Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

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I’d argue that in a nuclear family culture, kids are also expensive in indirect ways which are hard to account for. You sacrifice a lot of personal time and often health when you need to be there for kids virtually constantly, and while daycare is very expensive in some places ($1200 CAD/month for us) I feel like it’s one of the more manageable costs.

During the pandemic, having no friends or family around to help and needing to work full time jobs is a lot harder to manage than money.

I’m not complaining at all. I just spent a great day with my kids at the ocean and I love having them around. It’s still a daily task to juggle them, work, and my well being without much in the way of outside help. I’m fairly sure my life is shortening considerably as a result of the stress, so like I said, daycare seems pretty cheap in comparison.

Just my take on it - I know some people seem to manage it expertly, and maybe more people do than I realize.

In any case, that cost is still very high these days since both parents typically need to work. Money becomes easier to find than time.

> both parents typically need to work

I think that's the key. I'm still trying to figure out for myself if it has something to do with "we need more women in workforce"

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t... (Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap, explained)

> Warren’s central argument in the book is that this rise in household income was almost entirely driven by the increase in the number of two-earner families. And adding income by adding a second worker, she argues, has very different economic implications than rising pay for a single worker. In practice, the book says, the increasing ubiquity of two-earner households leaves families in more precarious financial circumstances with more brittle budgets that were more prone to tip over into insolvency if a problem cropped up.

> 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.

Sounds almost like that if we (putting the hard hat on and hiding under the table) find a way to exclude one parent from workforce, things will get back to normal.

Your reasoning is sound, but I believe it’s untenable in public discourse (for various reasons).

Forced exclusion sounds terrible. It's about having options, so there is not forced inclusion, which is the trap we've found ourselves in.

Long term, the fix is to push wages up so single earners can support a family and a stay at home partner. Short term, don’t have kids if you can’t afford expensive daycare and need both incomes to break even.

How would it work? Maybe I'm wrong, but once wage goes up there'll be prices growth for housing, daycare and other related things because more families is now able to afford it. It's simply the supply-demand equilibrium. So raising a single earner wage does not seem to do anything good, maybe without decreasing at the same time wage for the second earner (which is unacceptable for obvious reasons).

I’m not sure this is necessary.

I wonder if a future advanced society will support women who want to have large families during their college/educational years.

Our family had 2 children in the dorms while I was getting my doctorate, and they were a joy for the floor (e.g. we didn’t require the emotional support animals they were sending to every floor). Also, having the communal environment was ideal for finding child care here and there.

A situation like this would help such women reach their (per Pew research) goal of ~3.

Imagine if you had free tuition if you had a child while in college? Raising children while young is also super helpful activity wise…

I would say declining worker power drove women to the workplace, and elite strains of feminism were the cover not cause.

If it was just feminism we should have seen a 20 hour work week to compensate.

Not an expert here, but from my Soviet background I remember workers rights to go hand in hand with women emancipation.

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