> That's far more of a child care issue than a parental leave issue. If both parents take a year of leave each for three children that's not even close to a ten

> That's far more of a child care issue than a parental leave issue. If both parents take a year of leave each for three children that's not even close to a tenth of their working life. That's part of my point. If you need to use childcare services, then the cost of having children rises linearly with the number of children. If one parent stays home, then the costs grow logarithmically (I've heard anecdotally that after 4 kids, having more doesn't really require much additional effort because the older ones can be recruited to help with the younger ones). But aside from cost, there's also the question of emotional investment. I suspect that couples aren't generally going to want to have more than one or two kids if they aren't going to have enough time to personally invest in each kid. > And we are expecting far too many hours to be worked per household. But there's no reason a reduction in working hours has to imply a stay at home parent. What if both parents worked 3 days a week, or 2 days a week? That's a fair point, and I think it's worth looking at how that could be made a reality. However, shorter work weeks imply that each hour of work has the same marginal utility for the worker. I don't have any citations at the moment, but I've heard that people who work more hours tend to be paid disproportionately more. That is, it may make more financial sense for a family if one parent works 40-50 hours than if both work 20-25 hours.