Similar experience for us. Wife was basically surrounded by nannies and there wasn’t a ton of community support, at least not nearly as much as there used to be for my mother. I assume this varies based on location (not all communities can afford nannies).

It’s just economics IMO. It’s mostly double income now.

And if she had picked career, she would also have payed that price.

Men only pay it when choosing stay-at-home dads.

It's literally insane that people would consider working at a company to be more important than someone raising their own children instead of paying someone else to raise them for most of the day. I'm thankful the mother of my children could stay at home with them while I worked.

In the US I think, for me personally, its less about the work/career itself being more important than raising the kids (because it's definitely not, don't get me wrong). Moreso is the issue of financial opportunity and stability. Much of society and decent living standards today _demands_ dual income households. Permantently risking half of that dual income is terrifying.

Having been through this, I think some of it is a little jealousy/sour grapes from the 2 income couples who have to work to pay for all their stuff.

By your own admission you chose work instead of raising your own children. Why is that different?

> women are much more looked down on for choosing family over career

I don't doubt this at all, at least in certain circles. I suspect it's not limited to small circles, either. My wife's office culture is somewhat accepting of women leaving to raise families, but many of the women in management have totally forgone that option or have/had their kids in daycare very, very early on. I'm certainly not judging as I have no idea why, or what would necessitate that, or if it's necessarily good or bad. It's too complicated to judge in any meaningful way.

It certainly generates expectations and pressures though, and they're very harmful to people like my wife. Many of the women my wife has talked to feel distinctly anxious about managing their family life with women like that in charge. Further, many of the men in management are quite old and tend to think of leaving to raise a family as a distinct lack of commitment to the work – something which gets you excluded from "serious" work like field deployments where high reliability and commitment is considered crucial to the role.

Many women are already excluded from much of field work because some older dudes think women aren't strong enough to make the work safe. For example, under-water installations of equipment are almost exclusively performed by men because the men running the deployments believe a woman would be incapable of supporting a man if his safety was compromised. As such, the women on the team who want to progress need to fully commit in all other possible ways in order to appear viable. Leaving to have kids is essentially 3 strikes at once against your reputation in field work.

It's tough to watch.

Depends heavily on your social group. If your social group are all college educated liberals then I’d expect this. If they were conservative MRS degree holders or lower income they’d likely envy your wife