Is Motherhood a Static Identity? The Importance of Considering Variation in Child Age Range When Studying Parenthood

Vote Mama Foundation began the Politics of Parenthood dataseries to answer one seemingly simple question: how many moms of young children are serving in elected office in the US? It turned out to be a difficult question to answer, as no public data existed at the time. Since we began tracking the parenthood status of elected officials in 2022, we have consistently found that motherhood is a critical yet often overlooked political identity at both the state and federal levels.

A core contribution of our Politics and Parenthood data is that we include three variables to measure parenthood status. Our first variable measures whether a legislator is a parent of a child of any age, using a binary yes/no indicator. Our second variable is categorical, indicating whether the legislator’s youngest child is under 18 or an adult. Our third variable categorizes legislators by the age of their youngest child at the time of data collection.

Motherhood is not a static identity. Anyone can become a parent or caregiver at any time. We align with scholars who conceptualize motherhood as a dynamic life event with social, economic, and political implications (Greenlee 2014). Given that anyone can assume the role of a parent or caregiver at any time, our researchers take this into consideration each time data is collected.

Research on women’s political participation has consistently shown that women with children often wait until their children are grown before running for office. In 2013, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu found that among state legislators, women were less likely than their male counterparts to have young children at home. Other scholarship has shown that mothers will postpone their political careers until their children are older (Mariani 2008).

Our data supports these findings. We find that there are only 614 moms of minors serving in state legislatures – comprising only 8.3% of all state legislators in the United States. While moms of minors are underrepresented as a whole, moms of children under the age of six are even less represented; of the 614 moms of minors in our dataset:

• Only 107 are moms of children under 6.
• Moms of children under the age of six comprise only 1.4% of all state legislators in the U.S.
• Only 27 women legislators in any state legislature were pregnant or gave birth within the last year.

We find that the age of legislators’ youngest child is negatively correlated with representation; in other words, the representation of moms of minor children increases as their children get older. This is a trend we have seen at the federal and state levels across all years of data we have collected. This trend supports the academic literature that finds that women often wait until their children are older to run, and calls into question what barriers are keeping moms of young children out of office. Recent literature has shown that politically ambitious women are less likely to run for office if they are the breadwinner for their family, suggesting financial and economic costs associated with running are part of the calculation for moms of young kids (Bernhard, et al 2021).

Our work shows that more support is needed to allow for parents of young children to be able to run for office and balance having a family. While all perspectives of moms are needed in our governing bodies, our data proves that even among moms of minors, there are sharp inequalities of representation between moms of school-aged children and moms of children under six.

This blog post is part of an ongoing series to understand motherhood as a key political identity. For more information, visit our Politics of Parenthood – State Legislatures homepage. Future blog posts in this series will examine the intersection of motherhood with other key demographic variables and present state-level analyses of our highest- and lowest-ranked states.