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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

It's a strong case, but it still feels like a band-aid on the wound that is normalized double income households. My wife is a novelist. She chose to do that so she could have flexibility to stay home with children. It helps that she's a fantastic writer. I chose my current job because of 6 weeks paternity leave, as we plan on having several more children. I recognize my immense privilege being able to make choices like these, but it was not without sacrifices. For the first few years of our marriage we could have easily doubled our income if we were both working.

All this to say, is a return to single income households wanted, reasonable or possible? I can't help but feel that "working" and "raising children" is having your cake and eating it too.

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It is, and parenting is in and of itself a job.

Imagine a society where its an actual career - parenting, as a job, apart from teaching. Professional parents paid to raise children. That is basically what nannies among the rich are now anyway.

It is totally just a culturally normalized incongruence that is just assumed for the sake of assumption. In the same way until a hundred years ago educating everyone was considered infeasible. The farm laborer of the 1850s would have looked at sending their kids to a public school as unbelievable and fantastical as someone today might look at having children raised professionally.

Its also worth considering that, in the age of two income households reproducing as regularly as they do, school does do that already. The raising of the kids thing. It just does it really badly, because its not structured or designed for that. The prevalence and use of after school activities in many cultures as a way to keep kids busy until their parents get off work or during the summer is indicative of an ill-fitting bandage that nobody wants to consider pulling off and reconciling culturally because that means "admitting" millions of people are not time wizards that can manage to do 80 hours of work a week in 60.

Parenting is a job, yes. For better or worse, though, there are huge numbers of people willing to do it for free. This is a serious problem if we expect market forces to just sort things out.

My parents were lower middle class and both worked, and my mom took a year off for each kid. They just seemed to accept the idea that kids cost money, not unlike pets.

Is this wrong? I don't really have an opinion. I don't run a business, though.

I'd imagine if you offered people hardhats and heavy machinery to fix the roads they complain about quite a few would line up to do it "for free". Before wrecking the equipment and destroying property.

And like I said, people are willing to do it for free because they have normalized a cultural expectation to do so. But it was the same normalization parents had that if their kids were going to learn to read in the 18th century they would have to teach it themselves because private tutors were well outside the reach of a majority of the working poor.

People were willing to farm for themselves for centuries but the tools and lack of expertise and specialization made it incredibly inefficient. People built their own houses, but they were rarely more than rough cut lumber piled together with thatch for a roof. Human history is the realization of the value of expertise and specialization to make general problems everyone faces inefficiently focused managed problems by experts that can be radically more productive at it than the uninformed.

I'm just trying to say just because its culturally normalized now does not mean its predestined to always be the way of social organization. And that economics is a really strong motivator to change behaviors - its why reproduction rates drop so radically in industrialized countries in the first place.

> I'd imagine if you offered people hardhats and heavy machinery to fix the roads they complain about quite a few would line up to do it "for free". Before wrecking the equipment and destroying property.

You're saying that people who reproduce "for free" are half-assed incompetents? I disagree.

As for "culturally normalized", that's a blade that cuts deeply and in many directions. Without cultural norms, civilization as we know it would not exist.

To reiterate my main point, I don't really have a preference on paid maternity. Maybe it would be better, though, to simply award each citizen two or three years "general leave" to be used as they wish. Those that wish to reproduce could spend it that way. Those that don't could do something else. There are too many births now--we hardly need to incentivize more of them.

I think about this a lot too because my family could live off of my income alone. We might move to this at some point, but for now my wife prefers to work. That said, I'm genuinely curious if "single income households" were ever a norm, or if it was only a norm for the upper class (or perhaps for the middle class for a very short time, such as for a few decades in the 20th century).

I think "everyone in the family works" used to be the norm.

It’s always been true, but the answer to the question “for whom?” has changed a few times, like in the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

Single income households were only ever a norm for the upper classes, whether aristocracy or haute bourgeoisie. Almost as soon as that changed society did. Mass leisure society with many single income households were a post WWII US thing. The richest country in the history of the world sustained that from maybe 1945 to 1970, by which time feminism was in full swing. Capable women got bored and wanted meaningful non family work.

For married couples, the US has seen an increase in women working for pay from 30% participation to 60% participation from 1955 to present.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/08/Labor-Force-Parti...

So there was a while when most married women with kids stayed home.

No doubt, but I suspect that the mid 20th century is a historical anomaly. I'm also surprised that only 60% of women work for pay at present.

> I can't help but feel that "working" and "raising children" is having your cake and eating it too.

Just like the 'eternal September' there's the 'eternal desire to return to 1955'. I suppose I should be surprised.

> we could have easily doubled our income if we were both working

How would the world work such that this was not the case? I suppose the government could pay one parent to stay at home with their children, but it seems like there will always be a sacrifice required if you want to be in a couple where only one person is working full time (particularly at a specialized career).

Send the children away to specialist child care facilities that can look after them at scale. By centralizing the raising of children we can maintain quality control from a young age and ensure that children grow up as model citizens with the best education/development possible.

A Brave New World indeed.

> is a return to single income households

previously it was always men who were earning the income. So "return" is not desirable without the prereq of it not being gender segregated.

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