Go Ahead and Change Bodies; Just Remember to Take Your Soma
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As a kid, my mom was a working mother -- a terribly unpopular choice in rural Michigan where we lived. My mom drove 30 minutes away from home to get me to a suitable child-care provider. She didn't pick the place because it was close to work -- she was a traveling sales-person -- she picked it because it was the closest available (located at a church because commercial daycare was non-existent where we lived). When I started looking for a partner in life, one of my "absolutes" was to find a woman who would be OK with one of us staying home with our children (I was and still would be perfectly fine with being a stay-at-home Dad). As a result, my ex-wife stayed home with the children (and my current wife does the same).
The tables have turned in my adult-hood. It's unusual to have a parent stay home. The job is as hard as it was when I was a kid (if not harder due to social pressures that make women feel badly for not pursuing careers). As a society (in the US anyway), we're setup for both parents to work full time. When my wife and I chose not to enroll our children in pre-school most of our friends thought we were out of our minds and holding our children back. As parents we felt it was unnecessary to hire a professional educator for teaching our children the ABCs/123s and were surprised at the reaction we received even from families who didn't have two working parents. As a child, preschool was purely the domain of families of working parents and enrollment was considered an unnecessary expense when mom or dad was available.
Personally, I don't have strong feelings about stay-at-home vs. work full-time parents. I knew I didn't enjoy my experience as a kid but I knew that a lot of that was due to jealousy since nearly all of my friends had moms that stayed home. Our kids are school-age, now, but we're still a single-parent earning family by choice. Having children is a lot of work and I personally don't think we could handle raising them the way we desire if we both had priorities outside of the home. Don't read that as me saying that it cannot be done -- I'm sure it can, as my parents remind me "you turned out just fine"[1] -- I just don't know that I could do it.
[1] People get very touchy about parenting choices. When I told my family that we had no intention -- from the beginning -- to have both of us working, they assumed that we were calling them bad parents for choosing differently. I know the situation my family was in when I was young. They had little choice but to both work in order to keep the lights on. And I'm not the least bit upset with how I was raised, but the added time we get to enjoy our children and the reduced stress that I experience knowing that our home life is taken care of while I'm working is worth the loss of income, especially since we live in a place where we can comfortably get by on my salary.
Until you unexpectedly lose your job and then have no income. Hopefully you have savings to fall back on, if not you find yourself facing questions like: How can I feed my children? Or pay for medicine.
Don't get me wrong, I hear you brother. I had a stay at home mom and loved it, my wife came from a divorced family and didn't like being a latch-key kid.
So our decision for her to be a stay at home mom, to give up her career wasn't terribly difficult.
But I would be lying if I said I didn't worry about only having one income. I'd swallow my pride in an instant and go shovel shit all day if it meant that the family would have food, but it's a little stressful none the less.
The problem with dual income is that paying for childcare often doesn't scale well as the number of children go up. That cost quickly eats more and more of the second income.
> “Now, we are free to pursue our goals. We contribute to society every waking moment...
It also seemed to assume a method of universal child care and education.
Given that we don't have either of these, and based on the experiences you described, which method do you think is better for "society" and the child in the long term: two-income households with childcare, or one-income households with a stay at home parent?
But I think there's more than just taking care of children. There is research into how important family units are, and those units are better strengthened by greater time commitments of the parents than by less.
Plus there's the issue of parental choice in teaching values. If everyone in the society agreed upon values than the preschool teacher's example would be equivalent. But parents often have their own way of seeing things. Different religions. Different economic and civic philosophies, etc. So there's another reason to increase parental involvement, so that the parents spend more time being role models and conveying values. This is especially true if the childcare is provided as a universal service from the government, because then you can't even choose childcare at your local church.