My wife gets the dismissive smile and nod from career women whenever she answers their obligatory "what do you do for a living" question.
This makes her feel bad for raising our children.
This only lasts until I point out that these career women get the awesome privilege that men have enjoyed for hundreds of years: slaving away for some overseer, pushing paper in a cube and staring blankly at fluorescent lights, having distant relationships with your own offspring, and dealing with office politics for 30 years, then dropping dead.
Families also get the added benefit of having their children raised by a rotating crew of $10/hr wage slaves at some cut-rate daycare from infancy, in exchange for about what a 2nd house would cost, because dad isn't likely to want to stay home either.
The neighborhood also "benefits" by being an absolute ghost town during work hours, so people who are doing the work of raising children are left bereft of any sort of neighborhood support (remember when you could just let kids run wild outdoors, or your mom stopping next door for coffee?).
The fulfillment angle of no-parent society is pretty slim I think.
Raising kids is about the only fulfilling thing left in the world that anyone you know is likely to do. Families with no full time parent (mom or dad, mind you) is a bizarre and frightening development.
seriously, do you think that maybe different people are made happy by different things? i know men and women who have no interest in having a romantic relationship, let alone raising a family. do they occupy some horrible THX1148-style monochrome existence for fulfilling their lives by doing things?
Yes, for some. Come to think of it, spending time with the kids is probably the number one reason men downshift (by choice) as well.
What is complicated and not fully understood by me is how accurately we have accounted for women who voluntarily choose to downshift in all of the 'glass ceiling' statistics. I think that the glass ceiling is very real, but I just wonder how trustworthy the stats are. It's complicated.
It's very rational when you consider that it's consistently been shown that women are more likely (notice I said likely) to place a higher value on non-monetary compensation.
As most people with children will be able to tell you, all of those things are vapid and empty compared to spending time with your children. Perhaps many women choosing to stay home raising families instead of pursuing careers have found something more rewarding to do with their time.