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).
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.