> The problem of childcare cost is unsolvable with women at work, it's as simple as that.
What kind of nonsense is this?
One in six women never go on to have children, it's great news that these women's access to the labour market has improved.
Second, childcare ratios aren't 1 to 1. In fact they're about 1 to 4 for babies <1 year, 1 to 10 for 5 year olds, and 1 to 12 at school age. Suppose all women had children (they don't), society still greatly benefits from the efficiency of a childcare ratio as high as 1:12 as opposed to women caring for their child 1:1.
Third, children aren't permanently children, and certainly not permanently babies. The first few years requires a lot of parental or private childcare, but afterwards kids mostly go to school for most of the day. A woman will have at least 45 years between adulthood and retirement and most of that kids won't need constant parental care like the first few years. Making sure women stay active in the labour force (even part-time) will greatly help their chances in the labour market throughout their career.
Fourth, I see no reason why we're speaking about women rather than about parents. Providing income and childcare are shared responsibilities. It's fine to arrange it in your own family as you wish, but society shouldn't speak about these topics as if they should only apply to women.
I disagree with the ratio argument you've proposed, I'm sorry 1 carer for 12 toddlers is undeseriable. Ask any stay-at-home moms how it goes when they get their 3rd kid. And a carer will never care as much as a parent, so 1 to 12 is surely compromising on the children well being.
I would gladly consider parents rather than women, but for the vast majority of human history it appears that females have been rather focusing on taking care of home and children. Things can be arranged differently, but there are surely some deep rooted reasons as to the adoption of the role fulfilled by women for so long, and it must have shown superiority over having men take that role since it has survived across very different cultures.
We aren't hunter gatherers, we are even past the sedentary model that organised societies for millenia, so models can and better be questioned, but the childcare dead end needs to be looked at the way it is. It is not working.
Yes children grow up, I give you that. And of course it is natural for women who were mostly taking care of their own children to find an occupation, work is one. My comment was in the context of the child care chaos we've created. Not in the context of trying to hijack the thread into claiming women should not be in the workplace.
If women drop out of the workforce, are employers suddenly going to start doubling salaries so household income will stay the same? If not, then this isn't really a problem with gender roles, it doesn't seem.
It sounds to me like the thread of logic you're following is:
- Women have started working more, so child care is harder
- Child care costs went up during the pandemic, so more workers of all genders are staying home to care for their children directly
- Therefore, there's a labor shortage.
Well, the obvious conclusion from that thread of logic is that employers apparently need women to work in order for the economy to keep functioning, and if they stop working and stop sending their kids to daycare then there'll be a labor shortage.
If you don't have a plan to fix that problem, then complaining about gender roles seems kind of useless. If you're worried about the direction of childcare and you think more women should be in that role, then shouldn't you be happy that more people are staying home now to take care of their kids, and that this is forcing the market to adjust salaries to meet the new numbers of available workers?
You can't both have your cake and eat it, you can't be upset that women aren't staying home to look after their kids and upset that there are fewer available workers to hire once parents start staying home to watch their kids.
Taken in reverse, that's pretty much what happened when women entered the workforce in large numbers. It now generally takes two incomes to support a household, where it used to take one. (Yes, the standard of living and expectations in general are higher these days, but still.)
At least you got a few things right. Yes, women have been working "more" and it has created the difficulty to get their children proper care. It's rather logical. You can add to that it is not just women's problem. It's men's too. It is our problem : we have a model that cannot solve an absolute road block: if women work, and get equal pay, then childcare become out of reach to a large portion of the population. Unless you increase the kids to carer ratio of course, or build robots as carer. I think the issue with the work arounds are rather obvious. Or maybe not since I've only commented with simple logical critics but many won't cease to conceive a society with women taking care of their children until a proven solution comes along.
I don't have a plan to fix that problem, no. That's why I blame the dogma that introduced the problem in the first place. And I refer to the previous model that worked for millenia, which is a gender based role system. It doesn't have to be that way, but sure let's consider any way, but I don't see why criticising today's model and referring to one that worked is useless.
It seems like it's directly addressing a problem you have with the current state of child-rearing, and that in order to move to the model you prefer, businesses necessarily need to get used to the fact that fewer people are going to apply for jobs and that they'll have to pay workers more.
This should be a good thing as far as you're concerned, right?
Women have two heavy drivers for leaving the workforce - pregnancy/early childhood (age 20-35) and caregiving (45-60). This is a big deal, as when you lose a skilled attorney, engineer, or product manager, it’s difficult to replace them.
Offering work flexibility was projected to reduce this attrition by 30-50% depending on occupational category.
Certainly, my wife and I have ~semi-annual conversations on whether our lifestyle still makes sense (2 parents working, 2 kids under 5 in daycare:). There's definitely room to discuss that on societal level too. But there's no immediate assumption that my wife would necessarily be the one to quit work and spend extra time with kids - we're both engaged parents, both have our strengths and weaknesses, and once breastfeeding stage was complete both equally capable of parenting; and at the same time have both been career oriented and hold very successful positions.
in short:
"Are we as society on average supporting the model of two parents working" - a reasonable even crucial discussion to have.
"Should women be working" - hopefully settled a long time ago and anybody still questioning this will seem regressive at least, misogynistic more likely :-/
If I had to pick one point - it's that absolutely, yes, freedom is great, options are great. We HAVE the social and legal freedom to choose what lifestyle and combination makes the most sense for our family. And we weigh all the pros and cons and think of short and long term benefits and then have that discussion again few months later to see if anything has changed. We are lucky, blessed and privileged, on many different levels. So I don't feel picked on; I only wish more people here and around the world had the freedom, support and opportunities my wife and I have.
(as others have pointed out, daycare is not necessarily a bad thing. It's staffed by certified professionals who specialize in teaching kids - whereas let's be honest I'm just making it up as a parent. It's also great opportunity to socialize and make friends outside of their family. We don't see daycare as a downside - we see it as opportunity for our kids to get diverse experience between family and friends. As I said discussions revolve around all the many factors and options but certainly does not start from "daycare is bad" stance)
For what it's worth, everything I remember from daycare/preschool through elementary school was that it was a blast. Being home with just one parent instead of being/playing with other kids all day would've been way worse. Look at villages in developing nations: the young kids there run in packs, with free rein of everything, and are having an absolutely great time.
The only problem here is the ‘mediocre’ upbringing. My daughter is in a daycare where she is learning Spanish words/phrases in addition to English.
My daughter will be 2 in December and the daycare has her recognizing most letters, numbers, colors and shapes through dedicated practice. She uses tongs and spoons to practice picking up items and separating them by color or by number ‘grab 4 purple fuzz balls!’
These are teaching programs I would never have thought of at her age. I’d just point to fingers and toes and count to 10 or sing the ABC’s.
My daycare printed out paper with every letter and asks her to grab the letters of her name. Or she has an image with lower case letters on it and she asks my daughter to match the upper case letters out of a pile.
Long story short, raising kids newborn to 5 is a specialized skill just like teaching 5 to whatever, and society can benefit from having better educators for our children than what random adults turn out to be.
It would be great if we could come up with a socially supported system that raised the standard of child-care, so that every child gets the same treatment as your daughter.
I think the debate hasn't been settled though. It wasn't so long ago that women were, for the most part, prioritising being a successful housewives rather than their careers. Surely they had little to no choice since society expected just that from them. I wouldn't argue that the pressure wasn't forcing their hands, but was a model where the roles were gender defined. The good thing with clearly defined roles for something as challenging as being a parent is that one can work towards developing the required abilities to become an adult well equipped when family comes around.
I do see your point though. Your parental situation is not a rarety any longer, a gender based role assignment can't de facto be most adequate.
I don't have a desire to regress. It does seem to me we have regressed though. We created created society of kids at day care then schools, and are only starting to see the contradictions that come with that.
If the norm was instead working 2/3 days a week for less pay, there would be less money to spend on houses, so prices would come down (because the money that's charged is what can be afforded)
But part time jobs are nowhere near as common as full time jobs - especially for professionals.
Having parents looking after kids is a far better solution than outsourcing parenting to an external company, but it's far less profitable, and reduces things like GDP and stock markets, which is bad.
I don't necessarily agree with this. If the people/company that is looking after the children can do a good job, then it's far more efficient to have multiple children per person (company) vs 1-2 per person (parent). Plus (some of) the people that work for the company generally have an education that supports good developmental growth for the children under their care.
We could have both parents work part-time, and make everyone happy. But we want the GDP to go up, not down, throw more people and hours into the system, at the expense of children (our future they say) well-being.
IIR from the Pew Research Foundation on Family in the United States, less than fifty percent of all children in the US have two married parents, across all demographics and education levels, minus the one-percent highest income bracket.
lots of people in the city here with children, almost entirely the women.. the men are out of the picture for lots of reasons.. a non-zero percentage of young children have not met their biological father. The dental hygenist told me a month ago she has five kids of various ages and their father "lost his green card" and is gone.. she was cheerful and matter-of-fact. A plain spoken man in his fifties told me he has five children with three women and he never married any of them. This is not "terrible" it is true in his own words, he complains about the women and changes the subject.
Thanks for pointing out the separation rates. It would be misogynistic to dare considering a correlation between women not prioritising being a housewives over a career and men getting less interested in sticking around.
No, but where there are 2 parents involved in the child's birth (most cases), we _should_ have the expectation that both of those parents contribute to raising the child, barring edge cases.
colleagues - different can mean really different. Even sophisticated people don't see it .. reality speaks in its own ways
Universal or managed childcare - like health care - is one of those things that is a massive drag on the economy if it isn't provided.
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/childcare-a...
I do not know why, but they have a 2.4 fertility rate, could be related to an influx of women from poor countries (which in turn might not participate in the workforce, confirming what you state).
What should have been a great deal turned into a terrible deal. Unequal pay meant that initially, men didn't want to work any less when their wives started working, rising housing costs and child care ate up pretty much all the extra income, and stagnating wages meant that even as the pay gap closed, households still weren't getting ahead. We're overworked and underpaid, and employers just got more productivity for the same money as before.
We should go to a 24 hour working week.
It has nothing to do with genders - it has to do with the carrying cost of a household nowadays is tied to dual incomes (+ housing and health care costs have eaten up a lot of surplus income)
Statistics show you are right, evolutionary biology says you are right.
Statistics show the combined result of nature and nurture. How would you even begin to design an ethical study that could prove causation?
There's very little reason to think "statistics and evolutionary biology convergence" reveals any truths in this case. The only conclusion to draw here is that confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
At a cynical minimum it wastes tremendous resources. I want smart, competent, engaged women to have children. I also want them to choose how to direct their considerable energies as they see fit.
If you select childcare alone you bias towards those can easily have children which can foster resentment and opposition for tax based support. We already do this a bit where everyone pays for for public schooling regardless to if they have children or not and we also subsidize parents further by allowing them to be claimed as dependents.
Let's not keep this limited and make it so anyone wanting a child through a socially acceptable method be able to afford them long term since ultimately that's more generically what we're taking about.
So you're saying that the general progression away from the patriarchy wasn't evidence-based?
We are waking up to the fact this model cannot work for the overall population. It has been promoted by those who would greatly benefit from having everyone at work, and echoed by those who would somewhat benefit, and echoed more times all the way down to those who had everything to loose.
The problem of childcare cost is unsolvable with women at work, it's as simple as that. At best the average working woman will pay the same as she earns to afford full time child care. But if tax is taken into account, then it won't cover it. Or we squeeze more staff per child.
I think it will take some more time for most of us to come around to the reality of a model doomed to fail.