5 ms·

"Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner" Are families with two working parents

by blintz 9y ago

"Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner" Are families with two working parents actually less healthy? Do you have a source for that?

DoreenMichele 9y ago
No, I don't have a source. We are seeing a huge rise in problem pregnancies, birth defects, etc. There are likely a number of contributing factors to that reality. It isn't PC to wonder if maybe the rise of female careers is at related. That is viewed as antifeminist and so on. Women routinely take time off work to care for relatives, whether their own children or other relatives. They get no credit for this vital work and how it impacts the health of people. My experience suggests there isn't any point in trying to prove it. It won't get taken seriously anyway. It is common knowledge that small kids in daycare have more health issues. My sister, who has a career and works for the CDC, used to quote studies at me about that. She managed to stay home with her only child for the first few years. But, of course, in searching for info to support the idea that small kids in daycare get sick more, one of the most prominent pieces I can find is a PC piece assuring parents that the increased negative health effects of early daycare "has a protective effect later." Meanwhile, the study completely excludes data on, for example, hospital stays. Looks nicely spun to me. Other pieces outright admit that staying home is simply not an option for many women and go on to talk about how best to protect your child from germs at daycare rather than exploring statistics. Yet the fact that you can google the question and there are pieces trying to address it at all suggests it is a real issue and parents ask about the problem a lot. But society can't fix it, so it isn't really comfortable to admit that it is a real issue. Home cooked meals are also generally healthier than takeout, microwave meals, etc. Two career couples tend to not do a lot of cooking from scratch. Diet significantly impacts health.
- randomnumber53 9y ago
  Wow, this is extremely sexist and not at all evidence-based. Wouldn't it be nice if you could prove any nonsense proposition p simply by insisting that p "isn't PC" and therefore any attempt to prove p "won't get taken seriously anyway" so it very-well oh-so-likely must actually be true! And of course, asking males to take time away from their careers is out of the question...
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    I am on the record as saying both parents should be involved. When I said primary breadwinner it was intentionally framed as gender neutral. I have been the primary breadwinner in my own household for more than a decade while my adult sons took over things like housework.
  - yesenadam 9y ago
    What's sexist about what she wrote? (let alone 'extremely'?) I'm having trouble seeing it. Also, you could have just said "any proposition" instead. Instead you get to passively-aggressively say her claims were nonsense, without saying so. That's how it seemed to me anyway.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Of course kids in {daycare, school, the playground, riding the bus, ...} get sick (especially lots of minor viral infections) more often than kids who live in a hermetically sealed bubble, never share toys, and only ever interact with a couple of adults. Adults who never leave home also get sick less often than adults who go to school, work, etc. But it is also the case that the human immune system remembers various kinds of foreign agents that it has seen and is more effective fighting them off later (hence immunization as an idea), and there seems to be some evidence that excessive hygiene results in allergies, autoimmune diseases, etc. See for a start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis It is pretty unfortunate if parents can’t afford to keep their kids home for a week or two if they get seriously sick, though.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    We have 7 billion people on the planet and in my lifetime we went from more than half of all people living in rural environs to more than half of all people living in cities. Your hostile description of living in a bubble was the default norm for human life until very recently. The aberration here is not people with limited contact to others. The aberration is that in recent decades it is the new norm to work at a job that exposes you to many people every day and attend a public school that exposes you to many people every day. We do nothing to really account for this being a historical aberration for the species and then wonder why we have antibiotic resistant infections. They get that way in part by running through many, many people and having vastly more chances to evolve.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      The “default norm for human life” through most of time was either living in the forest, or living as a peasant on a farm. Peasants living on farms have historically had half of their children die in infancy, and generally poor health and short life spans afterward, because they eat an unbalanced diet mostly consisting of staple starches, spend half their time breathing wood smoke near a hearth fire, do strenuous repetitive manual work their whole lives, etc. People living in the forest were generally healthier, except sometimes they starved, were violently killed, or the like. Folks living on farms or in the forest generally don’t have autoimmune problems because they have constant exposure to animals, a wide variety of plants, etc. On average (especially the peasants) they have poorer health than folks living in cities, but the distribution of health problems is fairly different between the three groups. Deadly plagues (viral and bacterial) have ripped through through and decimated agricultural societies relatively often, at least in the past couple millennia. Many crippling diseases have also been endemic in many places (especially tropical regions) as far back as we have records. Modern medicine and lifestyle (indoor plumbing, vaccines, antibiotics, refrigeration, mosquito control, medicines for killing parasites, ...) have done an amazing job preventing those in wealthy countries. Does anyone wonder why we have antibiotic resistant bacteria? I thought that was pretty widely understood (at least by those who accept the science of evolution)...

by blintz 9y ago

DoreenMichele 9y ago

No, I don't have a source. We are seeing a huge rise in problem pregnancies, birth defects, etc. There are likely a number of contributing factors to that reality. It isn't PC to wonder if maybe the rise of female careers is at related. That is viewed as antifeminist and so on. Women routinely take time off work to care for relatives, whether their own children or other relatives. They get no credit for this vital work and how it impacts the health of people. My experience suggests there isn't any point in trying to prove it. It won't get taken seriously anyway. It is common knowledge that small kids in daycare have more health issues. My sister, who has a career and works for the CDC, used to quote studies at me about that. She managed to stay home with her only child for the first few years. But, of course, in searching for info to support the idea that small kids in daycare get sick more, one of the most prominent pieces I can find is a PC piece assuring parents that the increased negative health effects of early daycare "has a protective effect later." Meanwhile, the study completely excludes data on, for example, hospital stays. Looks nicely spun to me. Other pieces outright admit that staying home is simply not an option for many women and go on to talk about how best to protect your child from germs at daycare rather than exploring statistics. Yet the fact that you can google the question and there are pieces trying to address it at all suggests it is a real issue and parents ask about the problem a lot. But society can't fix it, so it isn't really comfortable to admit that it is a real issue. Home cooked meals are also generally healthier than takeout, microwave meals, etc. Two career couples tend to not do a lot of cooking from scratch. Diet significantly impacts health.

randomnumber53 9y ago
Wow, this is extremely sexist and not at all evidence-based. Wouldn't it be nice if you could prove any nonsense proposition p simply by insisting that p "isn't PC" and therefore any attempt to prove p "won't get taken seriously anyway" so it very-well oh-so-likely must actually be true! And of course, asking males to take time away from their careers is out of the question...
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  I am on the record as saying both parents should be involved. When I said primary breadwinner it was intentionally framed as gender neutral. I have been the primary breadwinner in my own household for more than a decade while my adult sons took over things like housework.
- yesenadam 9y ago
  What's sexist about what she wrote? (let alone 'extremely'?) I'm having trouble seeing it. Also, you could have just said "any proposition" instead. Instead you get to passively-aggressively say her claims were nonsense, without saying so. That's how it seemed to me anyway.
jacobolus 9y ago
Of course kids in {daycare, school, the playground, riding the bus, ...} get sick (especially lots of minor viral infections) more often than kids who live in a hermetically sealed bubble, never share toys, and only ever interact with a couple of adults. Adults who never leave home also get sick less often than adults who go to school, work, etc. But it is also the case that the human immune system remembers various kinds of foreign agents that it has seen and is more effective fighting them off later (hence immunization as an idea), and there seems to be some evidence that excessive hygiene results in allergies, autoimmune diseases, etc. See for a start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis It is pretty unfortunate if parents can’t afford to keep their kids home for a week or two if they get seriously sick, though.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  We have 7 billion people on the planet and in my lifetime we went from more than half of all people living in rural environs to more than half of all people living in cities. Your hostile description of living in a bubble was the default norm for human life until very recently. The aberration here is not people with limited contact to others. The aberration is that in recent decades it is the new norm to work at a job that exposes you to many people every day and attend a public school that exposes you to many people every day. We do nothing to really account for this being a historical aberration for the species and then wonder why we have antibiotic resistant infections. They get that way in part by running through many, many people and having vastly more chances to evolve.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    The “default norm for human life” through most of time was either living in the forest, or living as a peasant on a farm. Peasants living on farms have historically had half of their children die in infancy, and generally poor health and short life spans afterward, because they eat an unbalanced diet mostly consisting of staple starches, spend half their time breathing wood smoke near a hearth fire, do strenuous repetitive manual work their whole lives, etc. People living in the forest were generally healthier, except sometimes they starved, were violently killed, or the like. Folks living on farms or in the forest generally don’t have autoimmune problems because they have constant exposure to animals, a wide variety of plants, etc. On average (especially the peasants) they have poorer health than folks living in cities, but the distribution of health problems is fairly different between the three groups. Deadly plagues (viral and bacterial) have ripped through through and decimated agricultural societies relatively often, at least in the past couple millennia. Many crippling diseases have also been endemic in many places (especially tropical regions) as far back as we have records. Modern medicine and lifestyle (indoor plumbing, vaccines, antibiotics, refrigeration, mosquito control, medicines for killing parasites, ...) have done an amazing job preventing those in wealthy countries. Does anyone wonder why we have antibiotic resistant bacteria? I thought that was pretty widely understood (at least by those who accept the science of evolution)...