Effectively they do get paid. In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income. Outside a marriage, mothers get child support.
The fact it's not taxed as "pay" is a bonus for mothers, not a downside!
It's weird how the myth persists that mothers "not getting paid" a taxable wage is some kind of negative.
... and half of asset appreciation, and in some cases (it varies) half of pension.
I will also add that it’s not just mothers. It’s any spouse. I’ve seen successful women come out on the raw end of this deal during divorce.
I mention this not as a grievance, rather just an observation that people who are married, both male and female, are sometimes surprised at asset allocation during a divorce with regards to “passive” investments and business ownership (e.g, a self-owned business that has grown).
What you're hitting on is that staying home to raise 1-2 kids is economically inefficient compared to working and sending the kids to a daycare, because the daycare can benefit from efficiencies of scale.
Translated to HN-world: "I'm going work on a FOSS project full-time!" World: "Great; we'll pay for your server! You won't lose a dime!" Me: "Uh, what about the income from the job I gave up?"
Providing your own daycare instead of working is a lifestyle choice, why does the opportunity cost of that choice have to be shouldered by someone else?
That’s some creative logic. Being a stay at home parent is a full-time job. If the stay at home parent were being paid, they’d...well...be paid. “Effective” payment isn’t helpful to a full time parent raising a child and losing out on wages they would otherwise get at a job that the economy values with a taxable wage.
I don't see the upside.
Which is fine with me, I don’t think that’s a problem that needs solving but you and others in this thread had implied otherwise.
? Having room and board for yourself and your child is nothing if not helpful.
I don't think we should push women into these job, but I don't think we should push men into those jobs either.
> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids
Actually, my kid's day-care provider does exactly this! In a few years, he'll have teachers doing the same.
Valuing work is complicated. Personally, I'd be happy to be a stay-at-home parent if finances made that easy, even if seemed a little thankless. It's not like I feel that the webshit I build all day long is really valuable.
If someone feels undervalued as a stay-at-home parent, it's probably because they feel stuck in that job, either because of lack of education, lack of available child care, or otherwise lack of jobs.
Are you suggesting that the father should pay the mother a salary for raising the kids? (Or same thing with the sexes reversed if it's the father raising the kid)
Isn't that just a more formal arrangement of a stay-at-home mother/father? The main difference would be: more financial independence to the stay-at-home party, which is good in my book, but I'm not sure if that's what you're suggesting.
Of course some people prefer to raise their kids themselves, but that seems more like an expensive lifestyle choice than a necessity.
The economy of scale isn't as big as one might like. Child care staff ratios for infants and toddlers are something like 1:3 to 1:4. Between that and the cost of compliance, licensing, insurance, and the inevitable scandals when deployed at scale, (If you have 1 million caregivers, you absolutely will have some number of murders or molestations. Unfortunate when a parent does it to their own child, but A Public Scandal when a government employee does it) you have got to start wondering if it's worth the hassle.
Or you can have mothers take care of their own children. Which has been the default of every human society for tens of thousands of years.
Paying people to be stay at home parents would make it a viable choice for a lot more people. It would also help reverse the trend of the fertility rate dropping below 2.1
Well, until they run out anyway.
Because she already collects a massive amount of utility associated with raising her own children. The economics of paying people to raise their own children doesn't make sense; the externality allocations are completely wrong. I'm sure you can imagine some of the perverse incentives that come into play.
A woman benefits from raising her own kids (with an associated opportunity cost in employment availability), and the father also benefits from her raising the kids (without the same opportunity cost), so the rational economic strategy is for the father to defray some of the opportunity costs to the mother. This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".
Well said.
The modern inclination to tear down tradition institution and then replace them with increasingly more damaging and convoluted schemes is an endless source of confusion to me. It's almost if we've become so arrogant that we assume if something has been done for generations that it must be wrong, which seems like the exact wrong assumption to make.
The modern notion of traditional parenting is about 60 years old. Before that, things were much less straightforward, unless you were rich, because the absense of modern machinery and whatnot meant that that often both parents had to work.
Now with the legal necessity of 24/7 adult supervision before they are 12, that is gone and as a result you have helicopter parenting making it a shit ton more work to do.
Indeed, the proverbial rose colored glasses. I think this is where a lot of conservatives get tripped up.
Being willing to make improvements is necessary to avoid stagnation, but it's equally important to remember change is not necessarily improvement (and often isn't).
This is deeply instinctive - if you don't feel this, most likely you have been deeply mindfucked by modern society. Evolution, obviously, ensures that you get rewarded with lots of utils for doing the single most important thing you can do from an evolutionary perspective.
I'm not saying you've done anything wrong; this isn't your fault. But just try to imagine someone from a healthy society (in the sense of "the society is not at risk of collapse") asking a question like "what, exactly, do I get out of having children?"
Even in unhealthy societies like ours, if you can convince people to raise children, they almost uniformly report higher life satisfaction (both vs people who don't have children and vs themselves before having children).
Why would women get paid to raise their own kids? You suggest it's because when done well, it has incredible value to society. What is that value to society? It's having functional, productive members. Women already reap the benefits of that by sharing society with other peoples' well raised children.
What I mean to say is that it's a web of mutual benefit. The gap is actually in all the people who don't have children, who are essentially free riders in this scheme, but that is offset by the fact that they pay taxes for things like schools, which they don't themselves consume, and lack of tax breaks that parents receive.
But we seem to want to be paid. It's interesting that socializing the payments seems to strike people as more freeing than just social obligation.
This seems like the kind of thinking that eventually requires payments to give up the thrill of killing each other.
It's not that we _want_ to be paid. It's that we _need_ to be paid, because in order to raise a child you need a stable source of critical things for many years:
- food & water
- shelter (and heat)
- clothing
- waste disposal
If I wanted to take several years entirely away from work to raise a child, I would still have to have those things. How can I afford those things if I am not getting paid?
It's not about valuing _being paid_, it's about valuing the things that are necessary to raise a child.
You tell me how to acquire those things without being paid, and then we can analyze while people value being paid more than the social obligations.
From savings or by having another family member work? Combinations of that worked for a very long time in human history.
The person I was responding to said that people were obsessed with getting paid versus the social obligations.
I was explaining why people who would want to stay at home might be obsessed about payment. It's a question that must be answered.
You provide some potential answers, but for the vast majority of young Americans these days having enough savings to raise a child by themselves without working is not in any way realistic.
Even for the "have another family work" plan, for many a single income isn't enough to support 2 adults and raising a child. The economy just doesn't make that viable for a large swath of the country.
I realize some people won't do that. But we're talking about tech CEOs, so these are people who have some control over their lives. If we re-normalized those social obligations, I think it would be better than transactionalizing it.
And it's not all-or-nothing. I've tried to arrange my life so that I can make enough money, but also spend a lot more of my time doing the things I value more than money.
What's even more interesting, upvalue work that is traditionally female, and you may see more men drawn to it, staying home, teaching etc.
Instead, those can be thankless jobs from a money standpoint, and only folks who sell their souls into a male centric hellhole of work environments (PhD life is silly, medical residencies are nuts etc) are rewarded and women are told to lean in.