Lawmakers look for ways to keep moms at home to strengthen families
Task force blames breakdown of traditional family for social ills
Rep. Steven Thayn and his wife, Sherry, raised eight children on their family farm. She stayed home, and they home-schooled several of their children before eventually sending them to local schools.
Thayn said more two-parent homes and fewer working mothers could be both a social and economic boon. The Emmett Republican sees the breakdown of the traditional family structure as the root of societal ills such as drug abuse, crime and domestic violence.
That's why, as chairman of the Idaho House of Representatives' Family Task Force, he and others are considering controversial solutions such as repealing no-fault divorce laws and finding ways to encourage mothers to stay home with their children.
"In one of the articles I read, quite a large percentage of mothers really do want to spend more time at home, and if that's the case, what can we do to help them?" Thayn said.
One such working mother, Mandy Hagler, drops her 5-year-old daughter, Riley, at school every morning before running to an internship or to a class at Boise State University. On weekends, she works in retail to pay for her education and to support her daughter.
Hagler, 26, spoke at a task force meeting in Boise, but doesn't think the task force listened. She thinks Thayn and others on the task force, trying to define what a family should look like, are pegging families like hers as part of the problem.
"I don't see the government's place in defining what the ideal family is," she said.
Families in decline?
The six-member task force was convened this year by Speaker of the House Lawerence Denney and has been meeting with the lofty goal of finding solutions to what they see as the decline of the Idaho family. Controversially, the group is using the typical family of 1950 as its benchmark, though Thayn says it's simply a baseline and not a suggestion that families were perfect in 1950.
"I don't think the family structure was really ideal at that time, either," he said. "I don't think the family ever in the history of the world has reached its potential."
Throughout a task force meeting in late September, speakers offered statistics that single-parent homes — most often headed by a woman — were driving up rates of drug use and crime. Cohabitation, and divorce were having the same effect.
Thayn believes that reducing divorces could save the state $200 million because the crime rate would drop if divorces dropped. He thinks making it more difficult to get divorced would help families avoid what he sees as the pitfalls of non-traditional families.
The task force endorsed a proposal to end no-fault divorce, which allows a couple to divorce without proof of fault.
"Divorce is just terrible," Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries, said. "It's one of Satan's best tools to kill America."
A draft report released to the Idaho Statesman earlier this month makes several recommendations and also advocates adding family-impact statements to proposed legislation.
Several advocates urged the task force to adopt legislation to strengthen day-care regulations and make early childhood education part of public schools, two hot-button issues on which the House and Senate have clashed.
However, the task force report does not recommend tightening regulations for day-cares with fewer than 13 children. It does not mention early childhood education.
Sen. Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, a proponent of early childhood education and stronger day-care regulations, has been at odds with Thayn. Schroeder said stronger day-care regulations, including mandatory background checks for providers, are about keeping children safe from pedophiles and that research shows early childhood education helps children.
"Basically, we have in my opinion, and I stress in my opinion, a group of people who are living in the past," he said.
"Basically, they are people who think women ought to stay home and take care of the kids."
Thayn does not shy from this view, calling pre-kindergarten education a "free babysitting service" and suggesting that early childhood education, day-care and Head Start may hurt families by keeping mothers away from home.
"It seems to be (proponents of such programs) just assume that mothers have to work, and they're not really asking the question, ‘What can we do to help them stay home?' " he said.
Harwood said he knows first-hand the importance of a stay-at-home mom.
"If you have mom home when you get home, that's a big thing," he said.
"I didn't — my mom worked and my dad worked, and I got in a lot of trouble when I came home from school."
Rep. Branden Durst, D-Boise, said the task force is ignoring reality by thinking it can steer women back into the home.
"Clearly, I think that the reality is our economy can't support having single-wage earners in every household," he said.
Durst, the lone Democrat on the task force, bristles at suggestions that children from nontraditional homes face more troubles than those from two-parent households.
Durst is married with a 5-year-old stepson, a 3-year-old son from a previous relationship and a newborn with his wife.
He said he was personally offended by some of the speakers' suggestions.
"What's important is the quality of the family and the people in the family," he said.
Hagler agrees. Instead of focusing on the shortcomings of nontraditional families, the task force should look for ways to help them, through better health care and a living wage, she said.
"Just because you don't have a mother and father in the household doesn't mean the family is doomed," she said.
private matters, public solutions
Some task force members who speak forcefully about limiting the scope of government said they struggled with the very idea of a government task force tackling private issues. However, they agreed family issues affect the state too much for government not to take a role.
"I do believe we need to do some more preventative maintenance to keep our families together, whether that means incentivizing people to stay together or deincentivizing people to break apart," Rep. Marv Hagedorn, R-Meridian, said.
Some people question how much influence the task force will have.
Jasper LiCalzi, chairman of the department of political economy at The College of Idaho, said government talking about family legislation in a state like Idaho can be tricky.
"We have this libertarian strain in this state that government should stay out of personal business," he said.
"Well, family's about as personal as it gets."
A repeal of no-fault divorce would mostly be a boon for trial lawyers, whose business would increase as divorces became more complicated, LiCalzi said. He also said the proposal stands almost no chance of prevailing.
"We've been away from it for too long to go back," he said.
Schroeder agreed that no-fault divorce isn't going anywhere, but acknowledged that Thayn and like-minded legislators in the House are likely to again stymie Schroeder's push for day-care and early education legislation.
"That doesn't mean we won't try," Schroeder said.
There's a lot I can say about this, but the part that really got me was that these guys don't want to make PreK and early childhood education programs more widely available. They think it will keep moms away from the home.
In my case, this is the other way around. Having good quality and low cost PreK programs in our area allows me to be able to continue to stay home with our son and future child while our daughter will go to school.
If we had to pay the prices that I know other moms pay in areas that don't have lower (or free) programs, I would probably have to go back to work to supplement enough income to afford the prices (which can be 5,000 or more for 5 half days!)
