6 ms·

If you choose to have children then your career is raising children. You have to choose to prioritize one or the other, the idea that you can take large amounts

by se30b 9y ago

If you choose to have children then your career is raising children. You have to choose to prioritize one or the other, the idea that you can take large amounts of time off and still be at the same level as people who kept working is insane. There isn't any injustice going on here. Juggling an intense career path with raising children is a bad idea. Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has been shown to be highly detrimental to their development.

09bjb 9y ago
Instinctually, I agree with you on the effects of years of daycare on development...could you point me to one or two of your sources? I hate to be that guy on HN, just looking for some confirmation for my bias here :)
- se30b 9y ago
  most sources seem to be paywalled.. I am not an expert on this subject. http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001 thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/familyfacts/briefs/FF_Brief_43.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSo5gzJ1M1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSo5gzJ1M1s
  - eesmith 9y ago
    For this type of task, I find it best to go to Google Scholar. If you put in the title of the paper behind the first link you'll find the 1991 paper available from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nazli_Baydar/publication/232575381_Effects_of_Maternal_Employment_and_Child-Care_Arrangements_on_Preschoolers%27_Cognitive_and_Behavioral_Outcomes_Evidence_From_the_Children_of_the_National_Longitudinal_Survey_of_Youth/links/59e56e25aca272390ed64f13/Effects-of-Maternal-Employment-and-Child-Care-Arrangements-on-Preschoolers-Cognitive-and-Behavioral-Outcomes-Evidence-From-the-Children-of-the-National-Longitudinal-Survey-of-Youth.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nazli_Baydar/publicatio... . You'll also see that it's been cited by 611 papers. It's usually a bit odd to reference a 27 year old paper as a source because additional research since then has likely given more insight into the problem. Pulling one out at semi-random, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cch.12238/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cch.12238/full argues "more hours in non-parental child care were associated with better language abilities. However, more hours in care in the first year of life were associated with less language proficiency at ages 1 to 1.5. At later ages, this effect disappeared and language proficiency increased. Furthermore, children who spent more hours in centre-based care had better language scores than children in home-based care." http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.704.9791&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.704... summarizes a number of related reports: > O’Brien Caughy et al. (1994) report that entrance into daycare before the first birthday was associated with higher test scores (Peabody Individual Achievement Tests) for lower income children and lower test scores for higher income children. For the U.K. Gregg et al. (2005) find that children who receive informal care from friends and relatives in the first 18 months of life combined with full time maternal employment have lower cognitive outcomes. ... Finally, Loeb et al. (2007) find that entry into non-parental center based care before the age of one can lead to problem behavior. Magnuson et al. (2007), Baker et al. (2008), Datta Gupta and Simonsen (2010), and the research summarized in Belsky (2006) provide further evidence that non-parental care can have negative behavioral effects in some contexts. Or there's https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11016559 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11016559 which says: > After adjusting for child care quality, cumulative experience in center-based care was associated with better outcomes than was participation in other types of care. The amount of time children spent in care was not related to outcomes. Children in exclusive maternal care did not differ systematically from children in child care. Tests for lagged relations of earlier child care experiences to later performance (adjusting for current child care) showed that language stimulation predicted subsequent cognitive and language performance 9 to 12 months later. Although children in center care at age 3 performed better than children in other types of care, earlier experience in child care homes was associated with better performance at age 3 than was experience in other types of care. These would appear to be counter to your statement that "Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has been shown to be highly detrimental to their development." More specifically, once the child is about 18 months old, there appears to be positive effects of daycare and non-parental care. That "Family Facts" link is from The Heritage Foundation, which has a mission to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense." I can't help but think there is a bias in which topics to report and which evidence to present. One way to assuage my doubts would be if the reports had a link to the primary research literature. However, the only citation is to "a FamilyFacts.org Report by Jenet Jacob Erickson, researcher specializing in maternal and child wellbeing and former assistant professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. Her report reviewed key findings from 30 years of research on child care and children’s social– emotional development." This does not appear to be a peer-reviewed report. While peer-review has its problems, I again can't help but wonder about any possible cherry picking. Given the editorials by the author, at https://www.deseretnews.com/author/23012/Jenet-Jacob-Erickson.html https://www.deseretnews.com/author/23012/Jenet-Jacob-Erickso... , I know that we have very different biases. The last link is to Stefan Molyneux, who is often characterized as "alt-right" or "far-right". As an anti-feminist, I suspect he is biased towards research which keeps middle-class women at home to raise children. In any case, unlike Erickson, he is (like both you and me) also not an expert on this subject.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      This is pretty reassuring, and kind of makes sense to me from a gut level. It makes sense that professionals who love children would raise children who are well-adjusted, etc., vs. dumping your kids at grandma's or the neighbor's. I don't think I'm a bad parent, but I definitely am not cut out for full-time parenting. My wife doesn't seem to be, either. If either of us were full-time caretakers, we'd honestly be fairly miserable, and I can't believe that wouldn't reflect poorly on our kid.
hvidgaard 9y ago
The entire point, and what the graph clear shows, is that fathers and mothers wage-growth significantly diverges. Both become a parent, but apparently only the mothers pay suffer.
- ars 9y ago
  Is that bad? Is pay more important than raising children? Is the best plan, to make money, then to pay other people to raise your children?
- zaroth 9y ago
  As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men. Obviously with unlimited resources this doesn’t have to be the case, but it will always be the average case. This result isn’t surprising, nor does it seem something that society should be overly concerned with fixing. Choices have all sorts of positive and negative impacts, usually foreseeable ones at that. Work less to raise a family and someone in that household will earn less outside the household. Economically both parents are still probably producing the same value, arguably the woman is producing significantly more economical value, just the economists aren’t accounting for and valuing properly the work being done inside the household so the graph is scewed. You create a stacked line chart which tries to account for the net value of the cost-reducing housework performed by men and women in addition to the outside income producing activities, and I would bet the curve shows women driving significantly increased economic value after having children. It’s the premise that the only metric we should be looking at is outside income which is completely flawed.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men. Weirdly, there's still a household chore gap between men and women. My position on this is pretty well inline with John Green's: The pay gap is down to a single digit difference, but there is a difference in the unrenumerated work which goes into keeping society going in the context of raising children. (We might disagree on what to do about it.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI
williamdclt 9y ago
That's an opinion I can understand, but it completely misses the point of the article. The article is about the fact that children are a far greater risk for women careers that men's.
- zeveb 9y ago
  > The article is about the fact that children are a far greater risk for women careers that men's. Might that be because, even in countries devoted to gender equality to an extent previously unknown to mankind, women tend to devote relatively more of their time & concern to mothering than men do to fathering?
- curtis 9y ago
  > The article is about the fact that children are a far greater risk for women careers that men's. The obvious solution here is to convince women to stop having kids. Now, I don't think this, but I also don't personally have a problem with women choosing kids over careers.
  - Mikeb85 9y ago
    Corporations do actually discriminate against married women of child-bearing age, versus single women or women who have older children. Fact is, having kids means taking time off. And while fathers can take time off if they want in many countries, most take less time than women so as to not interrupt their career.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has been shown to be highly detrimental to their development. Can you give me a few links on this? Our child is in daycare, and we both work.
- se30b 9y ago
  most sources seem to be paywalled.. I am not an expert on this subject. http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001 thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/familyfacts/briefs/FF_Brief_43.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSo5gzJ1M1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSo5gzJ1M1s
  - eesmith 9y ago
    I commented on these citations at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16313449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16313449 .
sien 9y ago
'Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has shown to be highly detrimental to their development' What are your sources for this claim? In Sweden 85% of 2 year olds are in day care enabling mothers to work. This has been the case for decades. Source: http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/social-issues-migration-health/babies-and-bosses-reconciling-work-and-family-life-volume-4_9789264009295-en#page22 http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/social-... If what you claim is true the entire country of Sweden should show adverse affects. It simply does not.
- cfontes 9y ago
  The Netherlands is pretty close to that from what I've seen. Most children some of the children here go to day-care from 4 months old on so mothers can get back to work.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

by se30b 9y ago

09bjb 9y ago

Instinctually, I agree with you on the effects of years of daycare on development...could you point me to one or two of your sources? I hate to be that guy on HN, just looking for some confirmation for my bias here :)

se30b 9y ago
most sources seem to be paywalled.. I am not an expert on this subject. http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001 thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/familyfacts/briefs/FF_Brief_43.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSo5gzJ1M1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSo5gzJ1M1s
- eesmith 9y ago
  For this type of task, I find it best to go to Google Scholar. If you put in the title of the paper behind the first link you'll find the 1991 paper available from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nazli_Baydar/publication/232575381_Effects_of_Maternal_Employment_and_Child-Care_Arrangements_on_Preschoolers%27_Cognitive_and_Behavioral_Outcomes_Evidence_From_the_Children_of_the_National_Longitudinal_Survey_of_Youth/links/59e56e25aca272390ed64f13/Effects-of-Maternal-Employment-and-Child-Care-Arrangements-on-Preschoolers-Cognitive-and-Behavioral-Outcomes-Evidence-From-the-Children-of-the-National-Longitudinal-Survey-of-Youth.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nazli_Baydar/publicatio... . You'll also see that it's been cited by 611 papers. It's usually a bit odd to reference a 27 year old paper as a source because additional research since then has likely given more insight into the problem. Pulling one out at semi-random, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cch.12238/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cch.12238/full argues "more hours in non-parental child care were associated with better language abilities. However, more hours in care in the first year of life were associated with less language proficiency at ages 1 to 1.5. At later ages, this effect disappeared and language proficiency increased. Furthermore, children who spent more hours in centre-based care had better language scores than children in home-based care." http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.704.9791&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.704... summarizes a number of related reports: > O’Brien Caughy et al. (1994) report that entrance into daycare before the first birthday was associated with higher test scores (Peabody Individual Achievement Tests) for lower income children and lower test scores for higher income children. For the U.K. Gregg et al. (2005) find that children who receive informal care from friends and relatives in the first 18 months of life combined with full time maternal employment have lower cognitive outcomes. ... Finally, Loeb et al. (2007) find that entry into non-parental center based care before the age of one can lead to problem behavior. Magnuson et al. (2007), Baker et al. (2008), Datta Gupta and Simonsen (2010), and the research summarized in Belsky (2006) provide further evidence that non-parental care can have negative behavioral effects in some contexts. Or there's https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11016559 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11016559 which says: > After adjusting for child care quality, cumulative experience in center-based care was associated with better outcomes than was participation in other types of care. The amount of time children spent in care was not related to outcomes. Children in exclusive maternal care did not differ systematically from children in child care. Tests for lagged relations of earlier child care experiences to later performance (adjusting for current child care) showed that language stimulation predicted subsequent cognitive and language performance 9 to 12 months later. Although children in center care at age 3 performed better than children in other types of care, earlier experience in child care homes was associated with better performance at age 3 than was experience in other types of care. These would appear to be counter to your statement that "Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has been shown to be highly detrimental to their development." More specifically, once the child is about 18 months old, there appears to be positive effects of daycare and non-parental care. That "Family Facts" link is from The Heritage Foundation, which has a mission to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense." I can't help but think there is a bias in which topics to report and which evidence to present. One way to assuage my doubts would be if the reports had a link to the primary research literature. However, the only citation is to "a FamilyFacts.org Report by Jenet Jacob Erickson, researcher specializing in maternal and child wellbeing and former assistant professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. Her report reviewed key findings from 30 years of research on child care and children’s social– emotional development." This does not appear to be a peer-reviewed report. While peer-review has its problems, I again can't help but wonder about any possible cherry picking. Given the editorials by the author, at https://www.deseretnews.com/author/23012/Jenet-Jacob-Erickson.html https://www.deseretnews.com/author/23012/Jenet-Jacob-Erickso... , I know that we have very different biases. The last link is to Stefan Molyneux, who is often characterized as "alt-right" or "far-right". As an anti-feminist, I suspect he is biased towards research which keeps middle-class women at home to raise children. In any case, unlike Erickson, he is (like both you and me) also not an expert on this subject.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    This is pretty reassuring, and kind of makes sense to me from a gut level. It makes sense that professionals who love children would raise children who are well-adjusted, etc., vs. dumping your kids at grandma's or the neighbor's. I don't think I'm a bad parent, but I definitely am not cut out for full-time parenting. My wife doesn't seem to be, either. If either of us were full-time caretakers, we'd honestly be fairly miserable, and I can't believe that wouldn't reflect poorly on our kid.

hvidgaard 9y ago

The entire point, and what the graph clear shows, is that fathers and mothers wage-growth significantly diverges. Both become a parent, but apparently only the mothers pay suffer.

ars 9y ago
Is that bad? Is pay more important than raising children? Is the best plan, to make money, then to pay other people to raise your children?
zaroth 9y ago
As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men. Obviously with unlimited resources this doesn’t have to be the case, but it will always be the average case. This result isn’t surprising, nor does it seem something that society should be overly concerned with fixing. Choices have all sorts of positive and negative impacts, usually foreseeable ones at that. Work less to raise a family and someone in that household will earn less outside the household. Economically both parents are still probably producing the same value, arguably the woman is producing significantly more economical value, just the economists aren’t accounting for and valuing properly the work being done inside the household so the graph is scewed. You create a stacked line chart which tries to account for the net value of the cost-reducing housework performed by men and women in addition to the outside income producing activities, and I would bet the curve shows women driving significantly increased economic value after having children. It’s the premise that the only metric we should be looking at is outside income which is completely flawed.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men. Weirdly, there's still a household chore gap between men and women. My position on this is pretty well inline with John Green's: The pay gap is down to a single digit difference, but there is a difference in the unrenumerated work which goes into keeping society going in the context of raising children. (We might disagree on what to do about it.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI

williamdclt 9y ago

That's an opinion I can understand, but it completely misses the point of the article. The article is about the fact that children are a far greater risk for women careers that men's.

zeveb 9y ago
> The article is about the fact that children are a far greater risk for women careers that men's. Might that be because, even in countries devoted to gender equality to an extent previously unknown to mankind, women tend to devote relatively more of their time & concern to mothering than men do to fathering?
curtis 9y ago
> The article is about the fact that children are a far greater risk for women careers that men's. The obvious solution here is to convince women to stop having kids. Now, I don't think this, but I also don't personally have a problem with women choosing kids over careers.
- Mikeb85 9y ago
  Corporations do actually discriminate against married women of child-bearing age, versus single women or women who have older children. Fact is, having kids means taking time off. And while fathers can take time off if they want in many countries, most take less time than women so as to not interrupt their career.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has been shown to be highly detrimental to their development. Can you give me a few links on this? Our child is in daycare, and we both work.

se30b 9y ago
most sources seem to be paywalled.. I am not an expert on this subject. http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001 thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/familyfacts/briefs/FF_Brief_43.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSo5gzJ1M1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSo5gzJ1M1s
- eesmith 9y ago
  I commented on these citations at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16313449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16313449 .

sien 9y ago

'Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has shown to be highly detrimental to their development' What are your sources for this claim? In Sweden 85% of 2 year olds are in day care enabling mothers to work. This has been the case for decades. Source: http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/social-issues-migration-health/babies-and-bosses-reconciling-work-and-family-life-volume-4_9789264009295-en#page22 http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/social-... If what you claim is true the entire country of Sweden should show adverse affects. It simply does not.

cfontes 9y ago
The Netherlands is pretty close to that from what I've seen. Most children some of the children here go to day-care from 4 months old on so mothers can get back to work.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]