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.