BARACK OBAMA-'The AUDACITY of HOPE'

  Thoughts on reclaiming the American dream

Americans today have 22 fewer hours a week to spend with their kids than they did in 1969. Millions of children are left in unlicensed day care every day- or at home alone with the TV as a baby sitter.Employed mothers lose almost an hour of sleep a day in their attempt to make it all add up. Recent data show that parents with school age children show high signs of stress-stress that has been an impact on their productivity and work- when they  have inflexible jobs and unstable after-school care.

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But for the average Americn woman,the decision to work isn't simply a matter of changing attitudes. It's a matter of making ends meet.

Consider the facts . Over the last thirty years, the average earning of American men have grown less than one percent after being adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of everything, from housing to health care to education, has steadily risen. What has kept a large swath of American families from falling out of the middle class has been Mom's  paycheck. In their book The Two-Income Trap ,Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi point out that the additional income mothers bring home isn't going to luxury items. Instead almost all of it goes to purchase what families believe to be investments in their children's future-preschool education, college tution, and most of all, homes in safe neighbourhoods with good public schools. In fact between these fixed costs and the added expenses of a working mother (perticularly day care and a second car), the average two-income family has less discretionary income-and is less financially secure- than its single-earner counterpart thirty years ago,