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Comment by wonkaWonka | Hacker News Reader

Freeloading how? By not doing what? When, and for how long?

I don't think perfect parity in childcare is worth some of the artificial contrivances that perfectly equitable circumstances might demand.

Modern society is not natural or normal, in a cosmic sense.

If you mean freeloading, as in skipping town and denying involvement in a pregnancy, your arguments hold water, inasmuch as putting a child up for adoption is a similar degree of freeloading.

If you mean father and mother both being equally in the child's continual presence for the first 24 months of life, I doubt humanity's general economic wealth, in aggregate, could support such practices.

Should children be raised by butlers and maids in the name of equitable career paths for parents?

Maybe we should all be raised in B.F. Skinner Boxes, and learn to walk through operant conditioning.

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What exactly is wrong with a man wanting to stay at home with the kids? Even if the mom does it during infancy (when, due to breastfeeding and so on, she's arguably a better fit), the dad could take over later, maybe the second year. How is this unnatural?

Take my situation: I'm a woman, I make way more than my husband. I'm not the most lovey-dovey/maternal person in the world, my husband is. He did not have the resources while staying home that are available to women. In fact, he was jeered at in the streets and discriminated against.

IMO, people who smear a loving man being the primary caregiver for his baby as being "unnatural" are cruel and backwards.

Oh nothing is wrong with it, but that's a way different story. A desire to contribute to or fully take on child care should not be mocked.

But I really don't think the commonly observed imbalance of sympathy and empathy one sees, when comparing motherhood and fatherhood, is a freeloading type thing.

>What exactly is wrong with a man wanting to stay at home with the kids? Even if the mom does it during infancy (when, due to breastfeeding and so on, she's arguably a better fit), the dad could take over later, maybe the second year. How is this unnatural?

It's completely unnatural. So is you going to work. So is your husband going to work. The only thing that would be natural is both of you living in the woods as hunter-gatherers, as part of a tribe of hunter-gatherers.

As soon as we start talking about "jobs", "careers", or any kind of society that's bigger than a small tribe, and certainly anything involving technology beyond the spear or any kind of written communication, naturalness has completely gone out the window.

>IMO, people who smear a loving man being the primary caregiver for his baby as being "unnatural" are cruel and backwards.

They're also stupid, because as far as we know, there's nothing at all natural about having monogamous relationships. We really don't know how our distant ancestors lived socially, and the best we can do is look at primitive tribes that survived to modern times like the Native Americans, Australian aborigines, pre-contact Hawaiians, or various South American tribes. Not all of those were monogamous (Hawaiians in particular were highly promiscuous).

Anyway, back to modern society, what kind of craphole do you live in where your husband was "jeered at in the streets"? You might want to think about relocating to a better city.

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