Having young children can place constraints on your ability to shift work hours away from conventional 9-5. Childcare/schooling/etc are not as flexible in the schedules they follow, and not everyone has a spouse/partner with sufficient free time to compensate for your unavailability.
Another difficulty is that very young children don't always understand the concept of "daddy is working now and can't play". Hell, not all spouses understand the concept of "no, just because I'm home doesn't mean I can watch the kids while you go out and run errands". Being physically in an office somewhere else helps to prevent the lines between "work time" and "home time" from becoming blurred.
Never had problems explaining to the kids I'm unavailable during work time. You pretty much need a separate office room, of course.
Home time and work time do end up hopelessly intermingled, but it works both ways. The extra flexibility ends up giving me more time with my kids, I think.
School starts at 8.45 and ends at 15.30hrs here. Without shifting work hours, it's outright impossible to take care of kids with 2 working partners, unless you want the kids to spend a lot of time in aftercare etc. With shifting hours, it's possible by shifting both partners relative to each other, so IMHO this is a point in favor of flex hours. In reality, most families need help from grandparents, too.
Exactly. This is why people with children shouldn't also have jobs. At least one person needs to be at home to take care of the kids. However, with divorce so commonplace, you can't count on having one spouse earning an income any more, it's just too much of a risk, so I don't think anyone should have any kids at all. Having kids simply is not compatible with living in modern society. (No, this is not satire.)
You're not wrong. Women entering the workforce instead of staying home to mother children has a detrimental effect on families, despite receiving praise as social progress.
It's good for corporations because it doubles the labor supply, lowering wages for both men and women. States love it because they receive more income tax, since household work was previously untaxed. Families, especially children, are getting the shaft.
>Women entering the workforce instead of staying home to mother children has a detrimental effect on families, despite receiving praise as social progress.
It IS progress, for individual women or single moms who weren't lucky enough to hook up with a good-enough husband, or who didn't want to go the traditional family-and-kids route in life. It's been detrimental to society overall however because it's become a norm, and almost a requirement for families to earn enough to stay out of the ghetto; families don't feel they have the luxury to have only one working parent because the cost-of-living is too high, and also, many women feel (usually correctly) that they'd commit career suicide by taking off a few years to be a stay-at-home mom, because companies don't value this and see workers who take a few years' break as no longer employable.
>Families, especially children, are getting the shaft.
The ability for one spouse to forego work in lieu of dedicating themselves to childcare is a privilege not enjoyed by a substantial percentage of parents. Besides that, the choice to have kids (or not) remains in this country one everyone is entitled to make.
Do you have a solution? From what I see, parents simply have no time to actually spend with kids, they have to spend the equivalent of a full apartment rent on daycare, the cost of raising kids properly is utterly unaffordable, and the cost of living and healthcare makes it impossible for one parent to stay home instead of both having jobs, and the very high probability of divorce makes it foolhardy to enter into such an arrangement in the first place. On top of all that, the time needed to get an education and get established professionally makes it very difficult to have a kid before you're 30, and the older you are the higher the likelihood of birth defects or autism or Down's syndrome. Society isn't going to do anything to help you in raising your kids, so unless you're lucky to have some really great extended family or something, it's just way too much of a risk and an expense.
I fail to see how this is "off the deep end", this is just the reality of modern American society.
the older you are the higher the likelihood of birth defects or autism or Down's syndrome
For what it's worth, we've been getting really good at identifying these very early with tests that also hold little or no risk to the mother and baby (e.g. NIPT with free-cell fetal DNA). Of course, if there's moral objections to terminating such pregnancies even in the very early stages, that doesn't help.
reality of modern American society.
Yeah, that explains a lot. I understand daycare and healthcare aren't really subsidized here, apparently American society has problems with distributing the costs of childbearing over the population in order to encourage it. I guess they'll keep the population demographics at a sustainable level by immigration or something.
I have to disagree about the testing bit with autism; from what I understand, that doesn't even show up until a kid is a couple years old or more. Anecdotally, I have two friends with kids, and both their kids are mildly autistic. I think, in both cases, the mothers were in their early 30s.
>I guess they'll keep the population demographics at a sustainable level by immigration or something.
Yep, that's exactly what they're doing. The people having all the kids are either immigrants (esp. Hispanic ones), or ultra-religious Christians. All the people supporting "liberal" values aren't having any kids because it's too much time and money. So I think we can look forward to something somewhat similar to what happened to the Islamic world: it used to be at the forefront of science and math, and then turned into what it is today when the clerics took over.
Many other cultures (and even many of my relatives) frame the task of rearing children as means to better ensure for your own care towards the end of your life, rather than as a high-risk endeavor comparable to purchasing real estate.
I've heard of this, but what kids actually stick around to take care of their parents when they're old? In fact, isn't that rather cruel? By the time the parents are unable to take care of themselves (if they get to that state; lots of elderly people are fully mobile and capable of taking care of themselves), their kids will now have their own kids, and it will be flatly impossible for them to both have two jobs, take care of their kids, and take care of their parents all at the same time. That's an unreasonable expectation to have of your children.
Apparently this is the case in Singapore, which relies on family support instead of welfare. Retired parents can even sue their children if they fail to adequately support them, according to this Economist article:
