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their failure to provide for their families calls into question not just their abilities in the labor force but also their identities as husbands, as fathers, and as men. Perhaps it should come as no surprise to discover that financial problems and marital problems are statistically linked. Study after study shows that money is a source of contention in most marriages, but it is particularly problematic for couples that are financially unstable.16 For a family living on the edge, every purchase must be scrutinized, creating flash points for conflict in marriages that are already overly stressed. With no one close at hand to blame for layoffs at work or exclusions in the health insurance policy, it is all too easy to turn frustration and anger on one another. Couples slip into an endless round of “should haves,” second guessing themselves—and each other—for decisions long past. He should have worked the night shift when he had the chance, she should have kept driving the old car, he should have bargained for a better price on the home, she should have spent less on groceries. For some, words give way to physical blows in an ever-escalating battle to assess blame. A bankruptcy trustee we interviewed explains that by helping families use the bankruptcy courts to get protection from their creditors, “I’m in the abuse-prevention business. Every time I help a family get straightened out financially, I figure I saved someone a beating.”

Make no mistake: Financial distress is a problem for both men and women. Accordingly, we will tell the stories of both mothers and fathers in the pages of this book. But we do not want to leave the impression that these phenomena are entirely gender-neutral. They are not. Mothers are 35 percent more likely than childless homeowners to lose their homes, three times more likely than men without children to go bankrupt, and seven times more likely to head up the family after a divorce.17 And so, in the pages of this book, we will tell a story about families, about children, and, especially, about mothers.

Having Children, Going Broke

This book will tell the story of how having children has become the dividing line between the solvent and the insolvent, and how today’s parents are working harder than ever and falling desperately behind even with two incomes. It is also the story of how this state of affairs is not some unavoidable feature of the modern economy, or, for that matter, the inevitable by-product of women’s entry into the workforce.

We write this book so that Ruth Ann and all the mothers like Ruth Ann, along with politicians and pundits, child advocates and labor organizers, pro-family conservatives and liberal feminists, will take a serious look at the economic forces that have battered the American family. We want them to see the hard numbers—and to gasp. But most of all, we want them to see that there is a way out. There are changes that can happen—real changes, practical changes, meaningful changes. Changes that can be made in Congress, in state legislatures, in school boards, and in families. Changes that can make it so that the average parent can once again spend her nights fretting about potty training and prom dresses, not about home foreclosures and overdrawn bank accounts. Changes that can make America’s great middle class secure once again.

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The Over-Consumption Myth

During the past generation, a great myth has swept through America. Like all good myths, the Over-Consumption Myth tells a tale to explain a confusing world. Why are so many Americans in financial trouble? Why are credit card debts up and savings down? Why are millions of mothers heading into the labor force and working overtime? The myth is so deeply embedded in our collective understanding that it resists even elementary questioning: Families have spent too much money buying things they don’t need. Americans have a new character flaw—“the urge to splurge”1—and it is driving them to spend, spend, spend like never before.

The drive for all that spending is almost mystical in origin. John de Graaf