6 ms·

"Netherlands enjoy the highest subjective measure of life satisfaction among all OECD countries. Perhaps one reason is that their mothers are also among the mos

by fleddr 4y ago

"Netherlands enjoy the highest subjective measure of life satisfaction among all OECD countries. Perhaps one reason is that their mothers are also among the most likely to work part-time." I'm from the Netherlands and can confirm that the 1.5 model is very common. Typically the man has the full-time job and the wife works part-time and combines it with care for the children on the other days. On days where both parents work, often grandparents help out, if not possible it's daycare, which soon will be made free. Cynical people may think of it as a semi-old-fashioned model, but I couldn't disagree more. I know many such couples and these women see this as a "best of both worlds" situation where they both contribute to society and have invaluable quality time with their children. Some may start to work more hours once the kids are in school, but many just stay on this lifestyle, or then proceed to take care of aging parents. Quite a lot have a job in care, which means altogether their lives evolve around being with people and caring for them. They want to live this way and provide an invaluable service to family and society. Men often have a parent day, which is one day of unpaid leave per week for the first 2 years. Another variation of the model is 2 x 4, where both parents work 4 days as it slowly gets more acceptable for men to work part-time too. The important part is of course to have options, so that each can find their own ideal balance.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> Cynical people may think of it as a semi-old-fashioned model, but I couldn't disagree more. I think it's beautiful for one parent to set aside more time for raising children. The part that's old-fashioned is the assumption that this person will be the mother. Your comment makes it sound like full-time mothers and part-time fathers are still very uncommon.
- numbers_guy 4y ago
  Doesn't "old fashioned" imply that it goes against the contemporary expectation? Yet the expectation is still the same as it ever was. Not sure why people like you want to pretend like the majority of women would ever be happy with a stay-at-home-husband.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    I'm not pretending that at all. Women don't want stay-at-home-husbands. A particular movement of women may claim that or believe it is right, but that doesn't make it true.
- bergenty 4y ago
- emptysongglass 4y ago
  There was a study, which I can't find right now so I'm hoping another person will help me out with the citation, that showed women were less satisfied with stay-at-home men than vice versa. Anecdotally, once I fully took on the duties of breadwinner our relationship really transformed into the healthiest and most stable it's ever been. She pursues her creative passions and I get the joy of watching her grow. She does do the cooking but she also loves to cook. And no, the cooking and cleaning is not all she does. Her creative passions are much broader and what she spends the most time doing. I do wonder if some societal trend has completely hijacked our natural inclinations as men and women putting it all behind the veil of "it's all social construct! Dismantle everything!" I think we should allow for people who identify as either men and women but don't want to fit in what works, naturally, for most people to go be their best self and that society making outcasts of those people in the past was the real problem. You want to fuck men and you are a man? Go do you. You want to identify as a woman but you're biologically a man? Chase your bliss. However, going on the warpath to upend everything (and then force your new worldview on others) with postmodernist zeal has really been one of the most corrosively destructive things I've seen occur in my entire time alive and it appears to be emanating almost exclusively from the US.
  - klipt 4y ago
    > Anecdotally, once I fully took on the duties of breadwinner our relationship really transformed into the healthiest and most stable it's ever been. She pursues her creative passions and I get the joy of watching her grow. The problem here is the power imbalance. At least in the US, she has the power to divorce you at any time for no reason and date a different man, and you still have to support her with alimony/child support as if you were still together, but she of course no longer has to do any home making duties for you. It's a terrible deal for the breadwinner (generally the man). If you work a stressful but high paying job, you permanently lose the option to choose a lower stress lower paying job because the family court will assess your earning potential based on the high paying job and expect you to pay her forever based on that.
    - yolo3000 4y ago
      Well, it's the same in the Netherlands and probably most places as well. It doesn't matter if the spouse cheated on you, the one who earns most ends up paying alimony. But the second part I don't know, why can't one get the less stressful job after divorce, it's not like you're enslaved, or are you?
- sgt 4y ago
  Ours is 1.5 years old now, and I can promise you there's some things that the mother should do, or be the most involved in. Some things us guys are just a bit clueless about. One can go deeply into this but essentially it's about the emotional bond and "reading" your child, in addition to the purely biological like breastfeeding.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    I 100% agree and I thank you for calling things what they are.
balfirevic 4y ago
For the sake of clarity, that quote is specifically about children - full quote is "Children in the Netherlands enjoy the highest subjective measure of life satisfaction among all OECD countries".
ledauphin 4y ago
this is either a nitpick about language or a sweeping statement about humanity (let the reader decide), but as I see it, it's unhelpful to posit a dichotomy between "society" and "family". A parent caring for children _is_ contributing to society - society is made of people, and those people don't spring fully-formed from anyone's head! I don't really disagree with the main point of your comment, but I think this distinction is artificial. Perhaps what we're looking for is a way to communicate about the way that different types of work "feel" to the person working, and because we haven't developed our language as well as we'd like, we fall back to reductionistic concepts that perpetuate confusion about the 'goal' of human endeavor; particularly, the idea that "society-oriented" things are somehow intrinsically more valuable/important than "family-oriented" things.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Not to worry, I had no intention to make that distinction, it was clumsy phrasing, this isn't my first language. To be clear, there's nothing more meaningful than being a mother. So yes, a full-time mother is contributing to society greatly.
MandieD 4y ago
Common in Germany, too, and I’m that 0.5. I don’t see how we’d manage if I had only the choice of working full time or leaving the more interesting parts of IT. My in laws are over 80 and on the other side of the country, and my family is on the other side of the world. What really, really helps is that my employer was obliged to let me come back for anywhere from 15-30 hours/week during the two years after my year out for parental leave. Same hourly rate, same general tasks, and they cannot fire me in that time for anything short of actual malice or criminal actvity, so they can’t do something squirrelly like put me in a position I’m not qualified for to try to get rid of me. After these two years, I have a decision to make: switch back to my previous full time schedule, or to a permanent part time contract. My employer can choose to let me be more flexible, but they are not required to. My female friends back in the USA have been bimodal: either they drop out of their serious careers entirely after they have kids (and often end up trying to sell me MLM stuff), or they cludge things together to go back full time after at most 4-6 months of maternity leave, often spending more than they net on childcare and housekeeping for at least a year or two in order to keep their places that they’ve worked really hard for.

by fleddr 4y ago

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

> Cynical people may think of it as a semi-old-fashioned model, but I couldn't disagree more. I think it's beautiful for one parent to set aside more time for raising children. The part that's old-fashioned is the assumption that this person will be the mother. Your comment makes it sound like full-time mothers and part-time fathers are still very uncommon.

numbers_guy 4y ago
Doesn't "old fashioned" imply that it goes against the contemporary expectation? Yet the expectation is still the same as it ever was. Not sure why people like you want to pretend like the majority of women would ever be happy with a stay-at-home-husband.
- fleddr 4y ago
  I'm not pretending that at all. Women don't want stay-at-home-husbands. A particular movement of women may claim that or believe it is right, but that doesn't make it true.
bergenty 4y ago
emptysongglass 4y ago
There was a study, which I can't find right now so I'm hoping another person will help me out with the citation, that showed women were less satisfied with stay-at-home men than vice versa. Anecdotally, once I fully took on the duties of breadwinner our relationship really transformed into the healthiest and most stable it's ever been. She pursues her creative passions and I get the joy of watching her grow. She does do the cooking but she also loves to cook. And no, the cooking and cleaning is not all she does. Her creative passions are much broader and what she spends the most time doing. I do wonder if some societal trend has completely hijacked our natural inclinations as men and women putting it all behind the veil of "it's all social construct! Dismantle everything!" I think we should allow for people who identify as either men and women but don't want to fit in what works, naturally, for most people to go be their best self and that society making outcasts of those people in the past was the real problem. You want to fuck men and you are a man? Go do you. You want to identify as a woman but you're biologically a man? Chase your bliss. However, going on the warpath to upend everything (and then force your new worldview on others) with postmodernist zeal has really been one of the most corrosively destructive things I've seen occur in my entire time alive and it appears to be emanating almost exclusively from the US.
- klipt 4y ago
  > Anecdotally, once I fully took on the duties of breadwinner our relationship really transformed into the healthiest and most stable it's ever been. She pursues her creative passions and I get the joy of watching her grow. The problem here is the power imbalance. At least in the US, she has the power to divorce you at any time for no reason and date a different man, and you still have to support her with alimony/child support as if you were still together, but she of course no longer has to do any home making duties for you. It's a terrible deal for the breadwinner (generally the man). If you work a stressful but high paying job, you permanently lose the option to choose a lower stress lower paying job because the family court will assess your earning potential based on the high paying job and expect you to pay her forever based on that.
  - yolo3000 4y ago
    Well, it's the same in the Netherlands and probably most places as well. It doesn't matter if the spouse cheated on you, the one who earns most ends up paying alimony. But the second part I don't know, why can't one get the less stressful job after divorce, it's not like you're enslaved, or are you?
sgt 4y ago
Ours is 1.5 years old now, and I can promise you there's some things that the mother should do, or be the most involved in. Some things us guys are just a bit clueless about. One can go deeply into this but essentially it's about the emotional bond and "reading" your child, in addition to the purely biological like breastfeeding.
- fleddr 4y ago
  I 100% agree and I thank you for calling things what they are.

balfirevic 4y ago

For the sake of clarity, that quote is specifically about children - full quote is "Children in the Netherlands enjoy the highest subjective measure of life satisfaction among all OECD countries".

ledauphin 4y ago

this is either a nitpick about language or a sweeping statement about humanity (let the reader decide), but as I see it, it's unhelpful to posit a dichotomy between "society" and "family". A parent caring for children _is_ contributing to society - society is made of people, and those people don't spring fully-formed from anyone's head! I don't really disagree with the main point of your comment, but I think this distinction is artificial. Perhaps what we're looking for is a way to communicate about the way that different types of work "feel" to the person working, and because we haven't developed our language as well as we'd like, we fall back to reductionistic concepts that perpetuate confusion about the 'goal' of human endeavor; particularly, the idea that "society-oriented" things are somehow intrinsically more valuable/important than "family-oriented" things.

fleddr 4y ago
Not to worry, I had no intention to make that distinction, it was clumsy phrasing, this isn't my first language. To be clear, there's nothing more meaningful than being a mother. So yes, a full-time mother is contributing to society greatly.

MandieD 4y ago

Common in Germany, too, and I’m that 0.5. I don’t see how we’d manage if I had only the choice of working full time or leaving the more interesting parts of IT. My in laws are over 80 and on the other side of the country, and my family is on the other side of the world. What really, really helps is that my employer was obliged to let me come back for anywhere from 15-30 hours/week during the two years after my year out for parental leave. Same hourly rate, same general tasks, and they cannot fire me in that time for anything short of actual malice or criminal actvity, so they can’t do something squirrelly like put me in a position I’m not qualified for to try to get rid of me. After these two years, I have a decision to make: switch back to my previous full time schedule, or to a permanent part time contract. My employer can choose to let me be more flexible, but they are not required to. My female friends back in the USA have been bimodal: either they drop out of their serious careers entirely after they have kids (and often end up trying to sell me MLM stuff), or they cludge things together to go back full time after at most 4-6 months of maternity leave, often spending more than they net on childcare and housekeeping for at least a year or two in order to keep their places that they’ve worked really hard for.