8 ms·

Perhaps mothers could stay at home with their children. Relieving the cost of child care.

by cmilton 3y ago

igetspam 3y ago
Perhaps fathers could.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  It is honestly nuts that we were tricked into thinking equality meant our families had to work twice as hard. Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance.
  - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
    >Single-worker households should be the standard... Yes, this is ideal for children. >...just, without the gender imbalance. But why take this detour? Why does there need to be a balance? How does enforcing a gender balance help children?
    - igetspam 3y ago
      What detour? This feels like a straight line to reasonable discourse. What does forcing one sex to be the DRI for childrearing improve for kids? Specifically, what does it improve for girls?
      - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
        With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see more women be the stay-at-home caregiver. If a balance is desired, that's when you would have to force things. I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
        igetspam 3y ago
        What evidence do you have to support your assertion that women would naturally give up their independence to stay at home?
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see males constantly fight each other to lead the pack and mate with multiple women, with women having little choice in the matter. Assuming you want a more peaceful existence, and for women to have a choice in the matter, society needs to get hands-on to force a gender balance.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        And anyway, what hands are we talking about? Human nature is whatever humans do I guess, and that includes things like inventing feminism and equality.
        tzs 3y ago
        > I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance. I don't think anyone suggested forcing a gender balance. In the past in the US single-worker households were the standard. The expectation was that except for a few jobs, for example school teacher or nurse, women only worked until they got married. There was no law that said women doing other kinds of jobs had to leave the workforce when they got married, but many employers strongly favored hiring men. Similar when they wanted to promote someone they would favor men. They didn't particularly have anything against women per say, but felt that a man with a stay at home wife needed the work more than a married woman with a working husband. When someone wrote: >> Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance I think they had in mind how the single-worker household norm used to work, and by "without the gender imbalance" meant dropping the assumption that in single-worker male/female households the worker should be the man.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        That is mostly what I meant, just dropping the assumption that there ought to be an imbalance. I also very much think there would not tend to be an imbalance in a modern advanced economy; we’ll tend to be equal, and that most gender imbalances are just transient effects from history. This is just a prediction, though, I have no data to back it up. I don’t think there can be data on this, we do not have a statistically robust number of globalized information economies, we have just the one.
      - sgerenser 3y ago
        Nobody is forcing anyone, it’s just the natural choice for the lower earning parent to step away from their job. If women to a high degree only marry higher earning spouses, then this is frequently going to be the woman.
        igetspam 3y ago
        That's not the natural choice. The natural choice is to find the bottom of the barrel outside care and have a second income because we've made it financially impossible to do anything else.
        sgerenser 3y ago
        Sorry, it's true that the common choice is often for both parents to work. I meant the natural choice given that a couple has decided for one of the two parents to stay at home while their children are too young for school.
        igetspam 3y ago
        So then the assumption you're making is that women are the lower earners? Why is that? (Or why is that true?)
        sgerenser 3y ago
        Because in a given couple, women typically match with men that earn more than them. Whether that is the “fault” of the woman or man is for anyone to decide.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I think even my generation, and I’m not that young, has the expectation that at least an approximate balance would be expected as an outcome, absent any enforcement. I have no particular desire to return to old fashion gender roles, and lots of people who want single income households might, so I want to be very explicit about the fact that I don’t care to defend that position. Which I think is a losing position.
      - drivebyhooting 3y ago
        [flagged]
        bee_rider 3y ago
        Is this some sort of incomprehensible-to-outsiders meme?
        drivebyhooting 3y ago
        I will endeavor to give you a hint without spoiling the epiphany: You have two possible allocations of “utilons”. One strictly dominates the other but exhibits an imbalance. The other does not. Now choose.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        I pick the one with .8’s because this is an obviously meaningless and constructed problem.
        drivebyhooting 3y ago
        Your failure to draw meaning from the simplified problem disappoints. If you can’t grapple with this toy model I’m afraid you won’t make inroads in any real scenario.
        bee_rider 3y ago
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    Unfortunately most women, even the most feminist and empowered ones, would refuse to marry a man that makes less than her. That being the case, if it comes time for one to quit their job, it usually makes sense for it to be the lower earner. Not sure if there’s a way to really square that circle without restructuring male/female psychology.
    - igetspam 3y ago
      You have data to support this claim?
      - sgerenser 3y ago
        It’s pretty self evident as a member of society, but there’s a number of studies as well, e.g. https://ifstudies.org/blog/better-educated-women-still-prefer-higher-earning-husbands https://ifstudies.org/blog/better-educated-women-still-prefe...
        igetspam 3y ago
        Ooh. That's credible. A right wing think tank! I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"' https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/202102/why-so-many-single-women-without-children-are-happy https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/2...
        tzs 3y ago
        > Ooh. That's credible. A right wing think tank! Does that really count as coming from a right wing think tank? The article there just cites a paper, "Gender Asymmetry in Educational and Assortative Marriage", that was in the Journal of Marriage and Family, and has a short interview with one of the paper's authors. That journal is from the National Council on Family Relations. I can't find anything that suggests they are conservative. If anything what I'm finding in Google tends to have them more on the liberal side of things. E.g., their board's statement against anti-trans legislation [1]. > I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"' I don't think you are using "I'll see you and raise you" correctly. It's suppose to be followed by something that contradicts what you are replying to. What your link and his talk about are orthogonal. https://www.ncfr.org/news/ncfr-board-directors-statement-response-recent-anti-transgender-legislation https://www.ncfr.org/news/ncfr-board-directors-statement-res...
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    I suppose it depends on what the purpose of children is. I’ll be a bit provocative and say that I think that they are largely status symbols - they need to go to good schools and onto high status careers in order to bring as much prestige to the family as possible. There are only a few years of their lives where they need constant care but the costs of all their education will be enormous later in their lives and so a couple that has two earners will be able to out compete a single earner household for all the expensive late-childhood/early-adulthood expenses that will come up.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I don’t disagree that some people treat kids as status symbols, but that’s basically a pathology in our society IMO. The point of having kids should be to raise some happy, well-adjusted people. Education is important but for their enrichment, not as some silly high-score focused game. Education—there’s the cost of providing it, and then there’s the zero-sum competitive component. As far as I can tell we seem to be re-investing all that extra money into deans, administrative staff, and fancy facilities, so I think we should just not play that game.
      - hotpotamus 3y ago
        > so I think we should just not play that game I don't think there's any way out of that particular game other than not having children; they're going to need to go onto careers, and as much as the education system might suck, it's less grim than the careers they'd face without a degree. My cousin's (I don't have a lot of cousins but we've actually been close our whole lives; we've lived in the same city and I actually consider them my college friends because we also went to the same school) daughter's 3rd birthday is coming up. His ask - no presents, just college contributions please. I myself opted out of the game early on, and upon a lot of reflection of late, I think this is a significant reason I did although I would have had a hard time articulating it when I was younger.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        Individually we can’t opt out of it, but collectively we could do things like putting greater emphasis on the state-funded education systems.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    The extra income, post childcare. went into housing, as families had a higher income they had more to spend on the house, but the same houses existed. So it meant prices went up. The only winners were those who owned houses before the change.
  - alexashka 3y ago
    It's not surprising at all. It's tragedy of the commons, race to the bottom, etc. If everyone else has one income and I have 2, I am suddenly way ahead in the social dominance hierarchy. I liiike. Before you know it, everyone has followed suit and now nobody's happy.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Ah, Moloch strikes again. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- brvsft 3y ago
  Either one, doesn't really matter, and it is up to the parents. Although, not sure if you know this, but fathers can't breastfeed, no matter what you read on Twitter. It affects your options for the early years.
  - igetspam 3y ago
    Hahaha. As a parent and regular human, I'm fully aware of who can breastfeed. I assume my point was clear though. We need to stop putting all of this on women. Yes there are certain biology issues that require women to take some outsized roles in child development but those aren't permanent and telling women that they should stay home with the kids is usually not aligned with "until they're off the breast and then the father can stay home instead." Thankfully modern science has invented and improved the breast pump and the bottle warmer and after recovery, women don't actually need to stay home for kids to get breast milk. So there's really no need to be gender specific about which parent should stay home, past reasonable maternity/paternity leave periods. On the other hand, being single income is a luxury that not everyone can afford anyway. Our living costs have skyrocketed since 2020 and both parents working is necessity for lower and middle income families, in many cases. Even if the second income covers little more than child care, that "little more" is meaningful to people. If we want better families, we should provide ways for lowering the burden and not force women (her it's women because nothing grows in or comes out of men) to have kids they can't care for and/or don't want and find ways to make childcare more affordable.
  - triceratops 3y ago
    Not sure if you know this, but it's possible to pump and refrigerate breast milk. And even freeze it. Most developed countries have at least 3 months of maternity leave, and most children start weaning after a year or so. Which means 25% of that time is covered by mom anyway.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Most kids are weaned before the end of maternity leave at about 10-12 months so that’s fairly irrelevant.
    - 3y ago
- anon291 3y ago
  Once we grow boobs, sure. Pretending this is at all equal is ridiculous.
light_hue_1 3y ago
Yeah, in the 70s. Everything, including housing, healthcare, and education is so expensive now, we couldn't afford for one of us to stay home anymore.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  It's all relative. People earned a lot less in the 70s. Minimum wage was $2.00/hr or so.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Houses cost 3.8 times median household earnings in 1973. In 2023 it’s 7.5, and that’s with more households having two incomes. https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      Yes but interest rates were higher and you generally needed 20% down to get a mortgage. The years of near zero interest and zero-equity financing inflated housing prices. Also with dual-income buyers, people could afford bigger and more highly-speced houses, and builders built these instead of "starter homes" because their costs were about the same so why would they not build what was more profitable for them (this is still the reason we don't have enough "affordable" housing being built, because there is still not enough supply of higher-end housing). Not that it necessarily matters to someone looking for a modest first home today.
    - jl6 3y ago
      Not a bad uplift if you factor in the increase in the size of the median house: https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...

Perhaps mothers could stay at home with their children. Relieving the cost of child care.

igetspam 3y ago

Perhaps fathers could.

bee_rider 3y ago
It is honestly nuts that we were tricked into thinking equality meant our families had to work twice as hard. Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance.
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  >Single-worker households should be the standard... Yes, this is ideal for children. >...just, without the gender imbalance. But why take this detour? Why does there need to be a balance? How does enforcing a gender balance help children?
  - igetspam 3y ago
    What detour? This feels like a straight line to reasonable discourse. What does forcing one sex to be the DRI for childrearing improve for kids? Specifically, what does it improve for girls?
    - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
      With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see more women be the stay-at-home caregiver. If a balance is desired, that's when you would have to force things. I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
      - igetspam 3y ago
        What evidence do you have to support your assertion that women would naturally give up their independence to stay at home?
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see males constantly fight each other to lead the pack and mate with multiple women, with women having little choice in the matter. Assuming you want a more peaceful existence, and for women to have a choice in the matter, society needs to get hands-on to force a gender balance.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        And anyway, what hands are we talking about? Human nature is whatever humans do I guess, and that includes things like inventing feminism and equality.
      - tzs 3y ago
        > I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance. I don't think anyone suggested forcing a gender balance. In the past in the US single-worker households were the standard. The expectation was that except for a few jobs, for example school teacher or nurse, women only worked until they got married. There was no law that said women doing other kinds of jobs had to leave the workforce when they got married, but many employers strongly favored hiring men. Similar when they wanted to promote someone they would favor men. They didn't particularly have anything against women per say, but felt that a man with a stay at home wife needed the work more than a married woman with a working husband. When someone wrote: >> Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance I think they had in mind how the single-worker household norm used to work, and by "without the gender imbalance" meant dropping the assumption that in single-worker male/female households the worker should be the man.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        That is mostly what I meant, just dropping the assumption that there ought to be an imbalance. I also very much think there would not tend to be an imbalance in a modern advanced economy; we’ll tend to be equal, and that most gender imbalances are just transient effects from history. This is just a prediction, though, I have no data to back it up. I don’t think there can be data on this, we do not have a statistically robust number of globalized information economies, we have just the one.
    - sgerenser 3y ago
      Nobody is forcing anyone, it’s just the natural choice for the lower earning parent to step away from their job. If women to a high degree only marry higher earning spouses, then this is frequently going to be the woman.
      - igetspam 3y ago
        That's not the natural choice. The natural choice is to find the bottom of the barrel outside care and have a second income because we've made it financially impossible to do anything else.
        sgerenser 3y ago
        Sorry, it's true that the common choice is often for both parents to work. I meant the natural choice given that a couple has decided for one of the two parents to stay at home while their children are too young for school.
        igetspam 3y ago
        So then the assumption you're making is that women are the lower earners? Why is that? (Or why is that true?)
        sgerenser 3y ago
        Because in a given couple, women typically match with men that earn more than them. Whether that is the “fault” of the woman or man is for anyone to decide.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I think even my generation, and I’m not that young, has the expectation that at least an approximate balance would be expected as an outcome, absent any enforcement. I have no particular desire to return to old fashion gender roles, and lots of people who want single income households might, so I want to be very explicit about the fact that I don’t care to defend that position. Which I think is a losing position.
    - drivebyhooting 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        Is this some sort of incomprehensible-to-outsiders meme?
        drivebyhooting 3y ago
        I will endeavor to give you a hint without spoiling the epiphany: You have two possible allocations of “utilons”. One strictly dominates the other but exhibits an imbalance. The other does not. Now choose.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        I pick the one with .8’s because this is an obviously meaningless and constructed problem.
        drivebyhooting 3y ago
        Your failure to draw meaning from the simplified problem disappoints. If you can’t grapple with this toy model I’m afraid you won’t make inroads in any real scenario.
        bee_rider 3y ago
- sgerenser 3y ago
  Unfortunately most women, even the most feminist and empowered ones, would refuse to marry a man that makes less than her. That being the case, if it comes time for one to quit their job, it usually makes sense for it to be the lower earner. Not sure if there’s a way to really square that circle without restructuring male/female psychology.
  - igetspam 3y ago
    You have data to support this claim?
    - sgerenser 3y ago
      It’s pretty self evident as a member of society, but there’s a number of studies as well, e.g. https://ifstudies.org/blog/better-educated-women-still-prefer-higher-earning-husbands https://ifstudies.org/blog/better-educated-women-still-prefe...
      - igetspam 3y ago
        Ooh. That's credible. A right wing think tank! I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"' https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/202102/why-so-many-single-women-without-children-are-happy https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/2...
        tzs 3y ago
        > Ooh. That's credible. A right wing think tank! Does that really count as coming from a right wing think tank? The article there just cites a paper, "Gender Asymmetry in Educational and Assortative Marriage", that was in the Journal of Marriage and Family, and has a short interview with one of the paper's authors. That journal is from the National Council on Family Relations. I can't find anything that suggests they are conservative. If anything what I'm finding in Google tends to have them more on the liberal side of things. E.g., their board's statement against anti-trans legislation [1]. > I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"' I don't think you are using "I'll see you and raise you" correctly. It's suppose to be followed by something that contradicts what you are replying to. What your link and his talk about are orthogonal. https://www.ncfr.org/news/ncfr-board-directors-statement-response-recent-anti-transgender-legislation https://www.ncfr.org/news/ncfr-board-directors-statement-res...
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I suppose it depends on what the purpose of children is. I’ll be a bit provocative and say that I think that they are largely status symbols - they need to go to good schools and onto high status careers in order to bring as much prestige to the family as possible. There are only a few years of their lives where they need constant care but the costs of all their education will be enormous later in their lives and so a couple that has two earners will be able to out compete a single earner household for all the expensive late-childhood/early-adulthood expenses that will come up.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I don’t disagree that some people treat kids as status symbols, but that’s basically a pathology in our society IMO. The point of having kids should be to raise some happy, well-adjusted people. Education is important but for their enrichment, not as some silly high-score focused game. Education—there’s the cost of providing it, and then there’s the zero-sum competitive component. As far as I can tell we seem to be re-investing all that extra money into deans, administrative staff, and fancy facilities, so I think we should just not play that game.
    - hotpotamus 3y ago
      > so I think we should just not play that game I don't think there's any way out of that particular game other than not having children; they're going to need to go onto careers, and as much as the education system might suck, it's less grim than the careers they'd face without a degree. My cousin's (I don't have a lot of cousins but we've actually been close our whole lives; we've lived in the same city and I actually consider them my college friends because we also went to the same school) daughter's 3rd birthday is coming up. His ask - no presents, just college contributions please. I myself opted out of the game early on, and upon a lot of reflection of late, I think this is a significant reason I did although I would have had a hard time articulating it when I was younger.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        Individually we can’t opt out of it, but collectively we could do things like putting greater emphasis on the state-funded education systems.
- midasuni 3y ago
  The extra income, post childcare. went into housing, as families had a higher income they had more to spend on the house, but the same houses existed. So it meant prices went up. The only winners were those who owned houses before the change.
- alexashka 3y ago
  It's not surprising at all. It's tragedy of the commons, race to the bottom, etc. If everyone else has one income and I have 2, I am suddenly way ahead in the social dominance hierarchy. I liiike. Before you know it, everyone has followed suit and now nobody's happy.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Ah, Moloch strikes again. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
brvsft 3y ago
Either one, doesn't really matter, and it is up to the parents. Although, not sure if you know this, but fathers can't breastfeed, no matter what you read on Twitter. It affects your options for the early years.
- igetspam 3y ago
  Hahaha. As a parent and regular human, I'm fully aware of who can breastfeed. I assume my point was clear though. We need to stop putting all of this on women. Yes there are certain biology issues that require women to take some outsized roles in child development but those aren't permanent and telling women that they should stay home with the kids is usually not aligned with "until they're off the breast and then the father can stay home instead." Thankfully modern science has invented and improved the breast pump and the bottle warmer and after recovery, women don't actually need to stay home for kids to get breast milk. So there's really no need to be gender specific about which parent should stay home, past reasonable maternity/paternity leave periods. On the other hand, being single income is a luxury that not everyone can afford anyway. Our living costs have skyrocketed since 2020 and both parents working is necessity for lower and middle income families, in many cases. Even if the second income covers little more than child care, that "little more" is meaningful to people. If we want better families, we should provide ways for lowering the burden and not force women (her it's women because nothing grows in or comes out of men) to have kids they can't care for and/or don't want and find ways to make childcare more affordable.
- triceratops 3y ago
  Not sure if you know this, but it's possible to pump and refrigerate breast milk. And even freeze it. Most developed countries have at least 3 months of maternity leave, and most children start weaning after a year or so. Which means 25% of that time is covered by mom anyway.
- midasuni 3y ago
  Most kids are weaned before the end of maternity leave at about 10-12 months so that’s fairly irrelevant.
  - 3y ago
anon291 3y ago
Once we grow boobs, sure. Pretending this is at all equal is ridiculous.

light_hue_1 3y ago

Yeah, in the 70s. Everything, including housing, healthcare, and education is so expensive now, we couldn't afford for one of us to stay home anymore.

SoftTalker 3y ago
It's all relative. People earned a lot less in the 70s. Minimum wage was $2.00/hr or so.
- midasuni 3y ago
  Houses cost 3.8 times median household earnings in 1973. In 2023 it’s 7.5, and that’s with more households having two incomes. https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Yes but interest rates were higher and you generally needed 20% down to get a mortgage. The years of near zero interest and zero-equity financing inflated housing prices. Also with dual-income buyers, people could afford bigger and more highly-speced houses, and builders built these instead of "starter homes" because their costs were about the same so why would they not build what was more profitable for them (this is still the reason we don't have enough "affordable" housing being built, because there is still not enough supply of higher-end housing). Not that it necessarily matters to someone looking for a modest first home today.
  - jl6 3y ago
    Not a bad uplift if you factor in the increase in the size of the median house: https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...