You are splitting the cost though. Greater the time you spend on bread winning, and it always increases as work/fam responsibilities & fam size increase with time, less time you have on the home front. It makes a big diff(a real relief infact) if SO is full time manning that front.

This requires tremendous trust in the breadwinnner, though. Sexual competition is a reality, which is why infidelity happens. If the housewife/husband is deemed replaceable, then there is an implicit power differential between the breadwinner and house spouse, which opens the "lesser" half to abuse (physical, emotional, financial etc.). My recommendation to anyone considering house spousing is to have a contingency plan.

The most efficient solution for narcissism (i.e., abandonment of a non-breadwinning spouse) is not more narcissism (i.e., self-focused contingency planning). Unfortunately, in a highly individualistic (i.e., narcissistic) society, it may be the only one that is practical.

On a philosophical level I agree with you that it's not the answer. But I don't think contingency planning is narcissistic. Maybe I should define what a typical such plan looks like? To me it is simply having skills to become a breadwinner yourself should you need to. It doesn't need to be more than that. Ultimately however society needs more appreciation of how and why long-term monogamous relationships provide both individual and communal stability, and how the emotional/physical labor of house spousing provides value beyond immediate survival.

We largely agree. I think contingency planning is also needed for death of the breadwinner. Life insurance is always limited and sometimes not possible due to preexisting conditions. Thus, my objection is when distrust is the primary motivation for contingency planning.

That's why we have no fault divorce and community property laws in California at least . Evens out the power imbalance.

What an abysmal, cynical outlook this is.

> My recommendation to anyone considering house spousing is to have a contingency plan.

Relationships are about trust and vulnerability. If you're making fucking contingency plans, you're cheating at being in a relationship and don't belong in one.

My own advice would be that if you catch your spouse making contingency plans, see to it that their plan is executed as quickly and efficiently as possible. People that know they have a way out of trouble tend to do very nasty things before justifying their execution (same reason not to trust anyone of a citizenship you don't share). Get out of that relationship immediately while terms are good. The contingency will be executed by them under the worst of terms otherwise (expect to be provoked into violence or accused of spousal rape or worse, seemingly out of nowhere).

Yup things can/will get complicated but avoidance of risk doesnt solve the og problem of burnout. And with age/time/screwing up both sides learn that. There is probably no other way to build that trust.

I would point out that for many people the cost of paying for childcare during work hours is comparable to the income generated from said work. Those people have essentially no incentive to work unless they want to avoid their kids.

Even if it's a wash dollar wise, staying employed often means you get healthcare and retirement benefits AND the career progression that ideally comes with long term stable employment. Trying to hop back on the treadmill after a 5-10 year absence often has a huge opportunity cost on your lifetime earnings.

Also, people don't need to be ashamed for often wanting to do their own adult things with other adults. It does not make you a bad parent to not want to spend all your time with your children. Balance is super important, and I think many homemakers find it lacking. Also, children like to be with other children, not just boring adults, and it's actually not that straightforward to achieve that with no daycare / preschool time for them during the week.

Even if you were actually at a pure breakeven for the stay-at-home partner for the first year:

* Childcare costs decrease with age, and decrease substantially when your child reaches school age. Full-time childcare costs are typically only for the first 3-4 years of a child's life.

* Even if you break even in terms of take-home pay, a stay-at-home parent that was previously working might be missing out on things like 401K/retirement contributions.

* The opportunity costs to your career of taking 3-4 years off is enormous, and it's frequently difficult at best to return to work with similar pay/seniority as when you left after taking several years off (and might be effectively impossible if you've taken 10+ years off).

For working professionals, it's incredibly short-sighted to look at short term childcare costs vs take-home pay solely in terms of dollars, and it's silly to to say there is 'no incentive except avoiding your kids.' The incentive in terms of dollars and job prospects over the course of your career can be huge.

It seems to me that attempting to frame spending time with one's family as "incredibly short-sighted" is a perfect example of the "total-work" mentality the article decries. In that case, under what circumstances would you say a person shouldn't feel guilty about seeing their kids when they could be working?

You can choose to place a high value on spending time with one's family, and that's fine, but that's very different than making the "incredibly short-sighted" economic decision to quit your job because of very temporarily high childcare costs. For many people that decision is worth it, but everyone should be aware that the economic cost of it is actually quite high - relatively few if any professional careers can be 'put on hold' for 1-2 decades and then resumed without great difficulty.

If both partners work then:

- many more meals must be ordered in or eaten out instead of prepared from scratch

- transportation cost increases, more vehicles needed which means more gas more insurance more repairs or more transit fare and now both people sacrifice possibly hours of their day to commuting

- childcare services must be paid for and transportation arranged for them

- the choice of housing now has the additional constraint of being within commute distance for the second job (along with other resources that must be obtained outside the home now e.g. childcare) often meaning less choice and higher cost

- with both partners sharing household duties evenly, neither can take on additional work as needed whether that's taking work home, staying late or working a second job. Dividing the labor so one person manages the household and the other devotes their energies to earning money allows both to be more effective at what they do. Division of labor is the cornerstone of an advanced industrial society that makes everything possible.

> If both partners work then [...] more vehicles needed

I was thinking about the logistics of this the other day since one of our cars is down, I'm WFH with a SAHM and I hate the expense of having to maintain two cars. Maybe this is the time to downgrade to one (which will be followed by mandatory RTO, knowing my luck).

Being a housewife is Work. It's a full-time unpaid job that frequently involves bringing things to the home from outside of it. She's not my dog; if I took our only car to work, my wife doesn't just sit around awaiting my return or stop needing to go places. The kids still need to be brought to/from school (in California, this is at irregular times on irregular days for maximum exclusion). Sometimes they need to go to the doctor. Sometimes she needs to go to the doctor. Groceries need procurement.

She could take the bus, maybe. Then it's a discussion of which partner's role is critical enough to necessitate exclusive use of the car. Both sides are valid. Being a trailblazer doesn't mean shit if nobody's maintaining your path.

In past instances, I've left the car to her and just taken Uber to ad-hoc onsite work, but this is very unreliable (and expensive for short hops).

If you live in an American suburb, you need multiple vehicles regardless of employment status.

It depends. Lots of families need two cars -- but some just prefer it. And as with housing (and everything else), families can often make due with something smaller, older, etc. because it's cheaper.

There is this "modern" expectation of a lifestyle, but most of those things aren't _necessary_. There are lots of families which need two incomes to maintain the necessary stuff, but it's not the majority and few of them are reading HN.

and your second income is taxed at your marginal rate, to pay for a $1 of child care you need around $1.33 to $1.50 in income. Put another way, avoiding $1 in expenses is like earning up to $1.5 at work.

But the real issue is what the article points out, that this often leaves the stay at home parent “trapped” and dependent on the working spouse. What do you do when you’ve been out of the workforce 20+ years, kids out of the house (no child support), and you need to support yourself now?

I work, my wife is a homemaker with our kids. I love the fact that her work is not taxed. If she had a job, that labor would be taxed, and then the person who we would pay to watch our children would have their income taxed as well. Government would double-dip (triple-dip?) if my wife was working.

If the earner dies: life insurance

If the earner leaves: alimony

It's not like we haven't solved these problems before. Yes, we could improve legislation around this but the basic idea is that if you have a contract with a partner where one of you earns the income and the other does the work at home then part of that contract is to recompense the person who is not working if the one who is fails to live up to their side of the bargain for whatever reason.

Everyone's situation is different. I got 1 kid. I pay around $110/mo for childcare. No car. I pay around $100/mo for transport. I assume the kid's mum pays the same for transport. We're separated now, but she has a career because her CV isn't just housewifery.

I really can't get behind the money-saving arguments about food etc. (mostly in other comments even though my post is here.)

I mean, I buy meals during the day because I'm rich and lazy. Nothing's stopping me from storing leftover dinner in the fridge and taking it into work the next day.

But if I wanted unrealistic comparisons between food costs and employment, why not child care too: I save so much money and time by having my kid fed at daycare instead of having to feed him myself.

> Division of labor is the cornerstone of an advanced industrial society that makes everything possible.

I agree.

It would be absolutely crazy to split the workforce down the middle (housewife vs. everything else). It would be like if half the workforce was bakers or dentists.

The point is that a stay at home parent has more value than a single profession because two "labour units", if we must think of things this way to make it clear, are made less effective by having to practice their profession as well as maintain their home and raise their children. The argument in favour of a stay at home parent is that two working parents are made so ineffective that they are <50% capable as they were before forming a household so instead of 2 you now have less than 1 and in order to fix this one of them takes on all of the work of maintaining a household and raising the children while the other focuses their energies on their profession outside the home. This results in at least 1 full unit of labour but it may actually be greater than the average since the individual working outside the home may now be performing at a higher level since they don't even have to maintain the homemaking that a single person does. On top of that they gain the benefits of being in a stable relationship with a spouse and children and on top of that their relationship to both may be even better than other couples where both work. The person managing the household may even have a small participation in the labour force as mentioned in the article so you can add that to the total.