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Comment by largbae | Hacker News Reader

I love this new information about birth rates and WFH, and totally support following it to higher birth rates.

But the article framing as if the pronatalists somehow knew of the birth rate benefit and maliciously used it to counter their stated goals is too heavy-handed.

How about framing this as the new information that it is and getting the information out there in a positive way so that it can be used in both government and corporate policy?

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Wasn't it pretty intuitive back in 2021 or so that wfh would make childcare easier?

It's good to have exact numbers of course, but I can't see how anyone would think RTO wouldn't impact fertility or households in some fashion.

Sure, but I didn't think about this specific topic in any direction until this article. That's the great thing about articles and media, they spread thoughts and connections that might not be obvious to folks who are focused on other things.

At the start of WFH, we were all* rather more worried about the pandemic and what the shops had in stock than childcare.

By the end of the pandemic, it was more of a social battle between those who wanted to maintain the new normal and those who absolutely loathed it, and again nobody* really cared about childcare.

Closest anyone got to caring about childcare at any point was home-schooling and the value of air filters in classrooms.

* I am of course being excessively absolutist with this language, very little is all-or-none.

Actually paying someone to take care of your child 7-5 is easier, it's just wildly unaffordable and therefore less attractive.

I'm thankful I live somewhere I can pay $300/month for daycare. I think it's even cheaper now and capped at like $400 no matter how many kids you have in daycare.

We tried to have them at home while WFH a few months during covid when everything was shut down. That didn't work. lol.

I don’t understand the reasoning to have children if you don’t want to spend time with them and rather would pay someone to do that for you (not addressing directly at you). Being able to spend time with your child is a gift which passes by very quickly.

Unless you're independently wealthy, even the most traditional two parent nuclear family with a married mom and dad requires at least one parent to spend a significant portion of their day away from their children earning a living. I'm not sure why you would so strongly object to both parents doing that when you would presumably not object to just one doing the same.

WFH kind of solves that. Instead of taking coffee breaks or going to lunch with the colleagues presumably one of the working spouses can spend those breaks with the family. Now, I am looking at this problem from the European perspective where one of the spouses receive childcare payments and is allowed not to go to work for 1-2 years. I know about American system (12 weeks off) and it's beyond insane to me.

I don't disagree that parents should just roll around on the floor with their child until age three. My creditors feel otherwise, I presume.

I commented specifically regarding your wording about what's easier. I support the view that daycare is something you have to do reluctantly, not that it's the easy way out. Over the years I had seen too many of my colleagues who "prefer working from the office" because there are small children at home. That implies that the other spouse (every time it's the mother) who is staying at home taking care of them.

The article at least partially addressed that. The argument isn't that the pronatalists aren't truly in favor of higher birthrates, it's that they're selectively in favor of higher birthrates for certain groups of people and thus support solutions focused on those groups such as expensive fertility technology like artificial wombs while opposing more generally applicable approaches like workplace flexibility.

I think the article is on the right track, but it misses also mentioning the conservative politics angle. The right-wing version of pronatalism also includes a pretty obvious implicit, if not entirely explicit, goal to return to the 1960s model of family life where the husband worked while the wife stayed home with the kids. Offering women workplace flexibility and giving them the option to both work and have a family runs counter to that societal vision.

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