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Vox
6 days ago
- Health
- Vox
What beauty companies are selling to kids
is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here It's not an exaggeration to say that Jessica DeFino transformed my relationship with skincare. After reading her newsletter, The Review of Beauty, I started questioning the purported 'anti-aging' benefits of the products I was putting on my face and asked myself what it meant to buy into a philosophy of 'anti-aging' in the first place. DeFino has probably saved me thousands of dollars on skincare. I am, however, aging. The newest target audience for beauty advertising is decades younger than me: the teens, tweens, and even younger kids flocking to brands like Evereden. And despite some movement toward body positivity since I was a teenager, it feels like young people are growing up in a world with more exacting beauty standards than ever, from viral challenges that pressure them to work on their bodies all the time to ultra-normalized plastic surgery to weird ideas about guys' eyelashes. To be young today is to be bombarded with a dizzying variety of messages about your own beauty or ugliness, coming from some of the world's biggest companies as well as from influencers who are ostensibly your peers. To help me unpack all this, I reached out to DeFino, who got her start as an editor on the Kardashian-Jenner beauty apps, then became disillusioned with the beauty industry and evolved into one of its most incisive and influential critics. In a conversation that has been condensed and edited, she and I talked about MAGA beauty, the potential harms of slathering your skin with retinol at age 8, and why helping young people push back against our disordered beauty culture has to start with examining our own anxieties. Kids' interest in skincare is often portrayed as fun or harmless, DeFino told me. But beauty 'is a multibillion-dollar industry that is built on insecurity, whose physical products and procedures often have very serious physical consequences, whose messaging has very serious psychological consequences,' she said. 'We must take it seriously.' How common is it for kids to be using skincare products that once would have been marketed to adults? And how big of a business is skincare for young people? It's a huge business right now. US households with 6- to 12-year-olds spent 27 percent more on skincare in 2023 versus the year before. Beauty spending among teens increased 23 percent year over year. I don't have this year's statistics in front of me, but I would say it's a very powerful growth sector for the industry. More brands that were formerly targeted toward adults are expanding to target teens and tweens. And at the same time, we have a lot more beauty brands entering the market that are specifically meant for infants, babies, tweens, teenagers. A year or two ago, Dior launched the Dior baby lines, which included skincare and perfume for babies. I swipe through TikTok or Instagram, and I will see mothers putting sheet masks on their 1-year-old babies, 2-year-old toddlers. There's this really interesting trend that started a while ago on TikTok, where moms will hand their babies different beauty products and see if they know intuitively what to do with them. It is fascinating to see these 1-, 2-, 3-year-olds know exactly what to do with the blush brush or a serum or eyebrow pencil. Why has this been happening? Why are we seeing these expansions into younger markets? First of all, I think the collapse of age-appropriate spaces and age-appropriate media has been a huge factor. Just speaking from personal experience, growing up, there were a lot of teen- and tween-focused magazines. There were TV channels where the shows and the commercials were geared towards a specific age group. As media collapses and everything moves online and more into social media, we're all hanging out in the same spaces. It's very easy for a child to get adult content on their 'For You' page. And it's very easy for adults to be fed this teen and tween content to get outraged about. How many stories were there about the Sephora tweens? Which really only fed the trend. There's also basic everyday capitalism: The market always needs to expand. In the past couple of years, especially, we've seen it expand not only to children, but to women who are 70 and 80, who are getting these full-body makeover routines. We're seeing more and more young boys and men becoming interested in cosmetic interventions as well. This is not only a phenomenon for young girls. The market is really saturating every demographic right now. Filters on social media are created with cultural beauty standards in mind. Young girls might not necessarily be conscious of the fact that, like, I want to look younger, so I'm going to be using retinol or anti-aging creams. But they might be saying, I want to look just like that filter, and that filter is created with standards that prioritize looking very smooth, no lines, no wrinkles, no pores. I think the AI beauty standard and the standard of anti-aging actually share a lot of surface-level qualities. What are the medical or physical implications of using a lot of skincare, especially with active ingredients like retinoids, if you're super young? There are a ton of potential physical consequences the more beauty products you are putting on your face, and that goes for all ages, but especially for younger people whose skin is still developing and can be more vulnerable to potential issues. This new study from Northwestern Medicine looked at the skincare routines of children and teens on TikTok, specifically ages 7 to 18, and how those might damage their skin long term. There's an average of 11 potentially irritating active ingredients in the skincare routines in these videos, and some potential consequences of that are making the skin more sensitive to sunlight, which of course increases your risk of skin cancer over time; allergies; and dermatitis, which is an inflammatory condition. Any inflammation that can arise from that can also trigger psoriasis, rosacea, eczema, acne. Anything that you put on your skin affects the environment of bacteria that actually is there to keep the skin safe and healthy and functioning. Interfering with the skin barrier and the microbiome by layering on product after product after product can — for anyone of any age — make you dry or oily or dehydrated or sensitized. But particularly in the case of babies, there have been studies linking the overuse of soaps and scented products to developing eczema that carries on throughout a child's whole life. What about the psychological and emotional aspects being initiated into this skincare industrial complex from a young age? The most basic place to start is just to look at the data that we have for how beauty standards affect everyone who is subject to them. We have really strong data that shows that the pressure to adhere to a particular appearance ideal increases instances of appearance-related anxiety, depression, facial dysmorphia, body dysmorphia, disordered eating, obsessive product use and overuse, self-harm, and even suicide. Personally, I think the risks are even higher when you are indoctrinated into beauty culture at younger ages. The psyche is still as vulnerable as the skin is at that point. The younger you internalize a lesson like, I must look XYZ way in order to be beautiful, the harder it is to challenge that later in life. I also think a lot of it reinforces gender essentialism and these ideas of traditional femininity and traditional masculinity that have other sorts of consequences beyond one's own psychological health. These reinforce the conditions of a very oppressive society that believes women should act one way and look one way, and if you don't, you're not good, or you're not a woman, or you're not living up to your biological destiny. Since you brought up gender roles, I'm sure you've seen the discourse around MAGA beauty and conservative 'chic.' I'm curious if you think some of these politicized beauty standards are trickling down to young people. I do, and I don't actually think that's out of the ordinary. What we're seeing in, for example, Evie, which is sort of a right-leaning women's magazine, these are the lessons that are embedded in all sorts of mainstream beauty culture, whether a brand is coded as conservative or liberal. It's hitting in a different way now that conservatives are saying this out in the open, but these conservative messages are sort of the hidden messages in almost all beauty content that suggests you should look different than the way you currently look in order to be beautiful or healthy or happy or worthy. If outrage about Sephora tweens just feeds into more marketing, what is a good social response to some of the trends that we're seeing? When we see our adult behaviors mirrored back to us by children, we can see some of the absurdity of it, and we can see some of the danger of it. I don't think the correct or useful response is to be like, Okay, we've got to stop young girls from doing this. We have to look at ourselves. We have to look at the adult beauty culture that we have created and we're participating in and we're perpetuating. And if we don't think that is something for a young girl to see or to participate in, we have to be part of the project of dismantling that, not just for young girls, but for all women.
Vox
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
Can kids still have lazy summers?
is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox's newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. As a millennial, I had my fair share of '90s summers. I rode my bike, I read, I spent a lot of time doing nothing. My friends from home like to tell the story of the time they came by my house unannounced and I was staring at a wall (I was thinking). Now, as a parent myself, I've been highly invested in the discourse over whether it's possible for kids to have a ''90s summer' in 2025. This year, some parents are opting for fewer camps and activities in favor of more good old-fashioned hanging around, an approach also described as 'wild summer' or 'kid-rotting.' On the one hand, sounds nice! I liked my summers as a kid, and I'd love to give my kids more unstructured playtime to help them build their independence and self-reliance (and save me money and time signing up for summer camp). On the other hand, what exactly are they going to do with that unstructured time? Like a majority of parents today, I work full time, and although my job has some flexibility, I can't always be available to supervise potion-making, monster-hunting, or any of my kids' other cute but messy leisure activities. Nor can I just leave them to fend for themselves: Norms have changed to make sending kids outside to play til the streetlights come on more difficult than it used to be, though those changes started before the '90s. The rise of smartphones and tablets has also transformed downtime forever; as Kathryn Jezer-Morton asks at The Cut, 'Is it really possible to have a '90s summer when YouTube Shorts exist?' After talking to experts and kids about phones and free time, I can tell you that the short answer to this question is no. But the long answer is more complicated, and a bit more reassuring. Yes, kids today reach for their devices a lot. But especially as they get older, they do know how to put them down. And hearing from them about their lives made me rethink what my '90s summers really looked like, and what I want for my kids. Kids' free time is different now Parents aren't imagining the differences between the '90s and today, Brinleigh Murphy-Reuter, program administrator at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital, told me. For one thing, kids just have less downtime than they used to — they're involved in more activities outside of school, as parents try to prepare them for an increasingly competitive college application process. They're also more heavily supervised than in decades past, thanks to concerns about child kidnapping and other safety issues that began to ramp up in the '80s and continues today. Free time also looks different. 'If you go back to the '80s or early '90s, the most prized artifact kids owned was a bicycle,' Ruslan Slutsky, an education professor at the University of Toledo who studies play, told me. Today, 'the bike has been replaced by a cell phone.' Related Let kids play The average kid gets a phone at the age of 10, Murphy-Reuter said. Tablet use starts even earlier, with more than half of kids getting their own device by age 4. If kids are at home and not involved in some kind of structured activity, chances are 'they're on some kind of digital device,' Slutsky said. It's not as though all millennials had idyllic, screen-free summers — some of my best July memories involve Rocko's Modern Life, for example. But kids' screen time is qualitatively different now. According to a Common Sense Media report published in 2025, 35 percent of viewing for kids up to the age of 8 was full-length streaming TV shows, while 32 percent was on platforms like YouTube. Sixteen percent were short-form videos like TikToks, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. Only 6 percent of kids' viewing was live TV, which honestly seems high (I am not sure my children have ever seen a live TV broadcast). It's not completely clear that YouTube is worse for kids than old-fashioned TV, but it can certainly feel worse. As Jezer-Morton puts it, 'kid rotting in the '90s was Nintendo and MTV; today's version is slop-engineered for maximum in-app time spent.' It is undeniably true that in the '90s, you'd sometimes run out of stuff to watch and be forced to go outside or call a friend. Streaming means that for my kids' generation, there is always more TV. And the ubiquity of phones in both kids' and adults' lives has made enforcing screen time limits more difficult. 'It's tough to take away something that they have become so dependent on,' Slutsky said. Older kids can be remarkably savvy about their screen time That's the bad news. The good news is that a lot of what kids do on their devices isn't actually watching YouTube — it's gaming. Kids in the Common Sense survey spent 60 percent of their screen time playing games, and just 26 percent watching TV or video apps. Gaming can actually have a lot of benefits for kids, experts say. 'Video games can support relationship building and resiliency' and 'can help to develop complex, critical thinking skills,' Murphy-Reuter said. Some research has found that educational media is actually more helpful to kids if it's interactive, making an iPad better than a TV under certain circumstances, according to psychologist Jacqueline Nesi. 'Just because it's on a screen doesn't mean it's not still fulfilling the same goals that unstructured play used to fulfill,' Murphy-Reuter told me. 'It just might be fulfilling it in a way that is new.' Meanwhile, kids — especially older teens — are actually capable of putting down their phones. Akshaya, 18, one of the hosts of the podcast Behind the Screens, told me she'd been spending her summer meeting up with friends and playing pickleball. 'I spend a lot of my days hanging out outside,' she said. Her cohost Tanisha, also 18 and a graduating senior, said she and her friends had been 'trying to spend as much IRL time as we can while we're still together this summer.' She, Tanisha, and their other cohost Joanne, also 18, have been enjoying unstructured summers for years — though they had internships last summer, none of them has been to camp since elementary school. Joanne does worry that the ubiquity of short videos on her phone has affected her attention span. 'I feel like it's easy to just kind of zone out, or stop paying attention when someone's talking,' she said. At the same time, she and her cohosts have all taken steps to reduce their own device use. Tanisha deleted Instagram during college application season. Akshaya put downtime restrictions on her phone after noticing how often she was on it. 'In my free time, if I ever feel like I'm doomscrolling, like I've been on social media for too long, I usually try to set a specific time when I'll get off my phone,' she said. Overall, 47 percent of kids have used tools or apps to manage their own phone use, Murphy-Reuter told me. The sense I got from talking to Tanisha, Joanne, and Akshaya — and that I've gotten in interviews with teenagers and experts over the last year — is that teens can be quite sophisticated about phones. They know, just as we do, that the devices can make you feel gross and steal your day, and they take steps to mitigate those effects, without getting rid of the devices entirely. Kids 'really are very much in this digital space,' Murphy-Reuter said. And many of them are adept at navigating that space — sometimes more adept than adults who entered it later in life. All that said, Tanisha, Joanne, and Akshaya are 18 years old, and talking to them made me realize that 'wild summer,' at least of the unsupervised variety, may just be easier to accomplish for older kids. I can't quite imagine letting my 7-year-old 'rot' this summer. Yes, he'd want to watch way too much Gravity Falls, but he'd also just want to talk to me and play with me — normal kid stuff that's not very compatible with adults getting work done. It's certainly possible that kids were more self-reliant — more able to occupy themselves with pretend play or outdoor shenanigans for long stretches of time — before they had devices. But I'm not sure how much more. While writing this story, I realized that the lazy, biking, wall-staring summers of my youth all took place in high school. Before that, I went to camp. What I'm reading The Trump administration is declining to release almost $7 billion in federal funding for after-school and summer programs, jeopardizing support for 1.4 million kids, most of them low-income, around the country. An American teen writes about why Dutch kids are some of the happiest in the world: It might be because they have a lot of freedom. A new study of podcast listening among low-income families found that the medium fostered creative play and conversations among kids and family members, which are good for child development. Sometimes my older kid likes to go back to picture books. Recently we've been reading I Want to Be Spaghetti! It's an extremely cute story about a package of ramen who learns self-confidence. From my inbox A quick programming note: I will be out on vacation for the next two weeks, so you won't be hearing from me next week. You will get a summery edition of this newsletter on Thursday, July 17, so stay tuned. And if there's anything you'd especially like me to cover when I get back, drop me a line at
Vox
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Vox
MAGA's plan for moms comes at a cost
is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here The MAGA movement has a particular vision of the ideal American family. For starters, there are lots of kids. There's a dad who works a manufacturing job to provide for them financially. And, according to many influential figures on the right, there's a stay-at-home mom who holds it all together. Prominent Republicans from Vice President JD Vance to Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri have floated policies aimed not just at boosting birth rates, a key conservative goal in recent years, but also encouraging parents to stay home with kids, as Caroline Kitchener reported at the New York Times earlier this year. Those advocating these policies typically don't specify which parent should stay home. But Hawley, Vance, and other Republicans have been vocal about the importance of male breadwinners and women's childbearing and childrearing responsibilities, and within the larger MAGA project of pronatalism and manufacturing resurgence, it's fairly clear who the stay-at-home spouse is supposed to be. These realities raise a basic question about social conservatives' goals: Would it even be possible to reverse decades-long global trends in women's employment and convince mothers to stay at home? Pronatalist policies generally have not worked well to increase birth rates. Manufacturing jobs probably aren't coming back. But can President Donald Trump's allies find a way to make their goals for moms a reality? After several weeks of speaking with experts, I have good news for Vance et al: There is an answer. You just have to give moms a million dollars. The history of moms at work Stay-at-home motherhood is sometimes portrayed as a natural or original state of humanity, something women began to deviate from around, say, the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. In fact, mothers have moved in and out of various kinds of work over the course of American history. 'People treat the 1950s as the conventional ideal,' said Matt Darling, a senior research associate at the policy research firm MEF Associates who has written on mothers in the labor force. But if you go back to the 1800s, most white women and their husbands worked together on farms. 'The household was an economic unit,' Darling said. As the American economy transitioned from agricultural to industrial, Darling has written, more men went to work in factories and more women focused on child care and other work in the home. Stay-at-home motherhood was never universal — Black women in the US, for example, have always worked in high numbers, with the highest labor force participation rate since record-keeping began in the 1970s, and likely before, Michelle Holder, an economics professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me. But in the mid-20th century, families with a male breadwinner and stay-at-home wife were more common than they are today. In 1950, 29 percent of women — 46.4 percent of single women and 21.6 percent of married women — participated in the labor force. Rather than representing a historical norm, the 1950s were one particular point in time during which a subset of American families found it most efficient for one parent to work outside the home and one to work inside it. That point in time was also fleeting — women's labor force participation climbed steadily from the late 1940s, peaking at 60 percent in 1999 before dropping slightly. In 2024, 57.5 percent of women were in the labor force. During the same time period, men's labor force participation dropped steadily, from 86.4 percent in 1950 to 68 percent today. What would make moms stay home? To reverse these trends and get moms back in the home, Republicans have proposed a few ideas. One is to open up public lands for housing development, with the goal of reducing housing costs. Lower housing prices, some believe, could make it easier for families to live on one income. (It is not clear if opening up public lands would actually reduce housing costs, or how much lowering housing costs would really affect people's decisions around kids and family.) Another plan is to change the tax code. Right now, parents get a tax credit of about $2,000 for each child they have, and an additional credit of up to $6,000 to help defray the expenses of child care. Some Republicans want to reduce the child care credit and add that money to the lump sum parents get per kid, possibly bumping it up to $5,000. Research on increases to the child tax credit has shown a small effect on moms' labor force participation, Darling told me. For example, the temporary expansion of the child tax credit in 2021 led to a reduction in employment among mothers with low levels of education, according to one 2024 study. But for most mothers — even those who might like to stay home — an extra $3,000 per kid isn't enough to counteract the powerful forces that have transformed the American workforce over the last half-century. 'Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed' Some of the most pressing forces are economic. 'Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed to some degree' since the 1950s, Tara Watson, the director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution, told me. Houses have gotten larger and more expensive. There's a greater expectation that kids will go to college, which also costs a lot of money. Extracurriculars like youth sports are pricier and more regimented than they once were. If you wanted to make it easier for families to get by on one income, you'd have to make that income bigger by raising wages, some experts say. 'The federal minimum wage hasn't been raised since 2009,' Holder told me. Raising that would exert upward pressure on low-wage jobs in general, putting more money in parents' pockets. While Republicans have not generally supported minimum wage increases, one advocate of stay-at-home parenthood, Sen. Hawley, is sponsoring a bill that would boost the federal minimum to $15 an hour. But there's a catch. Some believe that the transition to dual-earner families happened not because of rising costs, but because of rising incomes. It sounds counterintuitive, but Darling has laid out the case, citing the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin. Essentially, wages began to rise in the years after WWII, especially in fields like office work that were more open to women than factory labor had been. Rising wages gave moms an increasing incentive to work — if they stayed home, they'd be leaving more and more money on the table. (Some research also posits that women are more likely to work outside the home when their potential earnings outstrip the cost of child care.) As Darling put it to me, 'it might not be worth it for me to take a job when it's $10 an hour, but it might be worth it to me when it's $15.' If more women started working in part because of rising wages, then boosting wages even more might incentivize even more women to work. Instead, the only way to get more women to stay home, some say, would be to pay them to do just that. What's the going rate for giving up your career? It's not unheard of: According to the Times, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) has introduced a bill that would pay stay-at-home parents for providing child care, an approach that's been proposed by some liberals as well. The bill would allow subsidies that currently go to child care providers through the federal Child Care & Development Block Grant to go to family members instead. The idea of compensating family members for providing care isn't new, or unique to Republicans — a number of states, including New Jersey, offer payment for what's known as family, friend, and neighbor care. But subsidy rates tend to be very low, and some family members who receive them say they're not even enough to cover the cost of what children need (like diapers and food), let alone enough to provide someone with a living wage. If you really wanted lots and lots of American moms to leave paid work for stay-at-home care, you'd have to pay them more — a lot more. That's because you're not just replacing their income (which, in 45 percent of cases, pays the majority of bills in the household); you're also working against 75 years of American culture. A hundred years ago, many American women would have been very happy to take money to stay home, said Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King's College London who writes about gender roles across societies. Their society already idealized (white) stay-at-home motherhood and they gained prestige and status from their role as moms. Today, however, 'women see success and status in having a career.' That success has been very real, and goes beyond pure economics. When American women entered the workplace, they achieved greater independence and the ability to leave bad marriages. Many found new social relationships and new sources of meaning and fulfillment. Women gained more power in society, more seats in Congress and on corporate boards, and more rights (though none of this came without struggle or backlash). In a 2023 McKinsey report on women in the workplace, 80 percent of women said they wanted to be promoted, the same share as men. A full 96 percent said their career was important to them. To get women to drop out of the workforce, then, the government would need to give them enough money to overcome the powerful incentives, both financial and social, that drive them to work. 'Maybe if someone offered me a million, I'd stop doing my Substack,' Evans joked. When I asked Goldin, who won the Nobel in 2023 for her work on women's employment, whether policies like baby bonuses or larger child tax credits would convince moms to stay home, she replied, 'Are we giving them a million dollars?' What if even $1 million isn't enough? Obviously neither Evans nor Goldin has studied whether giving moms a check for $1 million would convince them to stay home with their kids. Even in today's inflationary times, that number is basically a shorthand for a lot of money. The point is, if you want mothers to give up all the benefits they get from working, you're going to have to make it really financially attractive. And that's expensive. If there are about 25 million working moms in the US, giving each one a million dollars would cost the US about $25 trillion, an amount that dwarfs even the $2.8 trillion Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' is projected to cost the country over the next 10 years. Costs grow even more if the $1 million is an annual payout rather than a one-time sum. Paying only moms in the labor force without offering the same sum to moms already caring for kids at home also seems unfair — including the around 9 million stay-at-home moms in the US would boost the total even further. 'There's really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy' And that's all before we factor men into the equation. A two-parent home with a stay-at-home mom requires another person to be the sole breadwinner — according to a lot of socially conservative thinkers, that person should be a man, ideally a husband. But that puts a lot of pressure on young men, many of whom aren't even sure they want to get married, let alone bear the sole financial responsibility for a family, Evans pointed out. 'It's not just about giving women a million,' she said. How much would you have to pay men to go back to a 1950s nuclear family model, in which the entire burden of providing for a family rested on their shoulders? Getting a large number of moms to quit their jobs would also have indirect costs. The 25 million mothers working today are treating patients, teaching kids, selling products, and contributing to the country's GDP in innumerable ways. 'There's really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy,' Holder said. Trump and members of his administration have at times hinted that shrinking the American economy is acceptable if it allows the country to return to its manufacturing past. But tariffs purportedly designed to bring manufacturing jobs back home (and, some hope, bring men back to their former position of dominance in families and society) have been so unpopular that the administration has had to walk many of them back. It's hard to imagine that tanking the economy to get moms back in the home would fare much better. There are also surprisingly popular cultural forces — think tradwife influencers — encouraging women to prioritize stay-at-home motherhood, but it's a campaign that's unlikely to succeed at scale, due to cultural fragmentation and the hyperpersonalization of social media. 'It's much, much harder for, say, government to change people's values' than it might have been in the past, Evans said, 'because we're not all watching the same shows.' There are, of course, other options for supporting American families. If policymakers wanted to help moms with the costs and challenges of raising kids, they could institute national paid leave programs, Holder said. They could also make child care more accessible and affordable. In surveys, a significant minority of moms say the best setup for them would actually be to work part-time. If we wanted to make part-time work easier for parents, we could tackle unpredictable part-time schedules that make it hard for workers, especially at the lower end of the wage spectrum, to balance work and child care, Darling said. All this would probably cost less than $25 trillion. But if what Republicans want is to get moms back in the home, they're going to have to pay up. I will take my million in cash.
Vox
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Vox
One simple trick for Republicans who want moms back in the home
is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here The MAGA movement has a particular vision of the ideal American family. For starters, there are lots of kids. There's a dad who works a manufacturing job to provide for them financially. And, according to many influential figures on the right, there's a stay-at-home mom who holds it all together. Prominent Republicans from Vice President JD Vance to Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri have floated policies aimed not just at boosting birth rates, a key conservative goal in recent years, but also encouraging parents to stay home with kids, as Caroline Kitchener reported at the New York Times earlier this year. Those advocating these policies typically don't specify which parent should stay home. But Hawley, Vance, and other Republicans have been vocal about the importance of male breadwinners and women's childbearing and childrearing responsibilities, and within the larger MAGA project of pronatalism and manufacturing resurgence, it's fairly clear who the stay-at-home spouse is supposed to be. These realities raise a basic question about social conservatives' goals: Would it even be possible to reverse decades-long global trends in women's employment and convince mothers to stay at home? Pronatalist policies generally have not worked well to increase birth rates. Manufacturing jobs probably aren't coming back. But can President Donald Trump's allies find a way to make their goals for moms a reality? After several weeks of speaking with experts, I have good news for Vance et al: There is an answer. You just have to give moms a million dollars. The history of moms at work Stay-at-home motherhood is sometimes portrayed as a natural or original state of humanity, something women began to deviate from around, say, the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. In fact, mothers have moved in and out of various kinds of work over the course of American history. 'People treat the 1950s as the conventional ideal,' said Matt Darling, a senior research associate at the policy research firm MEF Associates who has written on mothers in the labor force. But if you go back to the 1800s, most white women and their husbands worked together on farms. 'The household was an economic unit,' Darling said. As the American economy transitioned from agricultural to industrial, Darling has written, more men went to work in factories and more women focused on child care and other work in the home. Stay-at-home motherhood was never universal — Black women in the US, for example, have always worked in high numbers, with the highest labor force participation rate since record-keeping began in the 1970s, and likely before, Michelle Holder, an economics professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me. But in the mid-20th century, families with a male breadwinner and stay-at-home wife were more common than they are today. In 1950, 29 percent of women — 46.4 percent of single women and 21.6 percent of married women — participated in the labor force. Rather than representing a historical norm, the 1950s were one particular point in time during which a subset of American families found it most efficient for one parent to work outside the home and one to work inside it. That point in time was also fleeting — women's labor force participation climbed steadily from the late 1940s, peaking at 60 percent in 1999 before dropping slightly. In 2024, 57.5 percent of women were in the labor force. During the same time period, men's labor force participation dropped steadily, from 86.4 percent in 1950 to 68 percent today. What would make moms stay home? To reverse these trends and get moms back in the home, Republicans have proposed a few ideas. One is to open up public lands for housing development, with the goal of reducing housing costs. Lower housing prices, some believe, could make it easier for families to live on one income. (It is not clear if opening up public lands would actually reduce housing costs, or how much lowering housing costs would really affect people's decisions around kids and family.) Another plan is to change the tax code. Right now, parents get a tax credit of about $2,000 for each child they have, and an additional credit of up to $6,000 to help defray the expenses of child care. Some Republicans want to reduce the child care credit and add that money to the lump sum parents get per kid, possibly bumping it up to $5,000. Research on increases to the child tax credit has shown a small effect on moms' labor force participation, Darling told me. For example, the temporary expansion of the child tax credit in 2021 led to a reduction in employment among mothers with low levels of education, according to one 2024 study. But for most mothers — even those who might like to stay home — an extra $3,000 per kid isn't enough to counteract the powerful forces that have transformed the American workforce over the last half-century. 'Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed' Some of the most pressing forces are economic. 'Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed to some degree' since the 1950s, Tara Watson, the director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution, told me. Houses have gotten larger and more expensive. There's a greater expectation that kids will go to college, which also costs a lot of money. Extracurriculars like youth sports are pricier and more regimented than they once were. If you wanted to make it easier for families to get by on one income, you'd have to make that income bigger by raising wages, some experts say. 'The federal minimum wage hasn't been raised since 2009,' Holder told me. Raising that would exert upward pressure on low-wage jobs in general, putting more money in parents' pockets. While Republicans have not generally supported minimum wage increases, one advocate of stay-at-home parenthood, Sen. Hawley, is sponsoring a bill that would boost the federal minimum to $15 an hour. But there's a catch. Some believe that the transition to dual-earner families happened not because of rising costs, but because of rising incomes. It sounds counterintuitive, but Darling has laid out the case, citing the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin. Essentially, wages began to rise in the years after WWII, especially in fields like office work that were more open to women than factory labor had been. Rising wages gave moms an increasing incentive to work — if they stayed home, they'd be leaving more and more money on the table. (Some research also posits that women are more likely to work outside the home when their potential earnings outstrip the cost of child care.) As Darling put it to me, 'it might not be worth it for me to take a job when it's $10 an hour, but it might be worth it to me when it's $15.' If more women started working in part because of rising wages, then boosting wages even more might incentivize even more women to work. Instead, the only way to get more women to stay home, some say, would be to pay them to do just that. What's the going rate for giving up your career? It's not unheard of: According to the Times, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) has introduced a bill that would pay stay-at-home parents for providing child care, an approach that's been proposed by some liberals as well. The bill would allow subsidies that currently go to child care providers through the federal Child Care & Development Block Grant to go to family members instead. The idea of compensating family members for providing care isn't new, or unique to Republicans — a number of states, including New Jersey, offer payment for what's known as family, friend, and neighbor care. But subsidy rates tend to be very low, and some family members who receive them say they're not even enough to cover the cost of what children need (like diapers and food), let alone enough to provide someone with a living wage. If you really wanted lots and lots of American moms to leave paid work for stay-at-home care, you'd have to pay them more — a lot more. That's because you're not just replacing their income (which, in 45 percent of cases, pays the majority of bills in the household); you're also working against 75 years of American culture. A hundred years ago, many American women would have been very happy to take money to stay home, said Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King's College London who writes about gender roles across societies. Their society already idealized (white) stay-at-home motherhood and they gained prestige and status from their role as moms. Today, however, 'women see success and status in having a career.' That success has been very real, and goes beyond pure economics. When American women entered the workplace, they achieved greater independence and the ability to leave bad marriages. Many found new social relationships and new sources of meaning and fulfillment. Women gained more power in society, more seats in Congress and on corporate boards, and more rights (though none of this came without struggle or backlash). In a 2023 McKinsey report on women in the workplace, 80 percent of women said they wanted to be promoted, the same share as men. A full 96 percent said their career was important to them. To get women to drop out of the workforce, then, the government would need to give them enough money to overcome the powerful incentives, both financial and social, that drive them to work. 'Maybe if someone offered me a million, I'd stop doing my Substack,' Evans joked. When I asked Goldin, who won the Nobel in 2023 for her work on women's employment, whether policies like baby bonuses or larger child tax credits would convince moms to stay home, she replied, 'Are we giving them a million dollars?' What if even $1 million isn't enough? Obviously neither Evans nor Goldin has studied whether giving moms a check for $1 million would convince them to stay home with their kids. Even in today's inflationary times, that number is basically a shorthand for a lot of money. The point is, if you want mothers to give up all the benefits they get from working, you're going to have to make it really financially attractive. And that's expensive. If there are about 25 million working moms in the US, giving each one a million dollars would cost the US about $25 trillion, an amount that dwarfs even the $2.8 trillion Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' is projected to cost the country over the next 10 years. Costs grow even more if the $1 million is an annual payout rather than a one-time sum. Paying only moms in the labor force without offering the same sum to moms already caring for kids at home also seems unfair — including the around 9 million stay-at-home moms in the US would boost the total even further. 'There's really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy' And that's all before we factor men into the equation. A two-parent home with a stay-at-home mom requires another person to be the sole breadwinner — according to a lot of socially conservative thinkers, that person should be a man, ideally a husband. But that puts a lot of pressure on young men, many of whom aren't even sure they want to get married, let alone bear the sole financial responsibility for a family, Evans pointed out. 'It's not just about giving women a million,' she said. How much would you have to pay men to go back to a 1950s nuclear family model, in which the entire burden of providing for a family rested on their shoulders? Getting a large number of moms to quit their jobs would also have indirect costs. The 25 million mothers working today are treating patients, teaching kids, selling products, and contributing to the country's GDP in innumerable ways. 'There's really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy,' Holder said. Trump and members of his administration have at times hinted that shrinking the American economy is acceptable if it allows the country to return to its manufacturing past. But tariffs purportedly designed to bring manufacturing jobs back home (and, some hope, bring men back to their former position of dominance in families and society) have been so unpopular that the administration has had to walk many of them back. It's hard to imagine that tanking the economy to get moms back in the home would fare much better. There are also surprisingly popular cultural forces — think tradwife influencers — encouraging women to prioritize stay-at-home motherhood, but it's a campaign that's unlikely to succeed at scale, due to cultural fragmentation and the hyperpersonalization of social media. 'It's much, much harder for, say, government to change people's values' than it might have been in the past, Evans said, 'because we're not all watching the same shows.' There are, of course, other options for supporting American families. If policymakers wanted to help moms with the costs and challenges of raising kids, they could institute national paid leave programs, Holder said. They could also make child care more accessible and affordable. In surveys, a significant minority of moms say the best setup for them would actually be to work part-time. If we wanted to make part-time work easier for parents, we could tackle unpredictable part-time schedules that make it hard for workers, especially at the lower end of the wage spectrum, to balance work and child care, Darling said. All this would probably cost less than $25 trillion. But if what Republicans want is to get moms back in the home, they're going to have to pay up. I will take my million in cash.
Vox
26-06-2025
- General
- Vox
The hidden pressure messing with teen birthdays
is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox's newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Birthdays are supposed to be fun. You eat cake, you open presents, maybe you have a party. They can also, however, become a source of pressure and anxiety. And for many teens today, birthdays are a time when the public nature of social media and the private joys of friendship awkwardly collide. Teens often post celebratory photos or messages on their Instagram stories for friends' birthdays, Kashika, 19, told me a few weeks ago in a conversation about kids and friendship. Then the birthday kid will reshare those posts to their own account. The number of posts you share 'forms an image of how many friends you might have,' Kashika explained. Kashika, a contributor to the podcast This Teenage Life, remembered seeing classmates share tons of birthday stories, and thinking, 'Oh my God, they're so popular.' Then, on her birthday, not a single person posted a story for her. 'I felt really bad,' she said. The birthday post (or lack thereof) has become a common source of anxiety, according to experts who work with kids. Teens report 'feeling a lot of pressure to post for people's birthdays, to post in a certain way, to post efficiently, effusively,' Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard's Center for Digital Thriving, told me. On the flip side, teenagers worry about having enough people post on their birthdays to 'signal that you have people who really care about you' or to 'show that you have a sufficient number of friends,' Weinstein said. Birthday wishes are one way that teens feel pressure to 'perform closeness' on social media, posting photos and messages of affection publicly 'both as part of being a good friend and as a way of validating their own social acceptance and connectedness,' Weinstein and Carrie James wrote in their 2022 book, Behind Their Screens. Performing closeness isn't new — teens used to decorate one another's lockers for birthdays, Devorah Heitner, author of the book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, told me (we did not do this at my school, and now I feel left out). But social media adds a new layer of labor to kids' already fraught social lives, forcing them to make calculations about how to celebrate their friends online — and how to respond if their friends don't do the same for them. The pressure to post Birthdays on social media offer a whole buffet of new stressors, kids and experts told me. For one thing, posts are easier to quantify than locker decorations. 'You can literally just count the likes or count the reposts,' Heitner said. 'That's very vivid.' Even posting on other people's birthdays can be nerve-wracking, kids say. 'I used to post for every friend that I had,' Divya, 19, told me. But then she realized that other kids were only posting birthday stories for friends who had posted birthday stories for them. 'It felt very weird,' Divya said, because she didn't personally care if someone had posted a birthday message for her or not. There's also pressure to make your birthday post reflect the level of your friendship. 'If someone is your best friend, you have to make it extra special,' Divya, a This Teenage Life contributor, told me. 'You have to just do it for the sake of making your friends feel special on social media.' That pressure to craft the perfect birthday post that communicates the specialness of a friendship is part of a larger pattern, experts say. On the one hand, 'social media offer compelling opportunities to validate relationships and show public support for others,' Weinstein and James write. On the other, 'when so much of posting is an expectation and over-the-top compliments are the norm, being authentic can feel nearly impossible and knowing what's authentic can be like reading tea leaves.' The pressure to perform closeness can be exhausting and annoying, kids say. One 17-year-old, Michelle, told Weinstein and James that she'd recently gotten stressed because she liked a friend's photo but couldn't think of a comment right away. 'I get really nervous about it too, because I have to think of something quick, and it has to be something really good,' she said. Once she'd engaged by liking the post, the clock was suddenly ticking. 'There's definitely expectations to comment on a post.' Especially among younger teen girls, 'there's a feeling that if we are close, people should know we're close,' Weinstein said. If they're not representing their friendship online through likes, comments, and posts, some teens feel 'they're not somehow not doing justice to the relationship.' As Kashika put it, Instagram stories and other social media posts become 'like a declaration in society that this person is my friend.' Pushing back on the pressure Performing closeness is far from unique to teenagers — adults are doing the same thing when they post cute photos and adoring captions on their anniversaries, Heitner said. And getting fewer birthday posts than you'd like, or fewer than other people get, can feel lousy whether you're celebrating your 14th birthday or your fortieth. After all, millennials on Facebook arguably invented birthday posting culture (and stressful birthday comparisons along with it). But for teenagers, whose needs for social approval and inclusion are so high, an underwhelming birthday on Instagram can be especially hard, Heitner said. Luckily, teens are developing some of their own ways of coping with the pressure social media puts on their friendships. Some are just using Instagram less in general, Heitner said. 'It is socially acceptable now to be a kid who's like, 'I don't really like this. I barely check it.'' Others are learning to draw a distinction between performed closeness and the real thing. Kashika felt bad 'for a while' when no one posted on her birthday, she told me. But 'then I thought, no, this is just part of social media,' she said. 'It does not actually depict our real friendship. And then my mood got a little better.' What I'm reading Families are reporting disturbing conditions at Texas immigration detention facilities, including adults fighting with children for clean water, and a lack of medical care for a boy with a blood disorder whose feet became so swollen he couldn't walk. The Trump administration is reinstating some research contracts at the Education Department that were initially terminated by DOGE, including a study on how to help kids with reading difficulties. The idea of giving kids a ''90s summer' may be a fantasy now that YouTube exists. My little kid and I have been revisiting Arnold Lobel's Mouse Soup, which includes stories about a lady who becomes obsessed with a rosebush growing out of her couch, and some rocks who learn the power of perspective. From my inbox When I talk to teens, I like to ask them what adults these days get wrong about young people. What don't we understand? Now I'm posing this to you — whether you're a kid or an adult with kids in your life, what do you think grown-ups are getting wrong? What aspects of kids' lives today need to be demystified or explained? Let me know at
