This seems pretty reductionist to me. Men can absolutely raise children. Husbands in heterosexual couples should absolutely be raising their children and not leaving the entire task of raising them to their wives. Gay men can also raise children. I don't think you meant to be disrespectful, but when you essentialize like this you end up putting women in a box where their role in society is defined by their biology, and you put men in a box where they feel like they can't and shouldn't participate in certain kinds of labor.
Beyond that, yes, men are perfectly capable of performing child rearing tasks. Note, of course, this does not negate the argument against a two income family. Having a society where one income can support a family means fathers can devote themselves to raising their children, and so can mothers. Or alternate roles. Or one full time career and one part time career.
Beyond that, most women strongly want to be with their babies. There was a NYT article a few years back about the boom of internet baby monitors, and it was kind of heartbreaking -- a bunch of women sitting at their desks glued to their baby monitors wishing they could be with their babies.
I think we've really fucked up as a society when "women can have kids and be with them" is considered strange or a luxury -- it should be the most natural thing in the world.
No profit in it, though.
Of course none of this stuff is critical, but I think for most people, the ideal scenario really is breastfeeding, straight from the breast -- and it's a shame that's so hard for so many to do in our society.
Just handwaving "but pumps!" really undermines how much effort this takes for women.
Still, the approach presumably should be more, not less, support for women who want (need?) to try this?
Our priorities as a society have been inverted in this area.
No, they have not. The states that protected abortion rights are also the states that offer paid parental leave and paid disability leave to new moms. And the states that restricted abortion rights are the states that offer zero parental leave.
A significant portion of US society supports helping new parents, and especially mothers. It does not have enough votes in the Senate though.
I then went on to quit work and stayed home to raise our daughter (she's now nearing 28 year old).
I'm a strong believer in having a stay-at-home parent, but this "women raise children" thing needs to stop.
But that doesn't change that the mother-child bond is a unique and special thing, and that there are real benefits to breast-feeding, straight from the breast.
And beyond, the simple fact is that many women really want to be with their babies.
It's misguided to pretend that there aren't biological realities underlying these preferences. We should try to tailor our policies to meet the desires of the most people possible.
(Not, of course, in a coercive way! If a mother would like to continue working and pump, then of course she should be supported in that. In past societies maybe this was the fight that needed to be fought, but now I think it's the opposite.)
The book “Lactivism” provides an entertaining account of recent history: https://www.amazon.com/Lactivism-Fundamentalists-Physicians-...
Only 30 years ago, the pendulum was fully swung in the direction of formula.
Having gone through the pregnancy gauntlet recently I've found
- There are many studies posited but no one ever talks about the 'n' or the replicability. The studies are almost always asking you to do something uncomfortable or be scared (amnio may cause a miscarriage; the best brain developing breastmilk is the feed btwn midnight and 6am; blah blah blah)
- There are so many people happy to tell women they should just stay home or if they dont they'll miss crucial moments or not develop their children's potential or even ability to love correctly. Oddly this is crucial for society and yet the US society provides near 0 support to make this happen
People happy to sit on their fat fannies and "supervise" the folks busting their asses to do all the work...yeah. That was old before the first pyramid was put built.
Not to mention that society is really hypocritical about it; demanding that women breastfeed, but also criticising them when they actually do so. Can't we give each other a bit more freedom to make our own decisions and trust that most people will be doing a pretty good job at it? Provide info, not judgement.
We should be adovcating for more parent-child bonding, however that happens; for more opportunities for parents to make whatever choices they wish to regarding the work/parenting issues during their child's early (entire?) life; for the normalization of public breastfeeding; for better parental leave policies; and more.
None of these things require pushing some point that raising children is naturally women's work (even if breastfeeding itself is).
It should be easy for women who wish to be with their babies and breast-feed them to do so.
It should also be easy for dads!
BTW, I'm about two weeks out from becoming a father. I only get 2 months paternity leave, but if I were the mother, I'd get 4! This seems unfair to me, but it's certainly better than if the policy were reversed.
It seems like there's just some built-in conflict between an intensely competitive capitalist society and the human needs of a family. I might do something like mandatory 4 years leave (in 1 year chunks) for all people, spread out from 20 to 40. You can spend that being with your kid, doing some sort of civic-project, or serving in the military.
Just spitballing'. Always fun to try to design a utopia. :-)
I have 2-month old and before he was born lot of people said to me that "dads can't do much in the first 6 months". I was like ok, we'll see how it goes.
After he was born, I quickly realize dads can absolutely do everything except feed the baby directly from the breast. Breastfeeding itself, depends on the baby and mom, is fairly quick, maybe like takes 15mins every few hours. That leaves about ~22 hours each dad can be part of the activities, like changing diapers, bathing, soothing, having the baby sleep on you, putting the baby to sleep, reading, changing clothes, singing etc.
This "dads can't do much", "there is just this bond with the mom" and "it's biology" seems like bullshit or an easy out from taking responsibility. The bond happens if you just spend time with the baby.
Society is making way too many excuses for men to avoid raising their children, and it really needs to stop.
The evidence is not at all overwhelming, and flies in the face of a couple of generations of formula fed people who turned out fine.
All anyone does by repeating that line is make people feel bad when they can’t or don’t want to breastfeed. Especially women.
Whoever wants to feed their baby breast milk or formula, do what you want. There’s enough anxiety in raising a child, we should be aware of when we might be increasing it in others for no good reason. GP could’ve supplemented their baby’s diet with formula while his wife was gone and everyone would’ve been fine.
Dad, when he actually spends time with kid is exactly the same bond. Really. I have seen that. There is nothing magical about mother-child bond. It is something that was unique in social setting where men are penalized for spending too much time with their kids. Or where men are expected to be disciplinarian after spending all the day outside of house. Or where dads were killed in a war.
Ideally, mothers would receive ample maternity leave to cover the breastfeeding period, fathers would receive ample paternity leave to cover the weeks immediately after birth and the period after the breastfeeding period ends, and both parents would be working part-time most of their careers.
Ultimately, dual-income has turned out to be an ugly bait-and-switch. The point was that women were more free, more independent, more able to develop themselves professionally, and families would be able to live more comfortably with the added income. Instead, it has often lead to families requiring two incomes to even be able to afford a house, mothers having to mix raising children while working while fathers still didn't do their part.
We should all be working a maximum of 24 hours a week by now. We were screwed out of these benefits and all the benefits of this increased productivity has gone to the rich instead of to working families.
Both my sibling and I, along with my wife and her siblings were formula fed. My kids were 100% formula-fed as well, because my wife decided she didn't want to waste her time pumping. Both generations are perfectly normal and healthy. We all caught COVID with only minimal symptoms.
Not having to breastfeed took an enormous amount of stress off my wife, and allowed us to split the work of raising our kids more efficiently
In Canada, I've heard that breastfeeding has been taken to a religious morality war, where some parents had to sneak in formula into the hospital because the mother couldn't either breastfeed properly or weren't producing enough, or simply didn't want to.
There are some advantages to breastfeeding and some disadvantages. I think the narrative of companies in the 3rd world trying to hook low-income families on formula should be considered a crime. But there's nothing inherently wrong with formula and it raises perfectly healthy children.
It also seems certain that there are advantages to being breast-fed. Exactly how strong these are is hard to stay -- as far as I know, all the research is observational, and so it becomes hard to tease out what is the effect of breast-feeding and what is just coming along for the ride (correlated w/ the type of person that prioritizes breast-feeding).
It's still a worthy goal to have a society that makes it easy for women who want to breast-feed to do so.
(And I hear you on the moralizing, which is obnoxious. Let the parents decide what is best for their baby and life situation; it is not anyone else's business.)
Unfortunately, they had a hard time getting their daughter to cooperate.
At their first post-natal checkup with their doctor, their daughter had not gained any weight since leaving the hospital. He told them to just feed her formula and don't worry about it. Apparently, the "lactation consultant" was not affiliated with the hospital in any way and this sort of thing was very common.
I find this to be a bizarre metric to use.
Is this true in all societies, or just societies like USA where most people live in car-centric suburbs isolated from any sense of community?
In Africa there are women who go back to work selling things in the town market shortly after their babies are born - with the baby strapped to their back and breast fed on demand. No need for daycare but mom can still work!
> In Africa there are women who go back to work selling things in the town market shortly after their babies are born - with the baby strapped to their back and breast fed on demand. No need for daycare but mom can still work!
I genuinely know much less about social structure in Africa. But I do know that 1 month old being strapped to back in the town market is more likely to get seriously sick - their immune systems are not strong yet. Meaning, this situation happens in places that have much bigger and serious social and health problems. And also, one other question is whether this mom would not picked daycare if she had that option. Moreover, while you can strap baby, you wont strap 4-5 years old and that means they spend a lot of time without supervision too.
Which is by the way origin of kindergarten - many 4 years old being unsupervised in German streets as both parents worked 12 hours a day in a factory. Which is default state whenever place is not rich, moms having a lot to do while kids do what they do (and it gets them into problems).
It has always been a luxury.
Unless they were wealthy enough to hire domestic servants or happened to participate in the postwar economic boom in the West that reduced the intensity of household domestic labor via household appliances, women of the past also got limited time with their children.
They were doing intense labor at home, in the fields, and as domestic servants for wealthier people. The same scenario happens today, as anyone who has hired in-home childcare knows.
Historically, precious few women could afford not to work, whether that work was compensated or not.
I agree that we should strive for an economic system that gives more parents more options to spend time raising their children, but we shouldn't couch that in faux-naturalistic ideals of what the situation was in the past.
People living this way of life are not working themeslves to the bone; they spend lots of time just hanging out and socializing.
I think the gruling overwork that most of us experience is more a feature of fuedal and then industrial culture, than a natural state of existence.
But still we are in real terms actually super rich, so it should be possible to somehow rearrange things to get back to that ideal, I think.
(Of course there are deeper issues here too -- just having a mom sit at home all alone with her baby is actually not very good either. Really, you want mom and baby to be integrated into a meaningful, rich cultural environment. And I think it would be nice if kids were more integrated into normal life, in general.)
Sure, but so are a lot of other features like modern medicine, communications, transportation, that come with industrial culture.
Assuming that you are talking about making the privilege of being a stay-at-home parent universal (independent of one's financial means), then I agree with the goal, but that is only realizable via industrial culture coupled with an income and wealth distribution that makes it possible for only 1 parent in the house to work.
It would also probably require people to live with less. When mothers were staying at home in the 1950s, the median home size was 983 square feet. Today it's about 2700 square feet.
All that extra space and the stuff it is filled with costs a lot, which is another reason that both parents need to work.
Plus, technology has made us way more capable -- productivity has increased a lot since the '50s, but wages have not kept up.
Which makes me think it's more of an organizational / incentives kind of thing, rather than a pure amount of wealth kind of thing.
(Something similar going on to the way in an purely competitive market, profits tend to get driven to 0, but with wages and quality of life, perhaps?)
Why not (even if only partially)? Biology at the individual level has physical consequences, which necessarily affects the available roles and roles chosen. It makes no sense to expect that this relationship is different in aggregate.
And until you can find a way for biological males to have a baby, biology is going to determine the role of childbearing.
Just look at the amount of suspicion that men draw in elementary teaching roles.
This may seem reasonable but it also often ends marriages, which is arguably a worse outcome for the child(ren).
Shouldn't women be allowed to take the first year of their child's life to provide for their long-term emotional development without jeopardizing their careers?
1. in the evolutionary sense of what human psychology has been selected for, including the increase of maternal prolactin and oxytocin during breastfeeding
Yes. Men should be allowed the same right.
One might insist on equivalent policies for the biological sexes on ideological grounds, e.g., men's rights, which is perfectly fine. However, from a logical perspective, arguing for males to have time off for the first year is jointly dependent on the biological argument (which applies to females) AND the ideological argument. Alternatively, from an empirical perspective, the research around males may exist and I am simply not aware of it.
I can’t tell if it’s concern trolling, poor english comprehension, or tradwife enthusiasts tipping their figurative trilbys to one another. It’s funny nonetheless!
Look at east vs west Germany. West Germany struggled with demand for social and child services during the pandemic, but the East never dismantled theirs, and it showed.
Care and support are jobs.
In such societies kindergartens are affordable and in the course of little over a year both parents have had a break from work, with full salary compensation, to get to know the new human.
The proof is that every state with paid parental leave and extended parental leave is led by Democrats.
And federal Republicans voted against paid parental leave in 2021’s build back better bill.
Exploiting this gap is how Trump got elected—remember that whole thing where the Republicans didn't even bother to generate an official party platform when he was running? That's because he threw theirs in the trash and just went with whatever ordinary Republicans chatting with other ordinary Republicans at a backyard BBQ say the government ought to do. Trying to come up with anything like their ordinary platform those years would have been pointless, or even harmful—explicitly adopt Trump's message, and you're in trouble if he ends up going down in flames and you have to backpedal, plus it'll piss off some donors; adopt your usual shit, and Trump's fans will be pissed off at you. So they just didn't make one, which was probably their best move under the circumstances.
Now, the follow-through may have been lacking and any lip-service toward that sort of thing by his hangers-on and imitators may be entirely disingenuous (as his probably was, too, at least most of it), but the gap between R voter and R official or de-facto official policy is real and it's big and Trump's messaging was laser-targeted at using that against his Republican opponents to get the initial nomination.
The "build a wall" stuff was lifted straight from that kind of actual-voter real-talk sort of thing. They literally want the government to just build a wall and assume they only haven't because of corruption and ill-intent among elected officials—it's obviously a good idea, from their perspective. On the campaign trail Trump even vaguely talked about "fixing healthcare" in ways that would surely have looked a lot like "socialized medicine"—because R voters support those policies when they're not being called "Socialist" or "Obamacare" or otherwise being demonized and mis-represented by their own media and politicians. Talk specifics, and they support them, talk about socialized medicine broadly and they tell you to fuck off to Venezuela with the other commies. That's another gap between R voter wishes and R party policy/actions.
Republican politicians also tend to support neo-liberal economic and trade policy, in deed if not in word, while their voters largely hate it (remember the tough-on-China talk and America-first trade policy and the trans-national trade regime skepticism and all that? That's Trump aiming at the party/voter gap, yet again)
"How can it possibly be that a major US political party can largely ignore the actual will of its own voters, for decades on end?" allow me to introduce you to our totally fucked-up electoral system and how it all but guarantees two viable parties at a time, both of which are also all but guaranteed to be disliked by a ton of their own voters. It's extremely bad. :-(
[EDIT] Hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if you could get a very high percentage—maybe not 51%, but a lot—of Republican voters to say they support a federal abortion law that's identical to Roe v. Wade's (maybe even without PP v Casey's modifications) effects—legalizing early abortion, but leaving laws about later-term abortion mostly up to the states—as long as you described what it did instead of short-handing it as "codifying Roe v. Wade" (indeed, you'd have to avoid mentioning that it had anything to do with Roe v Wade at all).
To be fair, we put it right in the name. It's not market-ism, or productivity-ism, or competition-ism, or higher-standard-of-living-ism. It's CAPITAL-ism.
Almost makes one think that they're not quite civilized, they just put economics above all and rely on exploiting other nations to prop the whole thing up.
We're supposed to be entering an age of automation. But now that the yoke of labor may be lifted from our shoulders finally, all anybody can talk about is "Full Employment".
I like your usage of "supposed." I feel like I have been seeing "Automation will replace <insert entity> in <made-up unit of time>" for the past 15 years or more.
I can't even get Siri to work 95% of the time let alone have her and her virtual brethren overtake society. I do not doubt it's possible one day, but assuming I am average, I have about 40 or so years left on this planet, and I doubt I will see it in that time.
I'm not trying to discredit the wonder innovations and milestones we have achieved so far, but it's the new "flying cars" to me.
You know what says "This country values parents who choose to have children?" Actual replacement of lost income potential and career progression.
Yes, in the US there are tax credits, SNAP, etc. None of these even come close to replacing the life income changes.
If we were serious about it, we'd have something approaching equivalent income replacement, GI Bill-style college funding, and child care cost support in every state*.
Having children should be an income neutral choice, not a burden.
* Side note: On all of these programs, I'd be in favor of supply-side support, rather than demand side reimbursement, given how inflationary reimbursement has been in the education market.
I always thought a low birth rate was a net-good: Something all countries are striving for. Like when your country drops below 2 births per woman, it has "made it" into the ranks of Developed Countries. Lower birth rate means fewer bodies to feed and a smaller environmental footprint. Sure, I guess it also means you have less "cannon fodder" both economically and militarily, but net net low birth rate countries are better off than high birth rate countries.
without placing a value judgement on the outcomes, this assertion is only true if the population decreases overall, which doesn't happen in the countries with permissive immigration policies. other countries with low birth rates and strict immigration policies have different problems, like declining property values, difficulty paying for pension/retirement obligations, shrinking gdp (even if gdp per capita is increasing), etc.
Only if you're willing to starve the elderly.
Consequently, future generations will always be paying for present day late life social support.
Because of this, negative population growth requires higher and higher present day tax burdens to continue paying equivalent benefits.
And population economics are not something you can paper over, because they're by definition on the order of your entire country's economic output.
Now that some countries actually have shrinking populations, everybody switched from panicking about overpopulation to panicking about having not enough working population to support too many elderly people. Immigration is the popular way out, but somehow I'd expect this shouldn't have been such a big problem in the first place. A couple of decades ago, women barely worked (paid, that is; they were probably overrepresented in unpaid elderly care).
I don't think a shrinking population should be this big a problem for a country. Sure, it probably requires some economic choices, just like everything does. But especially for densely populated countries dealing with housing shortages, a lower birth rate shouldn't have to be a bad thing.
An example of policy would be explicit subsidy of child support. Culture might be preferring to live in villages rather than cities. Economic structure might be lower housing costs for child-bearing families. More of France's immigrants may have been female, whereas Germany got mainly male immigrants/Gastarbeiters, etc.
France's total fertility rate fell below replacement around 1980 and it is still below replacement.[1] So if policy makes a difference, France is not trying hard enough.
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...
Our three kids are gonna cost us at least half a million dollars by the time they're all 18, between lost income, daycare costs, higher housing costs (not just a bigger house to maintain a similar comfort level, but also one in a much more expensive area than we might otherwise live in, since we have to care about school quality—an uncomfortably small house in a good school district still costs more than a huge house in a merely so-so district, let alone an actually-bad district, in our city), healthcare costs, transportation costs, plus all the smaller stuff like clothes, food, et c. And e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g optional is also far more expensive, like vacations.
And that's if we don't chip in for their post-secondary education or, like, give them a few grand to get their feet under them when they leave. Or buy them cars or any of that (we're not there yet, thank god). It could easily end up being closer to a million than a half-million, without even going nuts.
The tax credits don't even come close to covering it. Worse, because many of those expenses are front-loaded and so hit in our relatively-young years, the opportunity cost of that money ends up being enormous. The shadow cast on our future savings is way bigger than what we spend on them directly. We'd be retiring by 50, 55 at the latest if not for having kids, and also be able to spend more freely. As it is IDK if we're gonna be able to retire until we just can't work anymore.
Kids are basically financial suicide unless you're crazy-rich. Like they're great and all but god damn do I understand why people choose not to have them, even if they like the idea of having kids.
Or if you're very poor, then the more kids you have, the more you receive in benefits. Many poor people manage to have more kids than middle class people.
The middle class parent thinks "if I have another kid how will I pay for their college?" The poor parent just sends their kids to community college or if they're amazingly brilliant and get into Harvard, then they'll get a free full ride because they're poor.
But, the result of all this psychology and zero-sum competition (as housing/schools are) is that kids tend to eat all available income up to a point—and, indeed, if you cross a certain income threshold and can afford top-tier private school, there's another entire tier of potential and hard-to-convince-yourself-not-to-do spending above that.
A lot of developed countries have done a lot of things about it. A long time ago. It's mostly just the US that doesn't really seem to care about families, as far as I can tell. It's one of only 3 countries in the world that doesn't even guarantee paid maternity leave.
So a lot of men could in fact be raising a lot of babies and preschoolers. And yet they'll go on and on and on about the evils of capitalism, consumerism, modernity, anything, just so they don't have to do the hard work of raising their own kids.
> and both partners have equal responsibilities inside the home (kids, cooking, cleaning, bill paying, whatever)
So each task has to be split completely equally between each partner, to the hour? To the minute?
Can one spouse have a full time 40 hour / week job and the other a part time 20 hour / week job?
What about a high paying high stress 60 hour / week job and a 40 hour / week job?
Are you going to dictate the morally acceptable parameters of everyones relationship?
> That person needs a social outlet, a part-time job, something, whether they realize it or not.
This is a much less extreme position and I think hard to disagree with. I think the mythical era of the Homemaking Wife and Mother of the 1950s, the wives staying at home still had a lot of social outlets and interactions with people than they do today. Which speaks to the endemic isolation of our current culture.
>Forcing 2 household incomes was/is awful for a healthy society
Who is doing the forcing here? Many women wanted to enter the workforce. Some didn't want to enter the workforce. Some were forced by their situation or by economic changes, but it isn't like someone on HN was holding a gun to their head telling them to get a job, so I'm a little unclear on your lamentation here.
>Raising children should be regarded as one of the most important things a woman can do
Um, say what? Yeah, biology is amazing stuff. I'm in awe of women on every level. But your comment here is a bit dogwistling - are you intending for this to sound as misogynistic as many of us are reading it? Women who choose to not have children are just as amazing when they choose whatever path they choose.
>I’m not sure how western society will continue if we view raising a child instead of having a career as “stepping up”. It’s certainly disrespectful to all the mothers of our future.
Dude, what? Read back what I wrote - my point, which is well documented in many places - is the way women in our modern era are not only the predominant child-care givers, but also most likely to attend to household duties (cooking, cleaning, etc), and more and more are also the primary breadwinners. If that isn't stepping up in a big way, I don't know what else to call it. Is being a stay-at-home-mom not also commendable and deserving of respect? Absolutely. But your message seems to be one of dog whistling for the bad-old days of the past.
> Who is doing the forcing here?
It's called the two income trap[1]. Back when it was traditional that one person worked, the market recognized this reality and prices of everything made it possible to live off of one income. Then, slowly we started seeing more and more two-income families. Two-income families could bear to spend more on everything, so the market responded by adjusting costs higher. Soon, it became difficult, then impossible for a family to survive on one income, so then everyone had to go two-income. Now, the same standard of living we once could achieve on one income, requires two incomes. We've doubled the workforce but gained nothing in terms of standard of living.
-- That the idea that if they could be SAHMs, every woman would pick that route is utterly misguided. Some women would choose that, others would choose careers, some would do both.
-- That every family will make the choice of who is employed outside the home on their own. My ex-wife didn't work outside the home for many years (by her choice not mine). I know many couples with only a single breadwinner. So yes - the two-income trap is a real thing, but it isn't like it was suddenly law that every able-bodied adult had to enter the workforce.
No. Back when there was class power sufficient for working families to withdraw one partner from the labor market, they did so. Then that power eroded, and they were forced to send the second partner into the workforce. This also involved a wave of inflation that was never reversed for housing, healthcare, education, or energy prices.
So you answered your own question.
> Read back what I wrote - my point, which is well documented in many places - is the way women in our modern era are not only the predominant child-care givers, but also most likely to attend to household duties (cooking, cleaning, etc), and more and more are also the primary breadwinners.
That contradicts the data I've seen cited, which found that men perform more paid work and women perform more work in the home, but the total number of hours they work is basically the same.
Basic human biology is not taught in schools.
This is massively insulting to men. I'm personally massively insulted by it, having shared custody 50/50 with my ex and certainly done as much to raise my son as she has.
> I’m not sure how western society will continue
Birth rates are below replacement everywhere in the world except sub-Saharan Africa, and declining in sub-Saharan Africa too. Any notion that the low birth rate is a phenomenon that can be ascribed to cultural factors in the west is not supported by data.
This is as backwards as saying that women should not work and care for the house. If a woman wants to work and build a career let her, and if a couple wants to DINK, let them. Replacement level is a myth and a danger in a world choking up with our waste.
> Raising children should be regarded as one of the most important things a woman can do because they’re the only ones that can do it.
Yeah, you think of them as walking uteruses.
And if a woman wants to be a homemaker and focus on molding the next generation?
Yeah, it would be nice of society valued child raising more. But, it actually did not and instead the caregivers were often in bad or impossible situations.
Oh shove off. My dad by himself for years absolutely raised us without my biological mother in the picture at all. Men can and should be raising children too.
Another great book that covers more of the science in depth is The Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel [2].
Sounds extreme? Read the books (and others) yourself and see what conclusions you reach.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Your-Kids-Parents-Matter/dp/0375... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Developing-Mind-Third-Relationships-I...
People want to have their cake and eat it too, and I suspect by the animosity a lot of younger people have for the older generation that it isn't working out as well as they'd hoped.
Forcing 2 household incomes was/is awful for a healthy society. Women are the only humans that can produce children and they have to do it during a relatively short time window - especially if we want to reproduce at replacement level. Raising children should be regarded as one of the most important things a woman can do because they’re the only ones that can do it.
I’m not sure how western society will continue if we view raising a child instead of having a career as “stepping up”. It’s certainly disrespectful to all the mothers of our future.