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.
> 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
Here you talk about the "career of raising children"
> only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed
And then you proceed to justify it with an activity that on average probably lasts for about a year and can in large part be made compatible with a professional life. The average SV hacker brags about taking longer sabbaticals than this.
After 20 years, compare the control with those families that successful follows the trial (and for fun, throw in people who take sabbaticals as a third group) and see the results. Have poll questions about the size of social support networks, social status, income, carer, stress, perception of self worth, and so on. Last make a follow up in 50 years for life span and final carer, pensions and social support networks.
I have some predictions for all of those, backed by the research I have seen so far, but it would make for a very interesting read if such study would be made.
Children take an enormous amount of time and money to raise. And the amount of time and money we spend raising our children has increased significantly, as the age of maturity continues to increase (anecdotally this has gone well past 18 years old now, it seems children on average are being taken care of by their parents well into their 20s now). Someone in the family needs to be able to get home to make dinner every night. If you mostly can't travel for your company, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you can't stay past 5 oclock without it being an issue that needs to be planned for, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you get called away from an important meeting because your child is sent home from school with a cold... It's reasonable for employers to pay more to employees which can offer a higher level of service and flexibility and accommodation for work schedule and travel requirements.
One (or more) parental figures in the household need to elect to be on-call, and whoever makes that choice is going to see less outside income because of it. Equality doesn't mean that men and women need to make the same choices, just that a man and woman who do make the same choice should see the same outcome. What the statistics are showing us is merely that men and women, on average, tend to have different preferences and make different choices.
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.)
Most probably downvoted by men who refuse to acknowledge the value provided by unremunerated work to society.
> unrenumerated - you mean unremunerated, right?
(I'm what traditional/conservative society would call a "man")
If caregiving were split father-primary or mother-primary 50/50 among families, I'd expect we'd see the pay gap drop.
(Unfortunately, I suspect that because of gains from specialization, doing something more elaborate like both parents juggling career and childcare equally leads to net-worse outcomes in terms of both care given and revenue for household).
Is the best plan, to make money, then to pay other people to raise your children?
>The presence of children is associated with less accumulated job experience, more career interruptions, shorter work hours, and substantial earnings declines for female but not for male MBAs.
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/dynamics_of_th...
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-...
If what you claim is true the entire country of Sweden should show adverse affects. It simply does not.
http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001
thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/familyfacts/briefs/FF_Brief_43.pdf
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 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... 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 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-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.
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.
Can you give me a few links on this? Our child is in daycare, and we both work.
http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-08554-001
thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/familyfacts/briefs/FF_Brief_43.pdf
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?
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.
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.