The Globe and Mail headline was this: “The ‘motherhood penalty’: An accountant (and mother) explains the hidden costs of parenting.” I read the article, and the study upon which the article was based. Both these exercises led me to consider new titles. One was “What is wrong with you people?” 

There’s too much “motherhood penalty” work out there, and not enough “family-free penalty” research. The reader will immediately understand there is in fact no parallel pithy term to counter “the motherhood penalty.” We don’t host International Women’s Day events to discuss the losses of the childless. We don’t affix a family lens to our academic theoretical frameworks – or our tax policies here in Canada. We have a cultural fixation on gender-based analysis and women as individuals outside family, as if women become mothers because we write letters to a stork. 

Living family life as an individual does create problems. As our rearview mirrors warn us, those problems are closer than they appear. Furthermore, to live unhindered by dependents, outside family, as men or women, is to also experience a penalty – financial, social and spiritual even if universities and/or think tanks have not firmly quantified it quite yet. 

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Unquantified though it may be, I’d argue we are already experiencing the outcomes of living family-free. We do study social isolation and increasing loneliness, often referred to as an epidemic. Our inverted population pyramid, heavy on older people, light on young people, has become the subject of heated discussions, now that some claim we may be hitting the point of no return. 

This low fertility has many causes. One of them has to be an incessant academic and media focus on motherhood penalties. Another is lower marriage rates and delayed marriage. Having children is intended to happen with social support, first from the father, who is more likely to stick around if he is married to the mother, and then from an expanding network: a village of the family’s choosing. 

Instead, we often face motherhood and family life nearly alone. Consider the study behind the Globe article. The sample is of women exclusively in Quebec. Of 32 interviews, only ten of the mothers are married. The rest are living common law (19), separated or divorced (2) or engaged (1). 

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Quebec is the province in Canada and indeed the place in the world with the highest rates of cohabitation. And living common-law is routinely associated in research with lower rates of sharing finances. When we know this, we can begin to understand the quotes from some of the women interviewed. Poignantly, they describe negotiations over who pays for what. Consider these quotes: “…[W]ho has to pay for pregnancy vitamins? Sometimes we’d talk about it, the conclusion was one of us, then we’d talk about it again and it’d be the other. For the second pregnancy it was settled, it was half and half.” Or this one: “These days I go with organic food… but I’m going to buy that with my money because I know that we have to tighten our belts but I want to test [different food] for my daughter, so I’m willing to pay for the difference.” 

The study claims to examine how women “understand, explain, and enact their financial situation and decisions after becoming mothers.” It finds, “Becoming a mother thus represents a rupture in women’s financial narrative, a triggering point requiring mothers to assess their new circumstances and revise their financial mindset.” But what the study truly examines is what happens when we attempt the impossible: becoming parents but remaining isolated individuals who do not view the other partner as a full member of a new family, a small kind of kingdom, over which a mother and a father lovingly reign.  

None of this is to diminish that there are sacrifices mothers make that fathers do not have to. Some of these are financial. (I’d also love to launch research on the sacrifices of fathers.) But without a commensurate body of research showing the motherhood benefit, the family benefits, the losses in happiness that comes from living child-free, our public commentary will continue to be one-sided, and becoming a mother will remain an unattractive proposition. Changing this means not only changing what we study, but our approach to family life and an embrace of dependency as a normal thing, and one that brings various benefits.  

Andrea Mrozek is Senior Fellow at Cardus Family. 

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