Do Millennial Men Want Stay-At-Home Wives?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Anyway, it's still silly to take this particular question as a proxy for views on gender equality. I think there's an obvious desire for it to be economically feasible for one partner to be able to take time off to raise children in their early years. It's usually not possible anymore.
Also, I very definitely remember dial-up... and cassette tapes, and VHS, and walkmans, diskmans, CRT monitors, playing outside, etc :)
And when kids do play outside their parents hover over them and they can't explore or take risks.
Speaking purely from the perspective of someone in the US. I know other countries are very different.
Generations tend to be around 20 years and every one has a big gap between the start and the finish. Just look at baby boomers, do you think someone born in 1946 with a returning GI father and graduating high school right into the start of Vietnam escalation had much in common with someone born in 1964 and not graduating high school until the Reagan administration?
Regardless, although I understand the ubiquity of terms like millenial, I think there's so much more value in breaking down things into decades. I'd actually say 8 year segments are the most useful because you can use presidents (who often serve 2 full terms) as references, but that's specific for the US and doesn't jive well with a base-10 counting system.
I bet out there somewhere someone has come up with a great way to classify generations specific to cultural changes and I just haven't found it yet. Maybe it'll show up in this thread.
Improved educational attainment may have just made Millennials act more economically 'rational' than their previous versions.
Leaving the workforce for 5-7 years (or more) can shave hundreds of thousands or millions off of lifetime earnings. You are talking about leaving the workforce in prime of your career and not getting experience and promotions for several years. My daughter is 2.5, and my wife has been promoted twice since she was born. Leaving the workforce from the ages of 30 to 37 could be fairly catastrophic to one's lifetime earnings.
We live in the Washington, DC area, with the highest childcare costs in the U.S., and the long-term financial impact of her not working would be staggering, even if working versus not working was a complete push while we had pre-school age kids.
There are reasons why a spouse may want to stay at home to raise kids, but rarely does it make long-term financial sense.
Washington, DC is the capital of the wealthiest country on Earth and it has a massive concentration of high quality higher education. Why wouldn't the economy be strong here?
Anecdotally, my wife couldn't stand to stay at home, but it's also physically impossible to work full time and cover the kids' schedules, groceries, etc.
It doesn't have to be the woman either. We have friends where the woman works and the husband stays home. But they also adopted, so she never stayed home to recover, breastfeed, etc.
I can't remember ever seeing a single software development job (which wasn't contracting) where the employer advertised less than 40 hour weeks.
I was surprised to hear that my parttime friends in Europe had benefits equivalent to their fulltime colleagues.
Alternatively, a company which has employees who work in shifts is likely to already have the infrastructure for people to track their working time and be paid accordingly.
The same goes for somewhere where people work on multiple projects for different clients on a payment for time spent basis (you have to know how much you worked for each client in order to bill them).
The downside is that you would likely have to fill in a timesheet.
Similarly, it's stated early on that millennials were expected to see greater parity between the sexes in most roles, especially professional ones. If that's not happening, and if people are swinging back towards preferring men in the position of 'earner' (and therefore in a position of power), it's not hard to make that connection.
It's definitely true that they should have been more explicit about it, rather than seeming to conflate the two without identifying one as a proxy for the other, maybe.
Maybe ideally, or commonly, or on average, but that really depends on the parent(s) and the potential paid caregiver under consideration.
It also means that at any given time, either of us could support the family in case of disruption (e.g. I start a major project that takes a few years to generate revenue, or she decides to take time off active research to write a book). I value the flexibility that having both spouses work brings our family.
Leaving that aside, I want a co-equal partner, but that doesn't necessarily exclude someone who stays at home for any number of reasons. I think gender equality should also be pursued by undoing the devaluation of what has been historically considered "women's work" (caring for loved ones, housework, etc).
I would change places in a heartbeat if it made sense. It's not really an option for us because my earning potential is so much higher. We're beyond the window of time where we could make that change in arrangement without a major life upheaval.
For what it's worth though, my wife supported me entirely for a few years in our early twenties. Neither of us liked that arrangement very much, so when we had the opportunity to swap we did.
I enjoy housework, childcare, and my ideal career would work fine spending 4 or so hours a day working from home (and indeed, might work better).
So I think lots of Millennials want one of the couple to stay home for finance reasons or personal preference, but I think a lot of them pick who out of practical concerns, not gender roles.
I'd love to see some data that shows that a mother is better than a trained baby sitter, is better than group care of some kind.
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/documents/seccyd...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200704/daycare-rais...
>the more their teachers later reported that they do not work independently, did not use their time wisely, and did not complete their work promptly in grade school.
I'm not raising kids to do homework. Real learning isn't copying from a book. It'd be interesting to look at this at a later date. Looks like these studies should have this data by now, since it started with kids in 1991.