EDIT: I can't reply ("I'm posting too fast"), but I'm genuinely asking for clarity--not making a point or impugning anyone's character.

Click on the time next to the post you want to reply to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16056235

My wife was a finance director and made good coin. Given the cost of daycare and the difficulty of getting late childcare (we both have jobs where the day ends when it ends sometimes, daycare assumes your day ends at 4 everyday), it was a no brainer for her to stop working.

When she returns to the workforce, she’ll be on the bottom as an analyst or some other gig.

For people with less resources, it’s far worse.

Also daycare would be subventionized.

Even if you quit entirely, beyond straightforward maternity/paternity leave? I don't think I'd be in favor of that type of regulation. In my opinion, if you make the decision to quit (for whatever reason), you can come back to get whatever job your skills let you get. I also think "developed" isn't the adjective you're looking for, maybe "tightly-regulated".

Of course not. The point is that there shouldn't be any economical or work-related downside (other than slightly less pay during maternity/paternity leave) for having a child.

(Obviously raising a child costs money but I hope you get the idea)

Developed is quite apt for any society that values its members.

And I would hope that people would provide caregiving to their own children for free.

So would I. But why is it only women are expected to provide such care and are classified as gold digging whores if they think the father should provide for them while they do so and also provide some compensation into the future for the lost career building opportunities it costs them? Parents should both be responsible for the product of having gotten jiggy together, not just mothers.

In USA, while women are in poverty more than men, likely for the reasons you highlight, women receive more social services than men, for those same reasons. Homelessness disproportionately impacts men (by far), because woman and children have more access to social services.

Also, the American track record for alimony and child support is not great of late.

The instinct for pair-bonding--and, in humans, the cultural institution of marriage--evolved as behavioral adaptations to the unfairnesses inherent in having two sexes.

It would appear that equal outcomes demand equal commitment. As the biological commitment is a few kcal and a few minutes for one, versus years of time and many more kcal for the other, that leaves an awful lot of effort to make those scales balance.

Simple analysis suggests that females should cartelize and police each other's behavior with respect to males, embargoing reproduction from any male deemed too selfish in regard to child-rearing responsibilities. But cartels are tough to keep together, and males can counter with misogynistic and patriarchal strategies of their own.

The biological discrepancy will therefore likely never be resolved to anything even close to fairness.

It's never going to be free, either. There is always an opportunity cost. Providing resources to an existing child precludes using them yourself or applying them to a theoretical future child.

I'm inclined to believe this opinion runs diametrically opposite to the general consensus in Australia, insofar as legislation can be considered the general consensus.

I'll admit some men, and some women, may lean in the general direction of the opinion you've state, but I feel "gold digging whores" is overly strong.

But their opinions hardly matter as we have strong child support legislation, with a strong Child Support Agency to enforce the laws to direct an appropriate amount of money to the resident-parent to aid in funding the child. We also have a fairly well run welfare system.

In the US, full time moms tend to get viewed and treated like leeches, regardless of their socioeconomic class. I was a homemaker a long time. I have six years of college. I was a military wife and homeschooling mom. But America is pretty sucktastic about treating full-time wives like pariahs and non contributors.

If your land is more civilized than mine, I am very glad to hear it.

Edit: And I am not questioning it. I met an Australian friend for lunch/dinner with a group of friends in San Francisco years ago. He talked very differently about his full-time homemaker wife than is the cultural norm here.

How does that contribute to women being in poverty at a higher rate than men? If the parents are married, they share finances so they are either both in poverty, or neither are in poverty. If they are divorced, the primary caregiver will be compensated for their time through child support payments.

And I don't think stay at home mothers are generally classified as "gold digging whores", maybe my experience is different from yours though.

1) She got unexpectedly pregnant.

2) She got divorced.

3) Her spouse died.

Due to the fact that women live longer and men are, on average, about 4 years older than their wives, 90 percent if the time, when someone is burying their spouse it is a woman burying her husband. (for hetero couples, a stat that will change with same sex marriage)

I did the homemaker thing. I have 6 years of college. My post divorce life has been far less lush than that of my ex.

What a strange statement. This would be true if, for example, poor people were 33% men, 33% women, and 33% children.

It would also be true that "most poor people in the US are men and their children."

Did you mean to say something specific about single mothers and the children who live with them? Or was the phrasing an attempt to import that image while saying something much less meaningful?

Here's something that is specific and true: The vast majority of homeless in America are men. There are many, many centers set up to help women and children in poverty exclusively, while resources just for men are rare-to-nonexistent.

Extreme poverty is massively gendered against men, and the resources to address it are massively gendered towards helping women.

My mother cheated on my father and he left her because of that.

He was required (by Texas law) to pay child-support to my mother up until we were 18 (I am 29) to my mother who cheated on him; he still owes back pay on that and refuses to pay until they put a warrant out for his arrest.

My mother demonized him to us by crying about not knowing why he left her; she never once mentioned until 5 months ago that she cheated on him.

Dad regrets leaving us (his kids, not my mother) because it put a rift between us. We never knew the truth until recently when my mom let it slip in a conversation.

At this point I feel like he has been punished enough by the state of Texas for leaving my cheating mother.

Recently my eldest brother had a girl and my father has been in her life as much as he can and I'm incredibly happy for that (not jealous one bit) because at least my niece will have something my brother and I never had because he was soured by her behavior.

We grew up poor because of my mother's infidelity...

This may show my bias growing up in a traditionally christian environment, but for years the rub on the right has been to disregard two of those realities and handwave the other as: she got unexpectedly pregnant, because she lacks personal responsibility, and is therefore not entitled to the support of the state or society. When the Haves "get unexpectedly pregnant," it's an accident or a surprise, when the Have Nots do, it's a sin. Even some of the responses here dogwhistle the sentiment that the people in this position kind of deserve it, which disgusts me.

And to the other reply to your comment: Good thing this isn't a sympathy contest, and that humans do not have a finite capacity to care for their fellow humans, so we can feel bad for the dead people and still work for the benefit of the people left behind. "These are nice points, but wave of hand I'm not going to listen to them, honey." Of course they needed a throwaway account to say it here, too bad that attitude prevails in so many of our interactions every day.

At the societal level, attempting to hold people to a lofty standard of moral purity doesn't seem to be particularly effective considering even clergy have trouble remaining celibate.

The hope is that it prevents future unexpected pregnancies by making people pause and think before they act "Hmm, maybe if I do this unprotected thing I want to do that it will financially screw over the girl I want to do it with. Maybe I shouldn't do that thing without protection."

Personal responsibility is about incentivizing good choices, so society has to pick up the tab for fewer children born into poverty. Unfortunately, this probably doesn't work out in practice since people (particularly teenagers) are going to have unprotected sex regardless of consequences. So there is a point even if the point is broken.

There are 44 million people in poverty in the US. There are 10 million single mothers in the US, with 17 million children. Since the majority of single mothers are not in poverty, your statement is false.

https://singlemotherguide.com/single-mother-statistics/

My phrasing is fine if someone is engaging in good faith and trying to actually understand my points rather than looking for some trivial means to justify dismissing them.

You really seem to be reaching here. So I will likely not reply further.

EDIT: Others have independently expressed similar confusion as well.

EDIT2: I'm being throttled, but in response to Doreen:

Here's where you say women live longer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055356). I don't see how that can mean anything other than "men die younger". Again, no need to resort to "bad faith" when "miscommunication" suffices. Here's the full text for convenience/posterity:

> Most poor people in the US are women and their children. Most of those women were solidly middle class until one of three things happened: 1) She got unexpectedly pregnant. 2) She got divorced. 3) Her spouse died. Due to the fact that women live longer and men are, on average, about 4 years older than their wives, 90 percent if the time, when someone is burying their spouse it is a woman burying her husband. (for hetero couples, a stat that will change with same sex marriage)

Nowhere did I say that. That framing sounds incredibly bad faith.

Those stats are not current. Given the reactions I got from working women at a Fortune 500 company over the detail that my sons took over the cooking and cleaning, I have zero reason to believe we are anywhere near achieving parity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I successfully swapped gender roles with my sons. I got a corporate job and offered them the chance to take over the women's work rather than get jobs themselves. They did not half ass it, though they also did not handle it the same way I would. If it weren't for feeling attacked in an ugly and gratuitous way, there would be good common ground to be found there.

If you are interested, the book "More work for mother" details 300 years of history of household tech. It partly agrees with you that maybe women should learn to lighten up a hair. But it also asserts the pressure for women to work so hard comes from real gains in things like child survival rates.

I like the book in part because it is a rare example of not hating on either gender and not promoting the war between the sexes.

I don't plan to engage you further because this just sounds like someone venting their spleen on a random internet stranger and I am not interested in engaging with that.

I'm also somewhat irritated when people call it "women's work", as it puts the whole conversation on a sexist basis from the start, even though that is a factually and historically accurate way to describe it.

If you can find a copy of the book "Chore Wars," maybe that would be useful.

I don't disagree with you that domestic chores need to be streamlined as part of the solution. But the subtext of your long comment is just a whole lot of anger at "women," which probably means at the state of things between you and your wife, and kicking an internet stranger is less harmful to your life than just taking it out on your wife.

But I ain't crazy about being kicked, no matter how much I can understand the dynamic likely driving it.

As a matter of fact, my spouse acts a lot like my father and I act much like my mother. He also makes every little task a needlessly complicated affair, but he largely does it to get attention and recognition, as an insufferable extrovert. And then he doesn't get it, because my mother and all their children only look at the actual results. Somehow, they're still married, even after so many decades of putting up with the other one's crap.

And my spouse and I are sorted. As I mentioned, the only way to not do any of the work yourself--including the mental/emotional effort--is to let someone else do it their own way. So if my spouse does a job in a way that I find grandiose and inefficient, that's fine. If I do a job in a way my spouse considers to be half-assed and slipshod, that's also fine. There is an equitable division of labor insofar as we can both agree on what actually needs doing.

Either of us is, of course, free to do other things that the other person does not care about, but that work will not be paid as well with the intra-family currency based on gratitude and respect. The greatest sticking point is that my spouse wants to be paid (in that currency) by the hour and I want to be paid by the job. And that mirrors in miniature all the people out there that believe in the labor theory of value, versus all those that do not.

I don't care how hard you work at something, or how long it took for you to do it. I only care what you got done. And if you did something that no one else wanted, your effort doesn't count for as much as if you had done something that everyone needed. So when I hear you say that women do N hours more work inside the household than men, I feel I must rebut:

Time is not how everyone measures the value of labor.

That, of course, raises the question of how the value of labor should be measured. The tick marks on your household yardstick might be equally useless or worse, like SLoC or story points. Anecdotally, I have found it's usually better to not have an accounting based relationship, and to avoid keeping score on everything. If you feel emotionally as though you're working too hard, and your partner not hard enough, maybe talk about it to move expectations closer to reality. But telling your other that you are working 18 more hours per week on your relationship than they are is not likely to produce the result you are hoping for.

You are correct. My error.

But I see zero justification for you starting with a venomous comment and coming back now with a high handed comment that places all the blame here on other people, their prejudices and their propensity for ad hominems.

For the record: There was zero intent to attack you. I was doing my best to be understanding in the face of a really ugly remark. Sometimes when I do that, it goes very well. Sometimes, like now, it does not.

And I will make a mental note of this incident and try to keep it in mind should I run into you again on the forum. This has been an entirely unpleasant experience for me.

I'm not a pleasant person. I don't care to explain why right now, but it isn't right for me to spread my damage to others without their consent. So I'm sorry for doing that.

I recommend against projecting that on other families you don’t know. And maybe talk to a therapist?

There is also some hyperbole involved. My spouse may take only 15 actual minutes to clean a toilet, and use one off the shelf product, specifically marketed for cleaning toilets. So in comparison to the way I do it, that is using 12 different chemicals and taking all f'in' day. When my spouse describes how I do it, it would probably be more on the order of "takes 15 seconds to rub the seat down with a moist towelette". It is a caricature, rather than a photograph.

Actually, now that I'm describing it, that does seem very strange to use insincerity so much. But as I was growing up, when sarcasm was everywhere, it made a lot more sense.

When the Welfare People Come is great read on the the way the welfare system is stacked against those who need to use it that delves into this and OP's points in greater detail.

> 1) is known

If the woman doesn't know who the father is, who's choice was that?

> 2) is able

yes

> 3) is willing

The courts routinely assess child support on both willing and unwilling fathers. It's not an option for fathers.

#2) Yes, your prison comment overwhelmingly impacts the poor, particularly minorities.

#3) The burden is on the woman, if the woman is poor she may not have the resources to force the father to pay.

He was required (by Texas law) to pay child-support to my mother up until we were 18 (I am 29) to my mother who cheated on him; he still owes back pay on that and refuses to pay until they put a warrant out for his arrest.

My mother demonized him to us by crying about not knowing why he left her; she never once mentioned until 5 months ago that she cheated on him.

Dad regrets leaving us (his kids, not my mother) because it put a rift between us. We never knew the truth until recently when my mom let it slip in a conversation.

At this point I feel like he has been punished enough by the state of Texas for leaving my cheating mother.

Recently my eldest brother had a girl and my father has been in her life as much as he can and I'm incredibly happy for that (not jealous one bit) because at least my niece will have something my brother and I never had because he was soured by her behavior.

We grew up poor because of my mother's infidelity...

If someone is using a personal story with blaming statements as a means to make commentary about a more general topic of discussion, either the appropriateness of the blaming statements given the narrative must be just as subject to challenge as it would be if the narrative were a third-party news story and the whole style of argument of using such stories in a discussion needs to be viewed as out of bounds, otherwise you've created a specially privileged argument style for which only silence or agreement is allowed.

We need this for discussion quality because challenging someone on their intimate personal details typically makes them feel wounded where it already hurt, prompting a defensive attack and a flamewar. Also, because we can't know from internet comments what was really going on in someone's life, it's more intellectually honest.

There are other things one can do to signal that someone is not being attacked. You can rephrase a statement as a neutral question. You can lead with "In my experience," making the statement about yourself. You can say "Of course I can't judge what was going on in your situation, but" and return to a general case.

I agree with you that when someone makes blaming personal statements as if they had general force in an argument, most of us immediately sense that something's off. But such statements come from pain and pain never responds to argument, only acknowledgement.

You're a fine HN commenter and I think you know all this already, but maybe the above will help clarify something for others.

Would you be interested in essentially a mirror of HN's front page, but where you're free to say most things?

The mod criteria would be "If you get personal, or you're destructive to conversation, you're out." But conversely, uncomfortable ideas will be allowed.

I'm thinking we could also set up a Slack community for the site. If people have problems with the moderation, they can come chat about it openly.

The moderation here has been getting a bit stuffy, and maybe other people feel the same way. I don't know. If you're interested, shoot me an email and we can start hammering out a plan.

Unfortunately, I have no way of contacting you other than to post this here.

If my father had cheated on my mother I'm assuming it would still be his fault if she left him; that seems to be the gist of what you're getting at.

Once a cheater, always a cheater. We grew up poor because my mother cheated, not because of my father leaving.

And we grew up poor because my mother relied entirely upon my father for financial support and negated that benefit by cheating.

No, independently of your mother cheating on him, it's his fault for refusing to uphold his legal obligation to materially support his children.

Leaving the spouse is not the issue. (Leaving the children may be an issue, but to the extent it is it is at a minimum mitigated by fulfilling the legal support obligations a parent who is not raising their children has to those children.)

> If my father had cheated on my mother I'm assuming it would still be his fault if she left him

Whoever's fault leaving is, it would be his fault if he chose to refuse to meet his legal obligation to support his children.

> We grew up poor because my mother cheated, not because of my father leaving.

From your own description, the poverty was at least in large part because your father refused to pay legally-required child support after leaving you and your mother. Assuming that there was not a custody contest that you omitted in which your mother was awarded full custody, leaving children is not necessary with leaving their mother, however justified the latter is, and in any case, neither requires being a deadbeat on child support.

Accidents are only accidental in intent, not in results.

In some cases, the man who raped her.