibilities.

Read More: The Secret Tax on Women’s Time

Millions of working mothers must leave kids alone each day to earn the lowest of wages, often piecing together multiple part-time jobs. Just over 72% of unmarried mothers in the U.S. are employed outside the home. The minimum wage, unchanged in 14 years, is $7.25 an hour. With 60% of these workers still without paid sick days, even small kids who are sick may be left in another child’s care on any given day.

That’s how we met Bella in Portland, OR. She grew up in Oregon and said the town where her family lived had been losing jobs for decades. Her parents juggled seasonal farm work with local service jobs and would jump on any better-paid offer. But that often meant leaving the kids behind and leaving Bella to take over at home, sometimes for weeks. Going unmonitored meant she started skipping school, ultimately dropping out. Bella said that she and her siblings knew “to not talk about” being home alone. She now thinks other kids in her rural community “were in the same boat.”

It is a secret low-income children learn early on. The state doesn’t come knocking on your door to offer help to your parents who are working essential, but poverty paid jobs. The state comes in the form of Child Protective Services to file a report on your parents if they cannot perform according to a middle-class income standard. 

Black women, Latinas, and American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN) women experience the highest rates of poverty in the U.S. with Latinx women making up 27.1% and Black women 22.3% of women living in poverty. These families are also more likely to come into contact with the child welfare system and experience negative outcomes, like having their children taken away. That’s why, many moms told us, they keep this kind of child labor hidden.

During the pandemic the demand for service labor grew. We heard from many mothers who referred to themselves as “frontline” workers in grocery stores, nursing homes, and warehouses. They couldn’t go virtual or pay tutors for home schooling. They admitted that that they often turned to daughters to care for smaller children. “Because of the ways families are forced to rely on these kids, they have to take on roles they should not have to take on. They are missing out on the freedom of childhood,” said Quart in an interview over the phone earlier this month.

All of the moms we interviewed wanted their children to go to college and build a career, and yet enrichment opportunities seemed out of reach amidst the struggle for economic stability. Working up close for affluent families, these moms saw all that their own kids were missing out on. The parents we talked to were painfully keen observers of this duality. A nanny we met in Connecticut, Serena, told us she cared for the children of a wealthy family. From her close-up vantage, Serena saw how “They would have somebody to come in and tutor the kids…or they also have, you know, elite trainers for sports.” While her children had family members to help, Serena saw how inequality starts early. “I wish I had that for my own kids.”

Serena said that her childhood summers were spent waiting in the car or around the corner while her mother cleaned houses in a wealthy suburb. Now she is watching the impact of poverty wages play out in her own children’s lives. It was a common dread among hundreds of mothers we met. Despite all they do to lift their children’s dreams, they see their daughters funneled into the lowest paid labor markets, taught early on to clean, serve, comfort and care for their own families and then the families of the affluent.

For many, it’s easy to assume weekends, holidays, and summers are a time off for kids. Though costly for most family budgets, we assume that in the U.S. kids get time to be kids. We don’t see the 12-year-old girls minding babies and toddlers all day while their moms stock grocery shelves, care for elders, or assemble Amazon packages.

If we are outraged about the exploitation of children in the labor market, let’s also take a hard look at the child labor that goes on inside the home when parents are forced to rely on their kids because powerful corporate and political forces continue to impoverish workers and their families.

Take a moment to think about the future plans of your daughters, friends, and extended family. Maybe they want to pursue marine biology like a mom we met in Portland or become a women’s studies professor like a mom we met in Boston. What if the opportunities available to your daughter were the same as those of your nanny or housecleaner? What action would you take to change this?

Valuing children, and particularly valuing girls’ lives, demands national investment in childcare, equal education and opportunities for enrichment for all children, and setting living wages that match up with the true costs of raising a family in America today. Then the daughters of Maya, Bella, and Serena (and millions more) will have a summertime and the chance to be little girls.