The crux of the problem, as Mooney describes it, is that inflation has steadily risen—the amount of family income devoted to housing, child care, health insurance, and taxes has gone from 53 to 75 percent in the last 20 years—but wages, for the most part, have not kept pace. So while the middle class of our parents' generation could comfortably achieve the American dream of raising a family and owning a house, today's middle class often finds it must choose between raising a family and owning a house—and still relies on credit cards and gargantuan mortgages to help pay for one or the other. Put simply, if 40 is the new 30, then credit is the new savings.
As it turns out, Mooney makes clear that our throwback notion of marriage as salvation is only an illusion. In this new middle class, nobody is exempt from financial strain. People living on their own, childless couples, single parents, and families—above all, families—are failing to keep afloat financially. "Married couples with children have more than three times the debt level as those without," she reports, "and nine times the debt level of all childless adults."
In making her argument, Mooney also depicts a modern reality too often overlooked by those who criticize mothers who work full-time: By and large, families across a broad spectrum of classes now rely on two incomes to afford family life. As much as Leslie Bennetts's recent book, The Feminist Mistake, set forth a useful message—mothers should keep their jobs as insurance, if nothing else, against being left financially bereft after a divorce—it sidestepped this crucial dilemma. "Opting out was never an option for the working poor," Mooney declares, "and is increasingly not viable for the educated professional middle class either."
We are also a generation of late bloomers: We're marrying older, having children later, growing slowly into our fiscally responsible adulthoods. This, too, has cost us, in money as well as opportunities. Several women in Mooney's book decide that the debt their families accumulated in order to have one child inhibits them from thinking about a second. ("You cannot obsess about whether or not you can afford a second kid," a friend recently advised me. "I can tell you right now: You can't. You just have to do it and then figure it out.") A 34-year-old television producer reveals to the author that she and her husband took out a home-equity loan to pay for the in vitro fertilization she needed to get pregnant. And some are opting out altogether: Twenty percent of American women are not becoming mothers at all, a figure we haven't seen since the Depression.
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