Pursuing the Reunification of Home and Work | Hacker News Reader

Pursuing the Reunification of Home and Work

americancompass.org

47 pointssee-also37 comments

"Netherlands enjoy the highest subjective measure of life satisfaction among all OECD countries. Perhaps one reason is that their mothers are also among the most likely to work part-time."

I'm from the Netherlands and can confirm that the 1.5 model is very common. Typically the man has the full-time job and the wife works part-time and combines it with care for the children on the other days. On days where both parents work, often grandparents help out, if not possible it's daycare, which soon will be made free.

Cynical people may think of it as a semi-old-fashioned model, but I couldn't disagree more. I know many such couples and these women see this as a "best of both worlds" situation where they both contribute to society and have invaluable quality time with their children. Some may start to work more hours once the kids are in school, but many just stay on this lifestyle, or then proceed to take care of aging parents. Quite a lot have a job in care, which means altogether their lives evolve around being with people and caring for them. They want to live this way and provide an invaluable service to family and society.

Men often have a parent day, which is one day of unpaid leave per week for the first 2 years. Another variation of the model is 2 x 4, where both parents work 4 days as it slowly gets more acceptable for men to work part-time too.

The important part is of course to have options, so that each can find their own ideal balance.

> Cynical people may think of it as a semi-old-fashioned model, but I couldn't disagree more.

I think it's beautiful for one parent to set aside more time for raising children. The part that's old-fashioned is the assumption that this person will be the mother. Your comment makes it sound like full-time mothers and part-time fathers are still very uncommon.

Doesn't "old fashioned" imply that it goes against the contemporary expectation? Yet the expectation is still the same as it ever was. Not sure why people like you want to pretend like the majority of women would ever be happy with a stay-at-home-husband.

I'm not pretending that at all. Women don't want stay-at-home-husbands. A particular movement of women may claim that or believe it is right, but that doesn't make it true.

There was a study, which I can't find right now so I'm hoping another person will help me out with the citation, that showed women were less satisfied with stay-at-home men than vice versa.

Anecdotally, once I fully took on the duties of breadwinner our relationship really transformed into the healthiest and most stable it's ever been. She pursues her creative passions and I get the joy of watching her grow. She does do the cooking but she also loves to cook. And no, the cooking and cleaning is not all she does. Her creative passions are much broader and what she spends the most time doing.

I do wonder if some societal trend has completely hijacked our natural inclinations as men and women putting it all behind the veil of "it's all social construct! Dismantle everything!"

I think we should allow for people who identify as either men and women but don't want to fit in what works, naturally, for most people to go be their best self and that society making outcasts of those people in the past was the real problem. You want to fuck men and you are a man? Go do you. You want to identify as a woman but you're biologically a man? Chase your bliss.

However, going on the warpath to upend everything (and then force your new worldview on others) with postmodernist zeal has really been one of the most corrosively destructive things I've seen occur in my entire time alive and it appears to be emanating almost exclusively from the US.

> Anecdotally, once I fully took on the duties of breadwinner our relationship really transformed into the healthiest and most stable it's ever been. She pursues her creative passions and I get the joy of watching her grow.

The problem here is the power imbalance. At least in the US, she has the power to divorce you at any time for no reason and date a different man, and you still have to support her with alimony/child support as if you were still together, but she of course no longer has to do any home making duties for you. It's a terrible deal for the breadwinner (generally the man). If you work a stressful but high paying job, you permanently lose the option to choose a lower stress lower paying job because the family court will assess your earning potential based on the high paying job and expect you to pay her forever based on that.

Well, it's the same in the Netherlands and probably most places as well. It doesn't matter if the spouse cheated on you, the one who earns most ends up paying alimony. But the second part I don't know, why can't one get the less stressful job after divorce, it's not like you're enslaved, or are you?

You have to pay based on your max earning potential (the more stressful job) so if you take a less stressful, lower paying job you may have no money left to live on at all.

How can that work, what if you lose your job. Doesn't make sense

Then you would have a growing debt, they cancel your passport, cancel your driver license, eventually throw you in prison.

I'm actually pretty sure there are stay-at-home Dads who receive alimony, the law works both ways.

That's why I said

> It's a terrible deal for the breadwinner (generally the man)

It's a terrible deal for women breadwinners with stay at home husband too, but they're a minority of breadwinners.

You think the stay-at-home partner has all the power?! Perhaps you have never talked to a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage.

I never said all the power, but the fact that you'll be the one getting paid in a divorce, rather than the one doing the paying, certainly makes divorce a more economically attractive option to you than to your breadwinner partner.

"There was a study, which I can't find right now so I'm hoping another person will help me out with the citation, that showed women were less satisfied with stay-at-home men than vice versa."

There's a million studies that conclude that women almost exclusively select same level or preferably upwards, whilst men have more of a "any love is good love" selection mechanism, to dramatize a little. Both behaviors align 100% with biological incentives.

The full-time career woman does not want Joe Average, minimum wage earner that has ample time to take care of kids and the home. The feminist "dream" of this role reversal could be achieved tomorrow as there's millions of men like that. But they're fully ignored.

The second half of your comment escalates in various directions. I do agree though, that line of politics is incredible regressive.

I was the primary parent for many years, and I regret doing it. The stigma of being a stay-at-home dad is just too extreme. First, it is nigh impossible to find parenting groups that allow men. So, you're stuck parenting solo without community support. Then, my wife would constantly have to defend me to her parents and her group of adamant feminists. They would ask questions implying that my status is low or that I was some sort of deadbeat. I was doing 90% of the housework and parenting. It kind of sucked for many years.

Thanks for sharing. Yes, the "patriarchy" is female.

I switched to a 4 day work week 10 years ago, unrelated to children (we don't have them). On the 5th day I work on my personal projects. To this day I have to "explain" it, even to friends and family. Even though I make plenty in those 4 days and we have everything we need and more.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of women here work part-time even before having children. No questions asked.

The male purpose is clear, and we should stop pretending otherwise.

Ours is 1.5 years old now, and I can promise you there's some things that the mother should do, or be the most involved in. Some things us guys are just a bit clueless about. One can go deeply into this but essentially it's about the emotional bond and "reading" your child, in addition to the purely biological like breastfeeding.

I 100% agree and I thank you for calling things what they are.

For the sake of clarity, that quote is specifically about children - full quote is "Children in the Netherlands enjoy the highest subjective measure of life satisfaction among all OECD countries".

this is either a nitpick about language or a sweeping statement about humanity (let the reader decide), but as I see it, it's unhelpful to posit a dichotomy between "society" and "family". A parent caring for children _is_ contributing to society - society is made of people, and those people don't spring fully-formed from anyone's head!

I don't really disagree with the main point of your comment, but I think this distinction is artificial. Perhaps what we're looking for is a way to communicate about the way that different types of work "feel" to the person working, and because we haven't developed our language as well as we'd like, we fall back to reductionistic concepts that perpetuate confusion about the 'goal' of human endeavor; particularly, the idea that "society-oriented" things are somehow intrinsically more valuable/important than "family-oriented" things.

Not to worry, I had no intention to make that distinction, it was clumsy phrasing, this isn't my first language.

To be clear, there's nothing more meaningful than being a mother. So yes, a full-time mother is contributing to society greatly.

Common in Germany, too, and I’m that 0.5. I don’t see how we’d manage if I had only the choice of working full time or leaving the more interesting parts of IT. My in laws are over 80 and on the other side of the country, and my family is on the other side of the world.

What really, really helps is that my employer was obliged to let me come back for anywhere from 15-30 hours/week during the two years after my year out for parental leave. Same hourly rate, same general tasks, and they cannot fire me in that time for anything short of actual malice or criminal actvity, so they can’t do something squirrelly like put me in a position I’m not qualified for to try to get rid of me.

After these two years, I have a decision to make: switch back to my previous full time schedule, or to a permanent part time contract. My employer can choose to let me be more flexible, but they are not required to.

My female friends back in the USA have been bimodal: either they drop out of their serious careers entirely after they have kids (and often end up trying to sell me MLM stuff), or they cludge things together to go back full time after at most 4-6 months of maternity leave, often spending more than they net on childcare and housekeeping for at least a year or two in order to keep their places that they’ve worked really hard for.

The homestead of the future is one where multiple generations live together while working remotely. Knowledge work had been reducible to bits for 20 years, now they can be transmitted anywhere in milliseconds, just in time for a family lunch or dinner or movie.

It sounds nice, but there are extremely large segments that keep society functioning that don't involve knowledge work and can't be done remotely. It's easy to forget how much it takes behind the scences to keep the machine humming smoothly.

> It's easy to forget how much it takes behind the scences to keep the machine humming smoothly.

Until your toilet gets clogged.

Somewhat similar to climate crisis. If we shut off AC's globally for two days, we'd figure out the solution.

Can you clarify?

Here in France, a wealthy industrialized nation, most houses and buildings (even those of rich people) don't have AC. In my experience, this is typical of most of Europe.

Then again, we have figured out the solution to the climate crisis, it's nuclear power

Indeed. It is a considerable oddity how very material the lives of us wealthy knowledge workers are, yet how immaterial our labor.

It will work for a lot of people, and further the divide we have going on now :D.

You don't need every person in the household to work remotely, just enough to be able to collectively handle the housework. You're more likely to cross that threshold with six adults than with two.

Transmitted anywhere in milliseconds also means transmitted to a lower cost country, so be careful with this flexibility.

Outside of the bean counters, I’ve never heard anything good about the outcomes of any outsourcing project.

> I’ve never heard anything good about the outcomes of any outsourcing project

Cloud computing.

Isn’t it made by teams of EU and US engineers at amazon for the most part? These jobs stayed in the EU/US and didn’t go to sweatshops in LCOL countries.

Sounds like hell to me, I left home at 16.

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