> I know several parents that live close to their extended family and get help watching and raising their kids all the time.

Anecdotal evidence is a fallacy.

It's equivalent to saying that "smoking a pack each day doesn't kill you because my grandfather smoked until he was 97." As ridiculous as that sounds compared to what you're saying, they are nonetheless equal in terms of evidence.

All I said was that it's possible, I'm not arguing that it happens all the time. I know plenty of people that don't live near their families too.

To say something is possible, all it takes is one result, in which an anecdote is fine. Someone providing an anecdote doesn't guarantee a fallacy in all cases.

It's a choice for people to move away from their safety nets (unless bad things happen to their families, and I certainly know some people who have grown up in broken homes. I dated a few people in that situation). It's not always a good choice, or the best choice, but it's still a choice.

The parent only provided a single anecdote to "show" how things worked in Italy as well. I was just showing how his anecdote wasn't enough evidence to prove his point that things work differently in Italy compared to the US.

Not everyone has the privilege of choosing where to live, or even the possibility of remote work. People go where they can find work, and this often forces someone away from their support network. The cost of having a national labor market is that you can't rely on locally available jobs to match the locally available labor force.

Some lucky person might get the local job that matches their skills, but the 10 other people looking for the same job will be forced to move.

As someone who works for a lot less money than I could be making and in an industry I am not excited about in the least (insurance...technically business process outsourcing but our clients are all insurance companies), I don't know about the word forced. I have been choosing a suboptimal career so I can be near my support network. It's hard sometimes, really hard, especially knowing I could easily be making $100k+ more than I'm making right now and working on something I care about at least a little bit more, but I am making that choice.

I realize it can be extra difficult in some markets. I'm at least near a metropolitan area, so there's some jobs (hardly any that excite me, but there are some). I've worked plenty of shitty jobs in my life and nowhere near the software dev world in order to stay in my hometown . Unless the job market completely dries up in your town, it's a choice that can be made.

It's similar to all the people who get majors in humanities or psychology or marketing and then end up working as a barista at Starbucks once they graduate. It's far from ideal, but sometimes people really don't want to move across the country for their jobs (or can't).

Again, I'm not saying it's a great choice, or the right choice to stay near your support network necessarily. I haven't lived away from them so I don't have any idea firsthand. But I think it's a bit myopic to think you are forced to always go wherever the maximum amount of jobs or money to be made is, support network be damned.

I don't think one is always forced, but I think there is always someone who is forced. As you said yourself, it could be even harder for someone else. If you take the barista job, someone else isn't going to get it. And is a barista job actually going to provide maternity benefits or pay enough to raise a child? "Maybe sometimes" doesn't make a good national policy.

Do you feel that the sacrifice you have made to stay near your support network is worth the value of your support network? By which I mean, if you had a child, is your support network wealthy enough to provide the resources to help you raise that child? For many people, their support network is itself getting squeezed. What do you do if your friends and relatives themselves have to work 60 hours a week and aren't available to help watch your baby while you work?

I don't currently have a child but in the next two or three years I am planning to have one. Other people in the family have had children recently, though, and I am seeing how they are being helped out and they're getting a lot of assistance, including free babysitting, which by itself is crazy expensive (can be more expensive than one person's income nowadays, which is why some people are becoming stay at home parents now).

I also don't know how I'd be able to afford buying a house if I moved to somewhere like Silicon Valley, whereas I've bought a home here, and I'd rather not go back to renting if I can help it.

Also, one of my professional hobbies is board game design and I have built up a pretty good local network for playtesting and have gotten to know several designers and publishers in the area (even got my first game signed), plus I am within driving distance of the two of the biggest game conventions in the US, where I can network even further, so that's another factor keeping me away from the west coast.

So there are other unrelated factors that are influencing the decision, it's not a total black and white affair. Although I was still making the decision to stick around even before these were a thing.

I do agree with you that people's support networks are probably getting squeezed more than in the past (income inequality is on the rise, tuition, health expenses, etc are skyrocketing, so everyone is getting squeezed). I did say it's not necessarily the best decision for someone to make. It might not even be the best decision for me to make. But I'm still doing it, and I see tons of people do it every day, especially once they have families. I also see tons of people choose to move away from their networks, and again that may be the best thing to do, I just don't think sticking around should be assumed to be the wrong decision in pretty much all cases for the country as a whole, which seemed to be the assumption that was made.

I think the problem is precisely that society is being squeezed to the point that many people's support networks are breaking down, forcing them into moving to keep up with labor demand, for the sake of keeping labor supply cheep and powerless in the market. We are being offered a perverse choice at the outset, and being resistant to that coercive influence is the form that privilege takes. For the modestly privileged it's a difficult choice, and for the very privileged it's an easy choice.

> Except for the long period of paid maternity leave, there's no reason someone in the US couldn't have what the Italian woman has. I know several parents that live close to their extended family and get help watching and raising their kids all the time.

This is the part about which we disagree. You are generalizing from several people you know to say there is no reason someone else can't do it. The reason is that not everyone is lucky enough to know the kind of people you do. When you say "someone" it sounds like you really mean just yourself.

Fair enough. I guess using the words 'no reason' went a bit too far. I didn't realize I had done that. Afterwards I repeatedly said that for some people it might not be the best decision for them to make, though, so for me to assert that, clearly there must be some reasons for those people to decide otherwise.

Yeah the maternity leave situation is more structural than the extended family situation for sure. However I'd argue that the fact that people in the US tend to move farther for work stems from the same societal values that result in the lack of political will to enact mandatory paid parental leave.

Well, considering the entirety of the landmass of Italy is approximately the same size as the state of California, it's not really a surprise that Americans tend to move farther away. If Italy was the same size as the US, its centers of industry would probably be much further spaced out as well, as it is in the US.

That would have been more of an argument before the EU. Europeans have freedom of movement within the EEA, so Italy vs US is not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

Of course it's not apples to apples, that's kind of my point. The parent was the one trying to compare Italy to the US.

But for the sake of argument, I don't know to what extent Italians move great distances compared to the US, but I would imagine that most people tend to want to stay stick within their culture if they can get away with it. At least their primary spoken language.

The US provides a large landmass full of pretty much the same culture, same language, etc, somewhat divided between rural vs urban or conservative vs liberal, whereas Italians wanting to speak Italian and live among mostly Italians are going to have fewer options in the EU to choose from.

And I have no idea where the centers of industry are in Europe in general or Italy in specific, so I could not venture a guess as to how far apart they are. But if someone in Italy wants to stay in Italy and work in Italy, they have to go somewhere. And the furthest they can go is about the same distance as the state of California.