Lies, Damn Lies and Childcare

politicsofmothering.wordpress.com

16 points·rhema··4 comments

There's a pattern in most sectors where one party performs an optimization to reduce cost. Their margins are great until everyone else catches up. At that point, margins are back to razpr thin except you now bear the downsides of the optimization. You cannot regress because the market won't allow it. So you are now stuck, looking for another big move to get ahead.

In a lot of ways, I feel the emergence of dual income households has done that. It might have been economically advantageous at one point, but now (at least in HCOL areas) it's almost a requirement to just get by.

I heard someone say that while wages haven't really kept up with inflation, but household income has. I would love to see a source for that, but it would make sense to me.

It is not only mothers who want to spend more time with their children. Until modern times fathers spent as much time with their children as mothers.

I agree. Do you have any sources for these kinds of numbers? Did you have a time or place in mind by "before modern times"?

Pre-industrial revolution everyone worked from home (or more accurately from the field). Children were basically with their parents working the whole time. Of course a few rich and middle class children were in school or the hands of tutors and nannies, but there were so few of these compared to peasants that they are not really worth considering.

When I was a university professor I used to play a game with my first year students. On the way into the first lecture they had to draw a card out of a barrel at random that had their life's story if they had been born before science. It was a rare class if anyone was anything other than a peasant or dead.

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