Jane Galt is worried about the economics of childcare and she gives a good account of the hard choices women often feel they must face about bearing and rearing children:

Should we stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women. … We want to be successful as much as our husbands do. Taking five or eight or ten years off to get the kids started off right before they go to school is going to mean irreperably harming our prospects for advancement. We want very badly to convince ourselves that day care is really just as good, better even—or at the very least, that it is sufficiently not-worse that it’s justified. … And if I am a professional woman, my child is going to be spending ten or more hours a day with [a child-care provider]—more hours than they are with me. … And that’s assuming some hypothetical ideal of day care. Then there’s the actual day care we get, which pays people between $12-20K a year to babysit a large number of children.

Jane’s initial question—“Should we stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women”—effectively concedes the case as lost from the get-go. It frames the problem as wholly belonging to the prospective mother. Dad has no responsibility towards his potential offspring, is not required to make any work/family tradeoffs, and indeed has so much autonomy that a woman who chooses kids over career is “taking a huge financial bet on her husband’s fidelity.”

Jane’s dilemma is real, but its reality isn’t a necessary fact about the world. Rather, it’s a product of how the institutions of work and family are organized. As she herself says in passing, “society is not set up to allow women to take a break. Jobs aren’t made to accommodate it. And neither is marriage.” She’s right. But instead of framing the question in the terms society hands to you (this is entirely a problem for individual women which necessitates a tradeoff whose costs are borne solely by individual women), we can ask how these institutions might be reconstructed.

Two useful places to begin are Nancy Folbre’s The Invisible Heart and Joan Williams’ Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It. If you’re interested in fresh and practical perspectives on work/family conflicts, I’d recommend both these books, especially Williams’. (Here’s a Q&A with Williams.)

Folbre is very good on the general state of affairs that allows corporations to free-ride on (and profit from) the informal production of care within the household. (This is the much-neglected “invisible heart” of the title.) Williams focuses on the same set of choices that Jane discusses, showing how they are not the unavoidable, individual tradeoffs for women that they may appear. As Williams shows, the problem does not lie with women who want to have it all (and who subsequently can’t decide what to do), but with the “Ideal Worker Norm” built into the structure of professional careers. This is the gendered conception of the good employee, the role that companies want their employees to play. It’s institutionalized in their formal and informal expectations about how workers should behave on the job, in systems of reward and promotion, and in the benefits the state provides to workers and employers. It presupposes, at bottom, that the employee has someone at home to take care of him. It’s what needs to get reconstructed if there’s going to be any real progress on child care in the United States. In the long term, stop-gap solutions of the sort mentioned by Mark Kleiman just continue to let organizations in the formal economy off the hook.

Now, framing the issue this way will not make the problem Jane faces disappear. An individual woman deciding whether to have a child still faces the decisions she describes. But your basic orientation to the problem really does matter. The social world is not natural, which means there’s a sociology and a politics of child care as well as an economics. The institutions that structure people’s career paths may have deep roots, but that’s not because they spring naturally out of the earth. Cross-national comparison shows both that there’s considerable variation in the institutionalization of child care, and that this variation can have odd origins. For example, a very nice paper by Kimberly Morgan shows how working parents in France, Sweden and Germany presently live, for good or bad, with the residue of 19th-centrury conflicts between church and state over children’s education. These institutions aren’t immutable, either. In fact, in the U.S. they’ve changed a great deal since the early 1980s, often in response to surprisingly small shifts in law or policy.

Looking at the problem this way makes one less likely to fatalism about tragic choices, wanting to have it all, and the inevitable clash of work and family. It allows you, as Williams does, to propose some practical social policies—often as simple as changing the tax incentives offered to corporations—designed to shift the balance in favor of families. It won’t solve the problem overnight, but it does offer a more powerful analysis of it. It also has the virtue—as C. Wright Mills put it forty years ago—of letting us “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society,” rather than forever being stuck at the level of individual women facing insoluble work-family tradeoffs.