I don't understand why we want a society where everyone is trying to both parent and work full time. Specialization is a powerful tool. Speaking personally it makes a lot more sense for my wife to stay home and have primary responsibility for raising our kids and managing our household while I focus on my career. Implicit in this discussion is that the woman who choose flexibility and child-rearing options are oppressed or less than and it's not the case in reality.
I don't think people want it, but it has become a bit of a necessity due to the widening income gap and stagnant wages. Used to be middle America could afford to have one parent stay home and job stability was much better.
These days both parents need to work to have a hope of affording rent/mortgage, and job stability is a thing of the past so to have two bread winners substantially reduces the risk of being completely out of an income or health insurance.
Specialization is indeed a powerful tool, but in this case it is a lower priority than security and shelter.
The problem is that we're forcing women to specialize in child-rearing, which is not economically valued or rewarded, and men to specialize in earning income, which wields huge social and economic power. And the reason this happens is that men withhold their parenting labour, and women are forced to pick up the slack.
It's just like the feminist saying... "If men got pregnant, abortion would be available free of charge and without restriction in every town and city on earth." Women get stuck with this unrewarded and devalued specialized role.
> we're forcing women to specialize in child-rearing
I see no evidence of any force being applied. Women are free to chose their own relationship types same as men. Exceptionally few choose to be breadwinner supporting a stay at home father. Vastly more choose to be stay at home mom married to an income earning dad.
I actually think this is a mirror image of "companies don't hire women / because there aren't enough qualified women!" discussion.
I think there is healthy demand from women to marry a stay at home father, but not enough supply of men who prepared to be a stay at home father from a young age, dreaming about it, excellent at cooking and homemaking, etc. Pipeline needs to be fixed before stay at home fathers can be common.
And there is a bit of a game-theoretic problem here. As a guy, I've dreamed about being a father and raising kids since I was young, but for me the path to that always seemed to require getting a well-paying job.
Also, healthy demand in the abstract doesn't mean that there is actually a way for men who really care about being a father to advertise that fact without creeping out potential dates.
My observations are the opposite. Most high-earners I know are men, so if I wanted to be a stay-at-home dad, I would have a hard time finding a high-earning partner (so the choice shifts from "who stays ar home" to "do we live a poor or middle-class lifestyle").
One way to deal with this, is to make it equally viable for men or women to be stay-at-home patents. Viable socially (no stigma) and viable economically, so that the family simply chooses for the higher earner (if income is their determined) to have the job responsibility and the other to say home. So the problem is in the family dynamics. Society has to allow for the family dynamics to fall on either side without side effects.
Essentially, it happens from a tax perspective. Governments try to push up "workforce participation" to increase tax revenues and reduce benefits outlays, and increasing the incentives for women to go back to work a few months after childbirth is part of that. From their perspective, a childcare centre with a staff:child ratio of 1:4 is more efficient than a stay-at-home mum with a nine month old baby at 1:1 (and the older siblings already in school).
Socially, we might like flexibility in terms of it being a choice whether to look after the kids yourselves before they start school; for the beancounters though, they'd really like you both to be paying more income tax please, and the daycare centre to be employing more people too...
> Governments try to push up "workforce participation" to increase tax revenues and reduce benefits outlays, and increasing the incentives for women to go back to work a few months after childbirth is part of that.
This theory conflicts with the fact that the trend over time has been toward more support for parental leave, not less, on the part of government.
Parental leave only after women entered the workforce in such large numbers, and we've seen (and felt) the negative consequences from trying to outsource child-rearing so completely. Parental leave was not as necessary because there were more stay-at-home parents; and before early 1900s it was more common for both parents to work from home (i.e. on a farm).
This is totally fine, as long as society supports any specialization choice (men or women taking either role). As long as we support both choices equally, it doesn't matter if one gender ends up doing one of the roles more than the other.
That's not what people want though. What people want is for it to be socially acceptable for men to be the ones that take on the more flexible, lower paying, schedules to care for their kids as well as for it to be socially acceptable for women to /not/ take on that role and instead be the breadwinner.
I don't see anyone on this thread saying that a family must have two breadwinners. I think the argument is that the opportunity should be there, so anyone can follow the career path that best supports their chosen family roles.
