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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

TBH depending on circumstances, working five days a week at home also won't work for a lot of people this year.

I have family trying to raise two kids during this pandemic. Turns out, children aren't just little adults who will go off and do assigned tasks unsupervised; they require attention and crave personal feedback, and those aren't things they can get from either teachers or peers in a distance-learning configuration. Not in the quantities they get them in school. A lot of working parents are going to find they're splitting their time between their day jobs and keeping their children on their tasks, which will be a huge adjustment for a lot of families (especially families with two working parents who can remote-work).

I don't know that the US has a firm understanding of how much the babysitting aspect of regular primary (and in some cases, high school) education adds value, and the whole economy is in for a rude shock come Q42020 / Q12021 as everyone's projections get missed unless companies are writing down goal-hitting expectations right now.

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I haven't been this exhausted ever. Being productive at work and handling my children's needs throughout the day is unbelievably taxing, leading to Friday nights where I fall asleep with them ~730 and end up sleeping 12 hours.

I hope this leads to realization of how important work/life balance is here in the States. This Protestant work ethic simply isn't necessary with today's productivity.

I am moving to my parents’ city for this exact reason. My wife and I are full time professionals, and we are failing at educating our children.

Thankfully we live in the same city my parents live in, and they're retired. They've been an absolute godsend.

The (traditional) Protestant work ethic also assumed a Protestant community centered around a church as cultural / societal hub. Not even the PWE suggested people go all out all the time without community support.

Traditionally raising children was a multi-generational effort with grandparents often living under the same roof. Not to mention women were less likely to work outside the home back then. Modern society is highly efficient, but also highly susceptible to disruption. It'll be interesting to see how we figure out how to adapt.

Elizabeth Warren actually has a book on this very topic: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t...

>>>

The “two-income trap,” described The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:

The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting. Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities. Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on. This last point is really the key to Warren’s specific argument about bankruptcy, though it’s the first two that would drive her larger interest in politics. Bad things have always happened to families from time to time. In a traditional two-parent, one-earner family, there was always the possibility that mom could step up and help out when trouble arose.

“If her husband was laid off, fired, or otherwise left without a paycheck,” Warren and Tyagi write, “the stay-at-home mother didn’t simply stand helplessly on the sidelines as her family toppled off an economic cliff; she looked for a job to make up some of that lost income.” Similarly, if a family member got sick, mom was available as an unpaid caregiver. “A stay-at-home mother served as the family’s ultimate insurance against unemployment or disability — insurance that had a very real economic value even when it wasn’t drawn on.”

A modern family where mom is already working has no “give” and is much more likely to be pushed into bankruptcy by job loss or family illness unless it builds up a big financial cushion.

To elaborate on the "no benefit" for the families, and Warren probably talks about this, but there is benefit for corporations. They get nearly double the supply of workers which drives down wages and gives them more productivity per dollar spent.

So in effect, a wealth transfer to equity holders.

It's bizarre that this, the largest factor by far, gets so little play.

Yep, it undermine's everything Peter Thiel said in his debate with Andresson and was amazing to me Andresson didn't bring it up. They were looking at wage stagnation over the period where women entered the workforce, but without ever mentioning it was the period where women entered the workforce en masse.

It's because it undermines the feminist narrative that women entering the workplace had 0 repercussions on society as whole.

Welcome to the feminist utopia, I suppose? Equal representation of women in the workplace, ignoring the fact that a large percentage of women (majority in my middle class social circle) would rather bear and raise children than slave away in a cubicle, if given a choice?

The article calls the book "controversial", but I don't see how the harm from effectively denying motherhood to women is "controversial" at all.

I mean the real problem is that we went halfsies and didn't actually build out systems that allow women to do both effectively, but then everyone got lumped into doing work because not doing so put your family at a distinct disadvantage.

In countries less allergic to establishing welfare programs, cheap subsidized daycare is used to boost workforce participation amongst women: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/affordabl...

It's hard enough to do _one_ of those things effectively, let alone both. Welfare certainly helps, but you're still half-assing both things at best, and the results are pretty self-evident by now.

I mean, it's also not clear that mothers are necessarily the best people to be raising children either, given that being a mother and being trained in childcare are not the same thing.

From the Quebec study:

> For those kids who are in Quebec’s public programs, known as centres de la petite enfance (CPEs), “repeated studies have found sharp improvements in child development,” Fortin said. This accounts for about one-third of Quebec’s children in care right now.

Now the problem is scaling up good childcare to the other two thirds.

Other than this I don't really see how you would put the genie back in the bottle for women juggling childcare with employment, without also screwing over women who want both or don't want children.

It's moot. Childcare is no longer a real option from the epidemiological standpoint. It's one thing when your kid brings back a cold or a flu from their preschool. It's another when they bring back coronavirus.

Besides, I don't believe anyone other than parents are "the best" to raise children, on average. That's because I have children of my own and I know that childcare and primary education is basically a game of roulette wrt whether you get lucky and get a teacher who's any good. We should just make it socially unacceptable to abdicate parental responsibility at this point, IMO. It's absolutely nuts that 6 months old children end up in daycare.

That's because I have children of my own and I know that childcare and primary education is basically a game of roulette wrt whether you get lucky and get a teacher who's any good.

As opposed to the average parent who is great at parenting, right?

Sorry, but many (most?) parents absolutely suck at raising their kids. They didn’t have good parents themselves and they never dealt with the psychological issues that resulted. And in 99% of cases, they’re totally blind to this, and think (as you apparently do) that loving their kids makes them good caregivers.

I’m not arguing for or against childcare, but it’s a mistake to think the average parent is well-equipped.

Average parent is at least predisposed to giving a shit about their progeny. And what constitutes an "average parent" is not a constant. If we could make good parenting feasible (which it currently absolutely isn't) and bad parenting socially unacceptable (which, in contrast, is almost expected, at least in the US), the quality of parenting would improve quickly.

I mean, if only we could radically and rapidly change the values our society, there's a long list of things we could apply that ability to.

But even there, just looking at developed countries around the world with arguably much better values around parenting, I still think we'd end up with most kids in childcare. Maybe not starting at six months, but starting pretty young. I'm biased as a parent too, just in the other direction. There are just too many benefits to both children and women.

But we did "radically and rapidly" changed the rules of our society. Lack of focus on family and kids is a relatively new invention.

Have you been in a daycare? They're basically staffed by generic retail/service workers. I thought they were highly trained folks like teachers, but upon touring them, I realized they're not and also learned they're paid very little, so it kind of makes sense.

A woman cannot rely on finding the perfect man to take care of her. That is just unrealistic. And likely, it will set her up for failure.

And a woman cannot rely on her parents to support her as an adult until she gets married. That’s too heavy a burden on her aging parents.

Really, the only way forward, is for the woman to get educated, skilled, trained, or certified, in order to work.

But, we as a society need a new and different social contract.

I'm really not following Warren's reasoning here.

First of all, with two incomes, if one person loses a job, you still have cash coming in. On average, the drop is from 100% of normal cash flow to 50% of normal. With one income it is from from 100% to 0%. Yes, the other spouse can get a job, but that takes time, maybe days, maybe months.

This seems especially true during a bad economy when unemployment is high and people stay unemployed for long periods of time. With a dual-income family, the two often work in different fields. One might get laid off but the other's job is safe. You'll suffer, maybe even have to sell your house or something, but at least you can feed yourself.

Second, I've seen what happens when a spouse doesn't work outside the home for a long time. This happened to a relative of mine a long time ago. She had a short but perfectly fine career as a teacher for a while before getting married, having children, and being a housewife. Eventually she got divorced and found that, after being out of the job market for 20 years, the only job she could get was near minimum wage data entry. (She eventually got a better job, but it took many years as she was basically starting over.) Anyway, the point is I'm skeptical of Warren's reasoning that in a single-income family, the other spouse can just go out and get a job if needed. Over the long term, the single-income situation tends to damage the career path of the spouse who doesn't work outside the home.

> I'm really not following Warren's reasoning here. First of all, with two incomes, if one person loses a job, you still have cash coming in. On average, the drop is from 100% of normal cash flow to 50% of normal. With one income it is from from 100% to 0%. Yes, the other spouse can get a job, but that takes time, maybe days, maybe months.

The general crux of Warren's argument, is that the fixed costs incurred by the necessity of women working is so large that it basically made household income a zero sum game.

Previously, one person made income Y, and if the breadwinner became unable to work then they made some amount close to or smaller than Y.

Today, two people each make X, and also have to pay childcare and additional commuting or other expenses of Z every day.

Warren's assertion is that overall, today 2X-Z <= Y, because women increased the labor supply so much that wages were suppressed; so that Y for one person eventually became X for two people in a household. Depending on how bad the decline is, X may be a lot worse than a new, untrained wife making less than Y.

I think the idea is with 2 incomes, both partners need to remain employed in order to keep up, since people's expenses usually closely match their income. So if 1 of the 2 loses their job, that 1 of the 2 needs to find new employment to maintain their lives.

In the scenario of 1 working partner, if that 1 person loses their job, you can have 2 people looking for jobs in order to get back to normal.

What makes a two-income household a "trap" is when both parents are forced to work in order to make ends meet. This creates a nominal rise in household income that masks the actual desperation of the household's financial situation.

The trap is: declining real household income for segments of the population. The "two income" part is a consequence of the trap, not a cause.

This matters because a lot of the increasing representation of women in the workforce is not the result of the two-income trap, but the result of women, individually, wanting to work. In other words, not every two-income household is actually in a trap. Many of them are formed by two people who each have jobs they like and want to keep.

My wife, for example, has advanced training and likes her job. She couldn't wait to get back to work after we had our first child. As a family, we could survive fine on my salary today... but she would kill me if I suggested this. Now we're struggling to home-educate our child while we both work remotely. If I suggested that she quit her job to be our family's "insurance policy", again, she would kill me (even if I invoked Elizabeth Warren).

My mom worked too, because she wanted to. Good thing she did, because when my parents divorced she was able, financially, to transition to being on her own right away.

Single-income families can be a trap too... for the person who is not earning an income. About half of U.S. marriages end in divorce. A spouse with no independent financial base and no job of their own is not in a position to leave when they want to.

This stuff is really important to understand, so we don't go down a fruitless rabbit hole of wringing our collective hands about the decline of the traditional family culture or whatever. Taking that broad simple view of two-income households runs a very real risk of simply denying the agency of women who want to work and make their own way in the world... even if they are married with kids.

Traditionally being when?

The US was settled by people leaving those old generations behind and moving west (be it from somewhere in Europe to the US or from somewhere in the US to somewhere less populated in the US) with their spouse and maybe young kids. You always had stay at home moms, because home was usually mom's workplace, often dad's too.

Multi-generational households in the US existed as the exception when early settlers brought their entire communities over or when first generation Americans moved West with their immigrant parents. Having multi-generational households was never the norm.

"early settlers" is a tiny slice of history.

Tradition being up to the present, actually, in large parts of the world. (Repeating a comment to another article:) I suspect that people living with family until 20s/30s is likely to be much more common than people here expect, and that not doing so is an anomaly of the current age occurring in only certain cultures, with a possible return to norm in the future.

If you're discussing "protestant work ethic"-based communities, and "multigenerational housing"-based communities, they are generally mutually exclusive.

I suppose it depends on whether by "Protestant work ethic", you are referring to people who are actually in the Protestant/Calvinist faith, or if you are using it as a euphemism for general workaholism, as there are many non-Protestant communities which espouse hard work and frugality as main tenets to follow in life, which do have a higher rate of multigenerational-housing-based communities.

Also, it would be interesting to explore exactly how and why "protestant work ethic"-based communities and "multigenerational housing"-based communities became generally mutually exclusive, whether there is causation, or just a happenstance correlation.

> Modern society is highly efficient, but also highly susceptible to disruption.

That's something my wife & I have been discussing recently. She pointed out that traditional family structures have more slack built into them, which comes in handy in times of trouble. The problem is that in the modern Taylorist world we treat slack as waste. But it really isn't, any more than insurance is waste.

The “Protestant Work Ethic” was built around the notion of a two-parent household with the parents specialized such that one works outside the home while one works inside the home. It also assumes a significant social safety net in the form of family and close community support via churches, schools, etc.

I understand the gist of what you mean, but I think you’re really pointing at the idea of the “nuclear family,” and the “two-income household,” both of which are post-war ideas. Specifically, Elizabeth Warren wrote an entire book about this “Two Income Trap,” how much more fragile it makes families, and why we should be working to get back to one-income being a reasonable option so that more people could choose it when their circumstances demanded it.

The problem with going back to one income is cultural. Men want to be the breadwinner, so it's going to end up forcing women out of the workforce and back into the home. There's no way to have one income viable again without halving the supply of people in the workforce.

> Men want to be the breadwinner

And there's the problem. I'd be totally comfortable if my future wife ended up being the financial supporter of the family. There's technical things I'd like to invest time and mental resources in that wouldn't necessarily make money, but would be fulfilling, and housework is already something I do a lot of and wouldn't mind being more responsible for if I wasn't spending 40+ at the office.

I can't imagine dumping my career whilst I'm the higher earner, but if she ends up making more than me (kinda likely actually, given some time), it might be the most sensible solution. Marriage should be a team activity where either partner is willing to take on whatever role is best for the family.

Both men and women usually prefer men to be the breadwinner though - this isn't just cultural - it has biological roots. Breaking away from that on a mass societal-wide scale will not be easy. Thankfully humans are one of the few animals who override their instincts so it's not impossible.

maybe raising children should be breadwinning?

In agriculture-heavy eras, it was, in the sense that children would contribute labor value as they got older (and with relative quickness; you can trust an 8-year-old with tasks like feeding the chickens).

I tend to agree, but women don't want to be home alone with kids. Historically, women would share duties with other women in the village so there was a lot more socializing and mentorship.

It must have been fulfilling to start out a young inexperienced women in your village and eventually become an influential matriarch, with knowledge in herbal medicine, nursing, textiles, pottery, basketry, child development, leadership, storytelling, etc.

> I tend to agree, but women don't want to be home alone with kids. Historically, women would share duties with other women in the village so there was a lot more socializing and mentorship.

Stay at home moms are always having get togethers, play dates, catching up for coffee, etc.

The more of your friends who are stay at home moms the easier it becomes to be a stay at home mom.

Honestly can we stop saying these type of claims that men are « biologically » made to be breadwinners and woman « biologically » made to do house work? Not only the claims are dubious, but even if they were true doesn’t mean everyone is the same.

For a lot of people including women housework is actually boring and they would rather have a fulfilling career.

Perpetuating the idea that men should work outside and women should work inside really makes life really hard for men and women that don’t think that way.

> For a lot of people including women housework is actually boring and they would rather have a fulfilling career.

For the vast vast majority of people there is no fulfillment in a career either.

> Perpetuating the idea that men should work outside and women should work inside really makes life really hard for men and women that don’t think that way.

I'm making an observation - I don't like it either.

> The problem with going back to one income is cultural

I think the problem is cultural and genetic. After all, we have thousands of generations where men were molded for the breadwinner role. Lots of scholarly articles on that topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=genetic+influence+on+br...

Both indeed, but what separates us from animals is not being slave to our instincts.

> Men want to be the breadwinner, so it's going to end up forcing women out of the workforce and back into the home.

I’d love to send my wife out to work for the family.

In fact I’d love to get multiple wives and send them all out to work.

I'm puzzled by how America ended up with this "lone-wolf" nuclear family mentality where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone. Maybe it goes hand-in-hand with the American individualistic culture. Maybe it just happens in urban centers and I'm blind to places where it does not hold. But it is such a sad state; my best childhood memories are from being in a small town where everybody knew everybody, kids played together, and grandma took you on walks from house to house almost daily to sync up with neighbors. Oh and did I mention this is where our two working parents would drop us off for weeks at a time?

I almost feel as though suburban living forces this in the modern era... the area my parents moved to when they left the small town where I was born to for the sake of raising children with cul-de-sac and good school district had almost nothing to offer for me as a young adult, so I left and moved across the country to a place which was more in line with what I was looking for. There were few jobs nearby in my chosen field (or really any field for an educated young professional, service industries dominated) so my peers all left, too.

We've chosen hyper-specialization of our living areas. The places which are good for raising children are mostly horrible for careers and social life. The places where young people can get ahead and be social aren't as traditionally convenient for raising children (unless you have lots of money).

You pretty much have to pick where you live based on what phase of your life you're in, and I think for most people the expectation is still that once you get married you'll just move out to the 'burbs. Personally, I hate the idea, but I'm both not in a place in life where I'm too worried about children and also fortunate to work in an industry where its at least theoretically viable to afford to raise city kids and maintain a career.

My parents are getting ready to retire and thinking of moving to the mountains somewhere because being retired is no fun in a place where everything is optimized around children and everything is developed family-size. They won't be a support system where they are for my hypothetical kids anyways, and are eager to escape the suburb I grew up in as it has declined over the decades, so I wouldn't want to be there either.

Wrapping up that rant... quite simply, I insisted on moving away from where I grew up because there was nothing for me there and I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in that place. The fact that my parents still live there for now is mostly incidental. (But I also generally think suburbs are a worst-of-both-worlds kind of thing, none of the cohesive culture or community of a small town but also none of the variety, walk/bikeability, or cultural diversity of big cities, so my bias might be showing).

Maybe a contributing factor is that it is significantly easier and more acceptable to move house in America. Thinking back to where I grew up, the house we lived in was where my grand-grand-parents were born; it would be pretty much unthinkable to move (and was not even possible in previous non-capitalist regimes) so people stick around in close-knit communities. But maybe if moving was dead-easy like in the States this would naturally fall apart?

I guess it's already happening to some extent with Schengen and young talented engineers moving to job centers.

Another major factor you didn't mention is urban housing prices. Before kids, we lived near downtown Seattle in a walkable, urban neighborhood. It was great, and is where I would have preferred to stay long-term. When we decided to have kids, we knew that buying a large condo or decent-sized detached home within the Seattle city limits would be way out of our price range (housing prices in Seattle have almost reached San Francisco/Silicon Valley level).

So we moved out to the burbs, where we could afford a starter home big enough for our two kids and a mother-in-law.

>> where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone.

If you don't live in the larger metro areas, there aren't the same number of jobs paying good wages. So you move to where the jobs are, or at least where the jobs you want are. If you're a software developer you probably don't want to live in Ohio, and if you're a defense contractor you probably don't want to live in Wyoming.

Is a better wage worth having no family around? I'd rather be in Ohio making decent money with family around than in CA making gobs of money with no one.

I'm puzzled by how America ended up with this "lone-wolf" nuclear family mentality where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone.

Go west young man was not just a saying but part of America. Look at post WWII information on families moving to California for example.

Striking it alone by moving away from home has been a part of the American mythos since colonial times, when a big part of the Revolutionary War was the prohibition on settling west of Britain's declared Proclamation Line. And in future centuries America also soaked up all of the people in Europe who could be tempted by having a farm to themselves; they came to America daily by the thousands.

That being said, multigenerational households were really common up until the postwar period, at which point the US really started pushing the standalone suburban nuclear family as a way to avoid another case of excess industrial capacity. It takes a lot of workers and goods to build all the highways, infrastructure, and houses to support a two-story house with a white picket fence and a car in the driveway.

>I'm puzzled by how America ended up with this "lone-wolf" nuclear family mentality where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone

Because over a several hundred year period a large fraction of the people in Europe who were willing to risk financial ruin for a chance at a better life wound up here and our culture reflects that.

Specifically, the people who were already outcasts from the mainstream society.

No matter where you were born, the best career opportunities were likely to be somewhere else. So if you didn't want to get stuck in a dead end job then you had to move.

Much of America is inhabited by people who left their place of birth in search of better opportunities elsewhere. And most of this happened quite recently: the USA only consisted of 16 states in 1800 and 45 by 1900. I think this has caused American to be inhabited by people who are much more likely to value independence and (perceived) self-reliance.

What you experience is still quite common. Some of my siblings live 5 minutes from my parents and my nieces & nephews basically stay with their grandparents while their parents are working. A lot of my coworkers claim similar situations as well.

If my parents didn't live in an economic and cultural backwater with few opportunities and rampant political corruption, I'd be neighbors with them in a heartbeat. Sadly, they seem stuck where they are, and so am I.

It's not just America. One reason is increased costs of living in big cities. If you buy a house, you probably are not going to buy one so large that you, your children, and your grandchildren (who will only be born a few decades later) could all live there comfortably. Instead, you just buy one large enough for you and your children. Or just you and your partner, if you are not planning to have kids soon.

But this means that when your children decide to have children, they will have to move away. If they are lucky, they can buy a house near you; but if there are many people who want to live in the city, and the new houses are not built often, or at least not near you, then they will have to move further away from you. And this is still just talking about living in a city... I haven't mentioned proximity to job opportunities or schools yet.

I consider my family very fortunate that my wife's part to full-time chef gig did not call her back for spring/summer events for this very reasoning. We were previously both working, but fortunately we are able to change focus and she can do activities and learning with the kids while I work 9-10 hour days remotely from my home office. A lot of our friends/acquaintances are both struggling to work gig jobs or local retail of some sort and I feel for all of them while we're in the perfect position to save, teach our children, and then still plan our downtime together. We've not had any real fighting either, it's been better than having to work from the office this entire time, but I do still miss that environment. Oh right, that and our parents and the living grandparents also live nearby.

Or you could have affordable public daycare / public pre-school that starts when the kids are born. Why does everyone expect the government to take care of their kids from 6 to 18 but not from 0 to 6 in the US ? It's pretty ridiculous.

There's patchwork public daycare from age 3+, but mainly only for poverty cases. Daycare costs less than a job though, so you don't really need free day care as long as minimum wage is high enough.

Protestant work ethic. I used to believe in this but the hardest working people I spent time working with were actually Catholic.

I'm still uncertain how I'm supposed to lead twins through online Kindergarten and write software all day. They can't even fucking use scissors without my help.

As someone with a young one at home and that works from home, you cannot without help.

My advice is to not over-tax yourself trying to do two things at once. It is very tiring both mentally and physically to switch back and forth too frequently.

Focus on your kids when they need your focus and reserve your strength for planned time that you can actually focus on work. Like during nap time or after bedtime.

I ended up taking a 3 month leave of absence to take care of my 3 young kids (one of which has a disability). Ireland closed schools and universities on 13 March 2020 and we quickly realised that even with 2 parents at home full-time, we couldn't work and take care of our children.

We found a good balance eventually but it was only possible through the circumstances of my wife's role and my ability to take leave.

Many many people are not in a position (negotiating power, financially) to do that which makes this extremely tough mentally and physically. If you have the ability (time, money) to help friends, family, neighbours, please consider doing so (those that need it will very much appreciate it).

Obviously this isn't an ideal solution but I wonder if this might be an opportunity for the people with means to pay for a babysitter (but not necessarily a private teacher) to hire some of the 2020 college grads who aren't going to find a job any time soon as daily tutors/online school facilitators for their kids? There are going to be tons of educated young adults out of work in the coming year and given their lack of experience they'll be less expensive than hiring an actual teacher, but they may be able to provide enough feedback and structure to give the kids a better quality online education. I don't have kids though so I don't really have a dog in this fight, just an idea. I used to enjoy babysitting back in the day and I would have loved an "academic babysitting" job like this when I first graduated.

Turns out the age old adaptations of having proximity to relatives really do matter. US is doubly vulnerable here - people move around a lot and the infra for childcare is simply not there.

This is being discussed from the well-off perspective of remote-capable jobs. The real pain is being felt by medical and other front-line workers. Gov. really need to look for options to support those in critical in-person jobs, starting with medical/fire/etc and then opening up to all essential jobs categories.

A lot of us were born in places that are no longer economically relevant. The retired are less geographically restrained - I wonder why they don’t more often follow their adult children. For example some of my Chinese coworkers don’t need to go back to China for childcare; their parents and in-laws rotate shifts here.

Also keep in mind, if both generations have kids at 30 (or even younger in a more traditional setting), grandparents are also still working age when the child is born.

>I wonder why they don’t more often follow their adult children

Because the cost of living where their adult children are reflects the incomes of their adult children.

That's fair, but the way I've seen this done is with a 2-bedroom apartment. A young family will need that eventually anyway. The second bedroom can be the caregiver's until it becomes the child's.

No doubt. Like between teachers and other kids, young children have eight hours of constant stimulation and it's absolutely impossible for a parent to offer that. Work from home productivity will absolutely suffer because of it, but what else are employers going to do? Unlike providing on-site daycare, stay-at-home nanny services don't scale well. :/

> between teachers and other kids, young children have eight hours of constant stimulation

Not always eight hours, sometimes school can be boring ;)

> TBH depending on circumstances, working five days a week at home also won't work

I am aware that this is an extremely unpopular opinion, but in my opinion one shouldn't have kids unless they have the means to dedicate sufficient time and attention to them. That is maybe once you can take 2 days a week off as a parent, or there's UBI or something like that.

Would avoid a lot of unhappy marriges, parents and children.

Of course, most people seek to 'leave something behind', even at the cost of unhappiness for all involved.

I am not sure exactly what a good solution would be, but maybe 40+ hours a week isn't a good deal anymore.

Parents are spending more time with their kids today than was common in the past. There are huge economic/social upsides to having grandparents or schools cover more time.

> Parents are spending more time with their kids today than was common in the past.

And? How do we know it's enough? Based on the number of unhappy, abusive households, certainly doesn't seem so.

My point is that parents should have the economic means to spend more time with their children if required, such as during a pandemic, while facing minimum stress and economic disruption.

When parents have to work full time and often barely be able to take care of their children, it leads to stress at home and directly impact the child.

Maybe working 40+ hours a week isn't a good deal anymore?

Has the number of "unhappy, abusive households" increased along with the rise of dual-income families? That's what you'd expect, right?

It's all very well realising this in a major unforeseeable disaster, but it doesn't put the egg back in the ovary 6 years after the fact.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23968936

> in my opinion one shouldn't have kids unless they have the means to dedicate sufficient time and attention to them.

People that had sufficient time to dedicate to their children prior to the pandemic no longer do. It's not reasonable to suggest that all prospective parents should have forseen Covid-19.

You missed my point. Putting children in childcare is not 'having time for them' before the pandemic. They didn't have the time required even before the pandemic, it's just that there was a way to cover up for that lack of time before.

How is this different from buying farm-grown produce at the grocery store rather than raising it in a garden?

I mean, you can, but I don't buy an unsupported argument that says that everyone "should" do it that way.

> How is this different from buying farm-grown produce at the grocery store rather than raising it in a garden?

It's different in that you're not directly affecting the well being of people dependent on you by making that choice, apart of course from them being living beings.

> don't buy an unsupported argument that says that everyone "should" do it that way

Am not saying what anyone should be doing, you do you, just that I think many parents don't realize how much responsibility is it to have children and even if they do, the current way society is set up doesn't allow them to do their best, in most cases.

> It's different in that you're not directly affecting the well being of people dependent on you by making that choice, apart of course from them being living beings.

Can I infer that you think constant engagement with parents produces the best outcomes for children? Why do you think that?

That would indeed not be the correct inference to make, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23969103

> society should support such economic conditions that parents are allowed to spend more time with their kids [...]

I totally agree. But I'm not sure how you can use that to support your original statement.

> one shouldn't have kids unless they have the means to dedicate sufficient time and attention to them.

Do believe that no one in a deficient society should have kids whatsoever?

I'm pretty sure a kid only interacting with their parents for their whole childhood is a good way to get some really messed up kids. One of the things I've noticed really heavily during this pandemic is how much kids miss out from school and social interaction. Childcare isn't just "store children until I get off work", it's engagement. It's that child getting a variety of structured and unstructured time with educators and other kids.

I could have all of the free time in the world, and childcare would still be better for the kid than entirely time at home.

> I'm pretty sure a kid only interacting with their parents for their whole childhood is a good way to get some really messed up kids.

That is not an argument I am making. That is a good way to beat a strawman.

My point is not that they shouldn't be in childcare at all, but that society should support such economic conditions that parents are allowed to spend more time with their kids without having to compromise their economic prospects and so that when they cannot send their children to childcare, say because of a pandemic, it is only a minor inconvenience, rather than a significant burden.

> Childcare isn't just "store children until I get off work", it's engagement. It's that child getting a variety of structured and unstructured time with educators and other kids.

That's the ideal. When you're well educated, have the means to pick up the best childcare for you kid you can find, have done the research, but there's lots of families for whom, yes, childcare is precisely just "store children until I get off work", not out of malice, but because their economic situation hardly allows them to think about it much.

I find that low level anxiety has helped me to be prepared for the pandemic. I always worry about "what if", and that means that the possibility of (say) being without an income is already accounted for in my mind.

I don't have kids, but I've always worried. How the hell can you afford them? Have plans for them all the time? Never be able to leave the house without them, etc etc etc. Whereas some folks go into things just knowing "it will work" or "they'll find a way". I've watched friends and relatives raise kids; they somehow always manage to find a sitter, or the grandparents step in, or whatever. There are daycare options, schools, etc (in normal times). These are things I don't account for. When I think of having kids I think of being 100% responsible for them all the time, so the actual situation in the pandemic more closely matches my fears than it matches the "old reality".

I think of it a lot like planning for retirement and not expecting social security, or a pension, or an inheritance. Planning for the worst case scenario, I guess, but that "worst case" always seems like reality -- and them I'm pleasantly surprised.

Some people prefer some unhappiness over death. It's a rational choice.

Will childless employees receive raises or be rewarded in some other way?

No. The reward is not having to do two jobs for the same compensation. If you’re childless, your reward is your freedom from this challenging time for working families.

To get to the root of this...You are likely hinting that it is a choice to have kids. But it’s also necessary for society that people have children and take care of them.

Disclaimer: I don’t have kids but might one day.

The GP was suggesting that, due to having children at home, many people will slip on their deadlines. It's natural to ask what happens to people who do not have children.

> You are likely hinting that it is a choice to have kids.

I did not, and my view on having children is not relevant here.

They might slip on their deadlines during a global crisis, or they might just work more than they usually do (childcare and regular work). Childless people will likely naturally move ahead in their careers.

Unless a social justice movement prevents it on equity/diversity/inclusion grounds, as has been mooted at my company.

It depends a lot on the nature of your work.

I have a young child and, over the last 4 months, have probably spent less time than ever doing work for my employer.

At the same time, just by having the right idea/insight at the appropriate time, I've probably delivered more value to my employer in the last 2 months than ever before.

I think and hope that the outcome of all this in terms of my career will be a net positive. But I guess time will tell.

Practically speaking, I bet if someone crunched the numbers in 3 years, they'd find the childless employees had progressed further in their careers in 2020/2021 than the employees with children.

Not directly, but having fewer outside-work responsibilities always leaves more hours in the day to chase a promotion.

Also remote education is much harder one of my friends who is a classics teacher at a public (private) school in the UK confirms that.

And as its a public school these are small class sizes

You're right. I'm blessed to have my wife be a stay-at-home mom, and it means I can be much more productive during this time compared to people in dual income situations.

At the same time, we've forgone extra income by having her stay at home, so there's that too..

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