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Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

People probably assume that women are more likely to spend more time with their kids by observing the way that parents interact with their children in primate species (including in humans).

Maybe we should be doing more stuff that supports women being able to have their kids at work with them (if they chose to work) instead of somehow implying that there is worth in forfeiting substantial portions of the healthy parts of your life to improving the efficiency of a cat picture delivery service.

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As long as the children aren't present in the actual work place. I can't think of anything that would make the standard open-pit even more dreadful than children running around.

This might be an unpopular opinion in the U.S., but the workplace is meant for work. Stop "bringing your whole self" to work and instead carve out enough time in the week for your other priorities.

I've spent time with enough successful people that spend every evening with their family to stop believing the work-till-you-pass-out mythos. Daily productivity does not go past 4-5 good (plus 4-5 crap) hours a day for 99.9% of humans.

Some societies seem to have this figured out. I read an article recently about the Netherlands titled "Women in the Netherlands work less, have lesser titles and a big gender pay gap, and they love it" - https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/11/women-in-the-nether... - indicating that the work culture there provides a level of flexibility that actually allows women to spend significant amounts of time with their children as they grow up. It sounds a lot better for everyone involved than the American approach.

Another way is to make it so we don't expect it to be the mother who spends most time with their kids. Fathers also vary in how much time they want to spend with their kids, but society assumes it is less than mothers, which can make it difficult for men to do this, which in turn limits the mothers ability to spend less time with their children to focus on work.

In most situations there is usually a primary carer, that should not be expected to be the mother.

socioeconomically, children should theoretically incur debt during childhood (paid mainly to women as principal caretakers). as children grow up, they'd work to pay back that debt. while this framing may seem distasteful, it does roughly model, from an economic perspective, the natural, informal system of value exchange between generations that's kept our species going for millenia.

but more importantly, it illustrates a genuine hole in economics that naturally disadvantages women, because the value generated from the work of domestic caretakers isn't being accounted for in our overall understanding of economic productivity. if domestic work were paid, we'd certainly reconfigure our societies to take that into account, and having children in workplaces wouldn't be so disfavored.

incidentally, denser mixed-use urban environments allows for kids (and pets!) to be close by, filtering in and out of the workplace as needed, but not necessarily underfoot all the time, which to me, is the best compromise.

The expansion of our society since industrialization has been characterized by the gradual, but systematic, replacement of implicit social capital with explicit economic capital. It's been great for a subset of people (the economic capitalists and those who, for one reason or another, are unable to build social capital) but it's hard to pretend there haven't been costs for everyone.

yah, i like to think of it as the esteem economy, something that's even more intimately tied with human societies and our evolutionary survival. polico-economic systems are simply models on top of this underlying esteem economy, and over history, we've jumped from one polico-economic theory to the next, without earnestly acknowledging and perhaps even venerating this simple connection.

how social networks could potentially better model the esteem economy is what most interests me about them, but so far, likes and follows don't seem to do a good enough job in general at revealing the truly estimable from the randomly popularized background meme.

>Maybe we should be doing more stuff that supports women being able to have their kids at work with them (if they chose to work) instead of somehow implying that there is worth in forfeiting substantial portions of the healthy parts of your life to improving the efficiency of a cat picture delivery service.

I cannot imagine how it would work in practice

My college had a kindergarden for staff. That seemed to be a decent balance. Make it so you spend your lunch hour with your kids if it's really that important (and spend less time commuting as well).

A lot of these problems seem to me to have been created by very poor urban planning. If you work in a city it shouldn't be a big deal to have lunch with whoever/go down to the post office/ get away to the park for a bit. Been doing it my whole life.

It’s important to reframe these messages, I think, to focus more on “child development” than to focus specifically on women’s roles. I read this article replacing “women” with parents for similar reasons. My 16 month old could very easily sit with me in a private office space, and even WFH can occupy himself with books and toys. Usually he’ll come to me every 15-20 minutes for some exclusive attention, then resumes his play. But alas we focus so much on “productivity “ that, according to some metrics this makes folks like me “less productive”.

Meanwhile, I have very fond memories of my dad taking me to his job as an EE at Raytheon in the early 90s, and his cubicle buddies having so much fun with me there.

This is all great to show kids and makes for a better office environment. I don’t think the societal notion or forcing parents to jump through childcare hoops benefits anyone but the people making the most money.

instead of somehow implying that there is worth in forfeiting substantial portions of the healthy parts of your life to improving the efficiency of a cat picture delivery service

That’s not for you decide for everyone else. Whatever happened to live and let live?

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