American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were
derekthompson.org
derekthompson.org
I think this really undersells it. My mom parented a few hours a week. My kids (like most) lived under ceaseless 24/7 adulting. The time I spent with my sons was more like a 20x increase over my parents' generation.
Past that, it seems like it's taking forever for anyone to notice the radical changes in modern parenting/childhood. Along with eliminating adult-free peer time, we've eradicated free range areas. My generation could roam (w/o adults) for miles in every direction; my kids (like most) could go from one edge of the yard to the other (credit: car culture, trespassing culture, false stranger-danger culture).
The surprising part (to me) isn't how thoroughly adults have sabotaged kids growth opportunities, it's that nearly no one seems to have noticed it.
Spending long chunks of time with no adults, in a large mixed-age group, is a less and less common experience.
I spent some time in a remote fishing village in Madagascar and that was one of the things that surprised me the most - kids would spend all day together in an unsupervised mob roaming around the village, from the youngest ones who were just old enough to walk independently to age 8-10 or so (older than that and you had things to do).
I also enjoyed this essay on the topic: https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-chil...
I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting, because those topics are so deeply embedded in parenting today that it's like saying "nobody seems to have noticed the internet".
The swing towards "Fuck Around And Find Out" parenting has been going for the last ten years here, and everybody gives you rapturous applause when you encourage kids to have their own independent playtime.
I have also never seen a man at a playground get dirty looks, in fact there are more men out with their kids than women on the weekends (fewer during weekdays).
It’s a frustrating experience that changed how I interacted with other kids on the playground that weren’t mine. It made me more careful about whether I would let another kid join our game of tag or push the kid in the swing next to us when they asked. Sad really, and truly hope things have changed.
I had minor children from the early 90s to the late 10s. Parenting discussions were pretty much an ongoing thing. When I contrasted my childhood with my kids', there would be a long pause while the other parents realize it didn't used to always be this way.
Perhaps in the last decade awareness has bloomed and for whatever reason, I'm not coming across it. I hope so. That would be great.
“As of April 30, 2018, the term ‘helicopter parents’ yielded 2 million hits on Google. From March 2014 to February 2018, the keyword ‘helicopter parents’ was searched monthly”. https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3922...
On the one hand this is great - I am a huge supporter of understanding and accepting ourselves non-pejoratively - anxiety, depression, etc.
On the flip side they talk sometimes like the forces are from outside them, like they have no agency.
And they also talk like the words came from somewhere else, "My generation compared to previous generations..." <- unless you lived those previous generations, which is impossible, you heard that from somewhere, probably a paper, and probably from a professor in school.
Millennial dads were (mostly) a distant mess who for whatever reason saw the expression of feelings as "weak".
Truly, this hasn't been my experience. I'm GenX (edit: not GenZ), my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials. My 25yo kids understand behavior and psychology better than my parents ever did.
The reason my kids grew up imprisoned is there was nowhere for them to go. The risk to their well-being was never from strangers but from cars and police.
My understanding is that Gen Z comes AFTER millennials, so if you are Z, your kids can't be millennials. Maybe you are Gen X? Also, if your kids are 25 now, then they would be gen z, not millennials.
P.S. Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't make up this dumb system or these dumb names ^_^
I agree with everything in your top level comment.
You're right. I fat fingered my post.
If your parents were WW II vets, wouldn't they be part of Greatest Generation (often considered to be those born 1901–1927)? Silent Generation are often considered to be those born 1928–1945. They weren't adults when WW II was fought.
The friends who are with their grandparents show up. Grandpa parks his car in my driveway, and walks the kid to my door. We greet, kid runs off to play, and we shoot the shit for a while, asking how things have been going, maybe Grandpa wants to check out the latest on my woodworking project, whatever. Then Grandpa says goodbye, I'll be back later, and heads out.
The friends who are with their Millennial parents show up. Dad parks his car waaaaay out by the curb, never even going on my property. Kid gets out of the car and walks himself to my door. Dad speeds away in his car, never even acknowledging us. Dad comes back to pick the kid up, same thing. Parks way far away, texts his kid, and the kid excuses himself and runs all the way out to the car. I don't even know the names of any of my kid's friends' Millennial parents!
This pattern repeats across N = about 6.
The transition to adulthood was rough for me for several reasons, and looking back I think that was one of them - my parents always did things for me, but never expected me to do things on my own.
I almost certainly go overboard with this, but that's the nature of things.
She freaked out. She'd been so terrified by a litany of "stranger danger" stories that the thought of just going into a store alone - a small store with one public entrance - was alien to her. We told her she could do it herself, or not have ice cream, because we weren't doing it for her. She went.
I'm glad to hear you're pushing your kids this way.
What's most crazy to me is how somehow almost all boomers are more addicted to smartphones than gen Z and Alpha. They'll have their grandkids over, and they'll be glued to their smartphone instead of interacting with those kids.
I think it's similar to kids who grow up with alcohol vs those who don't. The ones not exposed go off to college and go completely nuts.
When I was a kid the Karens against childhood autonomy existed but it actually cost them time and money to rat us out since they would have to drive home to a telephone, so long as we didn't play near houses. If an asshole raised hell we were gone by the time they could call the authorities.
(1) I didn't personally appear at bus stop, thinking my kid would be able to just walk the short distance from the stop to our house. Nope, school did not let kid off bus, given a timer to show up at the transportation office before child services will be called.
(2) Let my kid walk on our own property, someone drives up and starts interrogating them why they are "alone." Fortunately I was actually watching from further away and I managed to diffuse the situation before they alerted the authorities.
(3) Took my kid to the park so they could have a nice time outside in public. Whoops, looks like my child is a difference race than me. That means I am a kidnapper. Karen (from bodycam, a passing yuppie looking cyclist) calls police, who arrive and scare the shit out of me and my kid and detain us for about an hour. Not released until a woman's voice comes on the phone (they literally did not check, just any female voice) says the man can let his child play at the park. They also contacted child services of both the city of the park, and my hometown -- fortunately even though the city of the park looked like they were ready to fuck with me my hometown CPS did tell them to kick rocks and since I left town there was nothing further they could do.
It's a real thing.
All this due to a disgruntled neighbor who endlessly called cps (anonymously), with a variety of bizarre accusations. I suspect CPS got so sick of seeing us, they eventually ignored the calls.
Bad parenting tends to be more of the type that isn’t engaged. Kids don’t hate you for going to work. They are hurt if you come home and ignore them.
So its not a matter of “killing yourself to get more time” … its a matter of not abandoning your kids and wife to make time for your hobbies or whatever
I think as kids we learned by example more than hands-on-taught.
And if you ask basically any kind of science "how do I best accomplish x?", that science will have a "presciptive" answer, so I don't see how parenting science is any more prescriptive then chemistry.
Thanks to anyone reading this if you’re trying to be a good dad. You’re making the world a better place in ways you don’t even see
All my millennial dad friends clean, change diapers, cook, whatever. And make no mistake all the moms are incredibly hard-working and involved with the kids.
If I happened to meet socially a dad who wasn't doing those things I would literally make fun of them. "You're a grown man who can't change a diaper or clean a bathroom?"
It's 10am on a Saturday and you're running around playing games with your kid. I just stared at him and went on.
My younger siblings were a bit more intrinsically interested in sports than I was, and my parents shifted their attention to their sports extracurriculars. I actually don't really remember what they did sports-wise because I did not care at all; and although I was the older sibling I was not so much older that anyone thought it was important to encourage me to take a pseudo-parental or caretaker interest in what my younger siblings were doing. I would go to the baseball field where one brother played his games because my parents were going, and then amuse myself by playing alone in the dirt beyond the bleachers, because that was more fun than paying attention to the game. By the time I was old enough to, say, drive them places in lieu of our mom, they had gotten to the age where sports were meaningfully competitive and were not actually good enough to keep playing.
So not only do I find this dad's attitude extremely sympathetic, I think that I would've found it sympathetic even when I myself was a child. This makes me some kind of outlier, I'm sure. Anyway, 3 years is young enough that there's no actual soccer happening, just running around with a ball, any kid can enjoy that. It's quite possible that, depending on the interests and dispositions of his kid, that dad won't be compelled to be on a soccer field at 10am much further in the future.
My older daughter is on a competitive cheerleading team. Not something we (parents) suggested but instead she found through school friends. She loves it. Has boosted her confidence and athletic prowess.
There aren't many dads at the meets relative to moms. Not remotely surprising. I'm the first person to admit that I don't know how to do hair or make up.
I see quite a divergence among the men in commentary. Some are there and happy their kids are loving it - they're finding a way to make peace with the situation. Some are checked out, on phones, looking grumpy at best.
Some part of me gets it. Wild asymmetry in that sport. Performances are just a few minutes long, but there's a shit-ton of practice and weekend days/entire weekends dedicated to cheer.
It would be so so so easy to say "get me out of here" but I've found a way to enjoy and make peace and make a friend or two along the way.
Contrast with her other current sport: lacrosse. First season and it's kind of a shit-show. But I'm with her in the sun on a Friday night - and with the right weather - it is a great place to be. We (parents, dads, etc.) see our friends there too.
Woke up at 6am. Child 1 woke up at 7am. Dropped her off at daycare at 8am. All the other children were being dropped off by their dads, too. Full day of work ahead. Dinner at 6pm. Bath at 7pm. Bedtime and story at 8pm. Usually calls with Bangalore from 9pm to midnight but it's Labour Day over there. Sleep at midnight.
Rinse. Repeat.
Also worth not forgetting that in most cases the fathers of millennials were a hell of a lot more present and emotionally available than their fathers etc. I'm sure we'll make plenty of our own mistakes that our children will try to avoid when their turn comes.
Guess why birth rates are crashing - and why they crash hardest in Asia, especially Japan.
The aforementioned “trad households” do not have a financially independent wife, which is what nradov is referring to when they write
> force the wife into becoming an unpaid caregiver for her in-laws
Typically, the in laws or the husband would control the assets, and hence be able to exert more influence.
> For my family, if we had more options -- ie, more money -- then both of us would be stay-at-home parents.
In the absence of a trust fund, most women (and men) will choose to be able to fend for themselves.
Why would you need or even want to be independent? Why would you plan to form a family while keeping your options open/having one foot out the door?
Because I would want my kids to be able to get out of an abusive partnership if they needed to. See the history of domestic abuse.
> Why would you plan to form a family while keeping your options open/having one foot out the door?
Everyone should have options open for basic sustenance. Death, abuse, job b loss, etc. As they say in engineering, two is one and one is none.
What you are describing is pretty much ideal for a lot of people, but it's not what everybody gets.
Assuming you want a family, your very top priority when evaluating someone for dating from the very beginning should be whether that person would make a good spouse and help you to form that family. Otherwise what are you even doing? Someone who can't commit is its own red flag for that purpose. If you have kids, that's it. You're in it. You need to be committed.
And having a job doesn't mean you're independent of your spouse anyway. If one of us died or we split, it'd be absolutely devastating to our family regardless of the money (e.g. if life insurance/social security covered everything). I would be hugely screwed trying to raise the kids without her, job notwithstanding.
I mean people do not naturally grow up wanting to stare at a desk/PC all day deciding to become a scientist or a doctor and study a bunch of shit that his almost no relation to what humans were adapted for for millions of years. Our evolutionary programming was to bang, have kids, and roam the jungle and grab the resources and satisfy our short brutish lives.
Now the fact that something is evolutionarily natural or historically normal doesn't mean it is good or right. But just letting loose on that particular natural instinct tends to be more accepted in conservative societies while in the city or liberal areas teenage (past age of consent) pregnancy is seen maybe more of something they will shame you for. You're supposed to do a pretty unnatural thing of staring at books until you're 22 or 26 and then stare at a computer screen so you can get a good job to pay a gazillion dollars for childcare delivered by minimum wage workers. You're supposed to take your time and maybe about the time your biological clock has run out, you pay $20,000 for IVF and you do a speedrun.
So which is a greater imposition of societal pressure? I won't claim conservative societies don't exhibit more social pressure than liberal ones. But on this point, it's not clear to me the conservative one is doing the greater of the pressuring.
My wife currently stays home with the kids, although that might change down the road. She doesn't have any trust fund or inheritance either, of course.
However, although I'm earning the money, it's 100% a shared resource. It goes into a shared account. I'm pretty sure that's a legal necessity since we're married, but it's how we'd choose to do it anyway. There's no division between my finances and hers.
We married each other to be a team together forever, but even if we separated, our finances would be divided in half between us. If we'd wanted to fend for ourselves, we wouldn't have gotten married, and certainly wouldn't have had kids.
She feels sorry for me having to go to work every day, but it's a logical division of labor because I have much higher earning prospects.
I say this because I want to understand your definition; are we a traditional household in your view?
In the context of the original comment by pkaler, and subsequent replies from basswood, mschuster91, purplerabbit, and nradov, I understood "trad household structures" to be one where the man in a husband/wife relationship sells his labor to someone else and the woman does not.
So yes, but, I would note that there is probably a difference (for the purposes of this conversation) between the following:
A couple that earns median income per year and still chooses to have only one income earning spouse specifically so the other spouse can spend more time with the kids, whilst making significant sacrifices in other aspects of life such as school district, kids' activities, vacations, material goods, etc.
And a couple where one earns significantly above median income and can afford to have only one income earning spouse without making significant sacrifices.
In the context of the entire chain of comments, I would assume purplerabbit was referring to the first type of couple, who choose to forego many of life's luxuries in favor of child rearing, and that is the type of "household structure" that nradov was saying is not popular, except "when women have no other options" (i.e. women's rights allowing them to be financially independent).
>However, although I'm earning the money, it's 100% a shared resource. It goes into a shared account. I'm pretty sure that's a legal necessity since we're married, but it's how we'd choose to do it anyway. There's no division between my finances and hers.
There isn't in my marriage either, but I would still advise my wife to maintain her ability to earn income in case I were to go crazy, lose my job, or some other risk. And I would advise my daughter of the same.
But the point is, we both would prefer to be home with the children, and it's only for want of money that either (or both) of us would work. The privilege is being able to stay home; the sad reality is having to work at the office to earn a living.
It just strikes me (and her too) that the conversation around this issue is framed so backwards, as though everyone deeply wants to spend their waking days at an office desk / driving an Uber / etc, whereas spending time with your children is a miserable burden that people only do if forced it with no other options. I get that might be the case for some people, especially if they hate their family or have an abusive partner, but to me it's an alien mindset. Work is the abusive partner that we can't escape from, but tolerate for the kids.
I don't think this is it, which is why I brought up a trust fund in one of my previous comments.
This comes down to personal risk tolerances, but it seems evident that many people feel that volatility in job markets and shrinking economic opportunities mean that there is a sufficient gain in security of housing/food/energy/healthcare/future economic opportunities such that it can be worth a sacrifice in spending time with children.
My parents moved to the US, along with their extended families from a developing country, and they almost all spent 24/7 working to develop businesses or whatever to ensure the kids had more opportunity than them. And they succeeded, most of my cousins do very well for themselves, and they can have a spouse that stays at home without decreasing their kids' future chances, but some don't (perhaps because their parents ended up in a stagnant metro rather than a growing one, that one factor is the single biggest difference in trajectories in my family).
It is easier than ever to be outcompeted by someone else around the world, so there is kind of an up or out situation for those that aim for maintaining a certain quality of life. It's also fine to opt out of that rat race, but from my perspective, the biggest cost is less access to healthcare.
I would note that the whole one spouse spending time with kids thing is probably a post world war 2 American/British phenomenon. Even in village life in developing countries, both the husband and wife are out working in factories or fields while grandparents who can't work anymore or older siblings and cousins are taking care of the kids. It's a grind for most people, most of the time.
In this framing, being able to have a stay-at-home parent is a privilege to be treasured. Not everyone can manage it, which is a tragedy.
Of course, for those who don't want to be a parent and prefer their job, that's fine too. Some people, whether men or women, just yearn for the mines. I wouldn't say that any such people should be pressured to be a stay at home parent. Hopefully they can be happily childless, or else partner with someone who enjoys raising children, or else get support from grandparents or the community.
What I simply object to is a framing that views being a "traditional" stay at home parent as an intrinsically miserable or undesirable role, when it's what so many of us factory workers wish we could do ourselves but can't afford to. When a (loving, non-abusive) couple can afford to have one parent stay at home, my wife and I both view that stay-at-home parent as the lucky one.
I would like to see good statistics on this.
And your wife’s opinion on her choices.
My wife self-reports as very happy and talks a lot about how proud she is of the decision. I'll acknowledge that we are privileged in terms of support -- 3 relative families within 30 minutes and most people in a 100 meter radius attend the same church. Even in our setup, however, we really wish we could swing a multi-generational setup and have grandparents around all the time.
Maybe the Amish are on to something!
Of course the spouse has the risk the other ex-spouse will sabotage themselves and end their incomes to avoid paying the order, at which point they may be thrown into prison if they are found. But are they worse off than the employee who can be fired at a moment's notice and go broke by a boss who isn't sabotaging himself at all and bound by no such judicial order? Maybe so, but it's not by some gigantic long shot.
> Those household structures aren't popular, they're just common when women have no other options.
I agree with what yours, and point out that it applies equally to men. I was 25 when we decided to have our first child and while I would make the same decision knowing what I know now, I didn't have anything near an accurate idea of what the impact would be on my life as a whole.
Basically, I wasn't taking exception to the idea of an irrevocable decision made with incomplete context; I was taking exception to the idea that it's somehow unique to women - because it's not.
I would add though that while making bad choices is not unique to women, when it comes to mariage, lots of society used to make it so much easier on men. Men could/can escape home in work, hobbies, etc with much less judgement than women. It’s gotten better in some parts of the world, definitely not all, and last years the trend is rather backward I feel.
Your comment seems to imply that they’re stupid.
Throughout human history, it was rare for only two people to raise a child, let alone one. Or for women to not bring money into the home.
Like many "trad" trends, it's based more on advertising and television than history.
"It takes a village to raise a child" was meant literally. However, the glory of capitalism required people to move to where the jobs were, turning that millennia-old principle upside down ever since industrialization. And car culture was the ultimate fatal blow, when children can't even walk their own neighborhood any more.
And when BLM made it part of their charter to encourage community support for children beyond the typical nuclear unit they were accused of a radical Marxist agenda to "destroy families."
For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans, and that's odd for a nation of immigrants considering how common the "whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins" is in the rest of the world.
I think because excessive individualism plays into the hands of large companies. There is an individualist culture that has naturally grown over time in the US, but it has also been pushed by big corporations because if you can't depend on your neighbors and extended family, you need to spend money to fill the gaps.
It's not like leftists are known for their traditional family values now or then, so why should it be taken that way?
Also given how many people espousing "traditional family values" among the right turn out to be abusers, pedophiles, rapists, deadbeats, etc, what you might consider "traditional" values don't actually mapped to the left-right political axis at all.
And I assume you didn't bother reading my comment or this thread very hard and just wanted to dunk on the left, but the American nuclear family isn't "traditional family values" to begin with.
Here's my routine.
5am: wake up/coffee
5:30ish: gym
6:30ish: back, clean kitchen, take out trash, make lunch for 2 kids
7:30: nanny arrives, and I sit down at desk, and kids are now awake
8:30: walk older kid to school
9-5:30: work or whatever else. I run my own business so some days feel very busy, some the opposite. I just try to be intentional with my time.
5:30 p: start dinner
6:30 p: dinner (or earlier depending on demands)
7:30 p: kid bed time
8:15-8:30: done w/kids. time for a bit of TV or wind-down, catch up with my wife about her day for as long as I can manage to stay awake
9:30-10: bed time (ideal day)
I stopped working at night unless it is critical for a next-morning thing. That leaves me absent from some opportunities that I might otherwise get spending more time on work, but I also have more time to focus on me/marriage/non-work-life
My point in sharing is that I make space on purpose for me. Your schedule sounds (and I am presuming) like you don't have much time for you. Is that right?
To be clear, I'm not trying to point a causal arrow here, or even say it's good or bad. I read a study the other day that asserted that fathers who spent more time parenting have measurably lower testosterone levels, and that the delta correlates to the amount of time spent.
There is a solid explanation.
First, before the adoption of mass spec, studies used a less accurate method of measuring testosterone that overstated testosterone levels.
Also, the studies showing the population level decline in testosterone generally controlled for obesity (which naturally lowers testosterone) using BMI. But BMI is a very crude measure.
When studies control with better methods like BMI + waist circumference, and only compare samples using the mass spec measurement method, the unexplained population level decline goes away. After fixing the measurement method, what remains of the decline can be explained by BMI + waist circumference. In other words, modern men are more prone to obesity and metabolic syndrome, which naturally reduces testosterone. Case closed.
For that matter, some _animal_ studies have shown declining testosterone as well. That doesn't seem to be well-studied, but if it holds up it would make me lean toward it being something environmental (e.g. microplastic pollution)
But there are other studies and meta analyses which cover other countries and come to the same conclusion.
I think many of the studies claiming to find significant population level decline are older and overstate the issue due to the methodological errors outlined in my previous post. If you are thinking of a particular one, please share a link.
I am not familiar with the research on testosterone levels in animals. In humans, while not conclusory, I do think the evidence suggests that increasing rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome are the proximate cause of testosterone decline.
While that can be true, I wonder how much of it is true. It's pretty common in therapy to hear partners saying the other one doesn't contribute, but further investigation can often turn up observation biases.
I am a dad, FWIW.
I've heard this from many moms, "My husband does so little in terms of housework, childcare, play and mental load, that it is actually easier when he is out of the house; when he is home, I essentially have to take care of an additional child." I even know some moms that organize playdates for their husband, as in ONLY the husbands, so that that the husbands are out of the house.
On the other hand, I know of two separate marriages that fell apart because the husband worked, did all the child care and housework, while the mom stayed home and doomscrolled. After a few years of no improvement, divorce. Of course many things could be at play here... screen addiction, post-partum depression, etc.
Raising kids is complex, time-consuming, hard, and amazing. It takes a lot of energy, people, and love. I always try to assume people are doing their best, though sometimes even that's tough.
On the other hand, /r/parenting was full of moms desperate because their partners didn't to their part.
It really paints a picture, if you think about it.
If you are referring to /r/girldinnerdiaries, that is not a cooking sub, nor is it intended to be. The whole point is pairing a photo of dinner with the situation and mood of the photographer.
It's right there in the name: Girl Dinner Diaries.
You can also find that much of the research about household duties is biased against the type of work that men have traditionally done (eg excluding yard work, maintenance, etc).
Merriam-Webster disagrees [0][1][2].
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deadbeat
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/loafer
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idler
Re. your other points, I don't entirely disagree with them, but they are at best tangential to the article we are discussing.
My ex wife does this. I take my issues with her to a therapist (instead of online forums). FWIW I have always been more present than her in our child’s life and certainly pay a lot more too. One data point, but it’s in the population you’re referring to.
Some people want sympathy at the expense of their partner’s reputation.
But the aggregate trend is quite clear.
How would aggregation of unreliable data help?
And the post that started this sub thread was about how their experience didn’t show the trend. But no one in the social sciences expects every sample to follow the trend. There will be numerous exceptions. Just like sometimes when one rolls a pair of dice one gets a twelve.
That twelve is an absolutely an accurate sample from the data but just because one sometimes gets an outlier it doesn’t mean that there is no central tendency.
Every dad wants his sons to be a better father than he was. Glad to see it happening.
Nothing strengthens the knees like the weight of responsibility.
What was my Dad busy doing? Focusing on his career in order to provide for his family. Doing hobbies that increased his skill set. Fixing the house to ensure we all had a nice safe place to live. Tending to the garden to keep the neighbours happy. Building ties with the community to increase our family's standing in the community and being able to call in favours in emergencies etc.
The 4 days off he had from his primary job, he worked multiple other jobs, creating multiple streams of family income.
It's so easy to view many of these things as him not tending to his family directly. That's incredibly short-sighted.
My mother appreciated very little of those things, and constantly nagged that he never did enough. She admitted many years later this was a big contributor to their divorce.
I think some modern opinions of parenting come from a very individualistic, transactional and reciprocal mindset. Eg "I spend 1 hour doing the dishes, you have to do something, today, and of equivalent value, to show you love us". What kind of foundation for a relationship is that? What happened to the power of a family?
An example anecdote: my friend works construction. Lots of long hours of hard labor. His wife is unhappy because he doesn't do more childcare, but left unanswered is how he could do more. He can't work fewer hours or move to a new job without a giant income hit. His wife can't earn enough to offset daycare costs. They already live on a fairly thin budget. From the outside, I can see how he'd feel unappreciated.
That said though there are definitely also men who aren't doing childcare OR working hard, and they're happy to have their wife do everything.
I’ve also now watched many friends divorce, and I have to say, the wives who stayed at home seem to struggle a LOT more with the transition of now having to parent AND have a job, and the husbands mostly seem to be fine. And that’s despite them now paying a big chunk of their ex’s bills!
Absolutely. They will though, when two parents working fully becomes a requirement instead of an option, as we are seeing in many HCOL areas. Or even, as many wish, to be the primary earner and the man stay at home.
In fact, the burden on the sole earner as you point out, is /increasing/ during this transition - costs are rising due to the expectation that two people will contribute financially to the mortgage and other expenses. Another issue that women don't tend to appreciate.
At that point, neither parent can catch a break, and the family and children suffer.
But this equality of opportunity is exactly what women fought extremely hard for. It's a shame that marriage and the kids are sometimes the victims of the side effects.
(I'm gay fwiw and not a misogynist. I do root for women's rights but not blindly. Demanding massive societal change comes with responsibilities)
Ok.
>I do root for women's rights but not blindly.
What? How does “I’m straight fwiw and not a homophobe. I do root for queer’s rights but not blindly” come across?
>Demanding massive societal change comes with responsibilities)
Who isn’t being responsible? Is it all girls outperforming boys in school?
You can see this in how people respond to complaints of lazy spouses. If a woman complains, everyone is by default on her side. If a man complains, even if it's obviously true his wife is not doing enough, he is still the one blamed because maybe he wasn't nice to his wife or something.
When I read from article:
> The fact that richer and better-educated parents are freely choosing to pour more of their valuable time into childcare makes raising children sound practically like a “luxury good,” akin to buying a Rolex watch or a fragile Fabergé egg.
It kind of reflected an unawareness to me. Unless one crosses the threshold of wealth where they can afford full-time 24/7 nanny, the richer parents spending more time in childcare seems obvious and non-counterintuitive. It is more likely jobs that pay well also provide flexible working hours and locations so these parents can really afford to spend more time in childcare. And this would much more prevalent category then families who could afford hired help for child care.
On the other hand poorer parent with much stringent job conditions would be mentally and physically exhausted to provide much childcare.
> I think some modern opinions of parenting come from a very individualistic, transactional and reciprocal mindset. ..
I think family unit like almost every other thing in modern economy has fallen victim to financialization of society.
I think it's unquestionably true that fathers spending more time with their children is, on the whole, much better for those children.
But it's also true that it's a huge problem for society that people are having fewer children. And I think you can make a reasonable argument that increasing expectations around the quality of parenting are party of that trend.
As it turns out, I don't enjoy extended time with children. My bad, but I power through it for the sake of the child. In older times that would be no problem, my wife would deal with that. Instead I stopped at 1 when I realized I am not the kind of person who enjoys being equally involved with children.
I can tell you that my wife and I are both exhausted of taking care of them 24/7. It is not something we do for funsies.
It doesn't have to be the wife per-se. When I was building our house, I did most of the carpentry. My wife hated it and did very little of that. My wife hates driving the tractor. My wife hates driving any vehicle. My wife hates doing the plumbing and electric. My wife hates taking care of the pets, so I take care of them. My wife doesn't like practicing self-defense and security for the house, and there are lots of dangerous animals and criminals here, so I handle that. I do not ask my wife to do any of those things except at worst a few small % of the time compared to when I do them. This does not bother me at all because different people prefer different things.
Modern society has brainwashed people to think they need to share child-care and ideally equally. I think this is highly misinformed utopian vision. Voluntary preference based division of labor is smart and helps us all enjoy our lives more. Very rarely do couples have absolute equal relative preference for all the tasks, even if they dislike all of the tasks.
It seems obvious that if you brainwash people to think labor sharing by exchanging tasks is "avoidance" that you increase the chance one of the two parties will just veto any additional children. But if you bring this up then it's straight to whataboutism but women also don't enjoy it which totally misses the mark about relative preference that results in imbalanced childcare, which can be evaluated even when both people dislike a task. Unless you totally reject sexual dimorphism, you should be at least open to the possibility as well that females on average might have higher relative preference for child-rearing than other things, as long as feminists aren't shaming them left and right with artificial impositions that somehow they're being robbed if a man is "avoiding" it by exchanging labor to do something else.
Personally I don't take your omniscient approach. I believe the parents are nearly always better position to determine the interests of their children than some random dude on HN, than the outsider trying to impose their goal of their particular vision of "engagement."
If you're sincerely trying to engage in good faith, I feel you should be apologising for your role in sending it in the wrong direction unintentionally.
To be clear, I'm not taking a position in the debate here, just commenting that the way your engaging is legitimately a bit annoying if you're not aware. The other person getting really angry isn't the best look either, but I'm sure they already know that.
I watch my friends raise young children, and to be blunt it largely looks miserable to me. You effectively are babysitting children activities 24x7. Basically running a tiny daycare.
The families and adults seem to simply exist as caretakers for their child's lives.
I ascribe to "the kid is just now part of your general life" for 90% of your adult activities. Could be working in the shop, outdoor chores, cleaning the house, fixing the car, shopping, whatever. The point is the kid primarily exists in your life and does whatever it is you are doing, not the other way around.
Yeah, some things are impossible to do with a kid of course. But not nearly as many as currently believed for most children. If properly socialized, kids can exist non-disruptively in plenty of situations. And the danger to them in a lot of spots is wildly exaggerated. I brought my 5 year old into warehouses and lumberyards with a bit of instruction and teaching them to pay attention. They pretty quickly adapt.
If I have another kid I'd plan on not modifying my life a whole lot. The kid will simply come with to most things and liberal use of babysitting and such will happen. I have friends who are terrified to even leave their toddlers with babysitters these days for a few hours - it's absurd.
Kids imo do best in a balanced life where the get to learn by watching and doing. Not catering to their every whim and desire and shielding them from every possible danger.
There are certainly some age ranges (infant through ~3 or 4 years old or so) that are much more difficult, but after that parents seem to prefer life on hard mode these days for some reason. Paranoia and peer pressure from my standpoint drives most of it.
My older (25 now!) son would have been a miserable experience for me if every single day was a "rainy weekend" style thing where we're stuck inside playing children's games and the like with near constant 24x7 attention and direct interaction at his level. I'd have gone insane. Having him "around" most of the time while I did things with an hour or two of direct "kid time" engagement was totally sustainable, and he seems to have gotten a lot of enrichment from most of it. Note that wasn't staring at screens though - it was physically and actively doing stuff. And part of learning as a parent and a child of a parent is the parent making mistakes. Shit happens, just correct for it moving forward. So long as no major injuries occur life moves on and typically everyone is better off for it.
Three are running around yelling and I can’t even join in, as they want me to be “the base” apparently.
I have two children and I find parenting to be utterly draining. They are 4 and 6. They are *constantly* fighting. They play together a bit, but when they do, after 5-10 minutes it leads to real fight where we need to intervene. And they still demand an enormous amount of attention.
It turns out I am one of those fathers with a personality that doesn't deal well with constant sensory overload. I was medicated for ADHD myself as a child and one of my children is AuADHD. It isn't his fault and we're trying to find ways to help him (and everyone else), but his meltdowns make life so, so hard for the whole family. He wants to control and dominate every situation, whether it is his brother or his parents.
I was wondering if the dynamics of three would have made it easier because he couldn't dominate his brother so eaily, or if that would just mean he became the isolated child.
Taking my one kid to things was much harder because they'd have to be played with.
My four kids just play with each other. Yes I play with them too, but most of the time they run off on their own to play and want the adults to go away.
It's magical. Ironically I have more free time as a dad of four. Still the same number of diapers to change but the older ones do stuff themselves.
The biggest issue is logistics of getting four kids the various places they need to go.
It does increase the network, so that if one kid doesn't want to play, the other might. Sometimes all the kids are playing together, sometimes one is off doing his own thing, sometimes there's still a meltdown.
Three might be the nadir as they outnumber you but each kid only has two other kids. But when older you likely can deal with one kid at a time and the other two play.
If it makes you feel better 4 to 6 is about the worst for "normal" kids, too, as they know that the outside world is something they have influence over but can't always control the way they want to.
i can relate. when my kids were young i didn't know what to do with them. but it's not that i didn't like spending time with them. before we had kids, working part-time so i could spend a lot of time at home was my dream. it was what i wanted. when the dream became real my inability to initiate play with the children was unexpected.
i figure it was because i had no rolemodels from my time growing up, no childhood experience that i could replicate because i grew up with a single dad who wasn't as close to me as i wanted to. every interaction was initiated by my children. it got easier as they got older because our interests became more compatible. (we could play games together that i also enjoyed, etc)
all the other stuff, taking care of them, feeding, putting them to sleep, etc. was easy because it's clear what needs to be done. and it wasn't/isn't exhausting either. i relish every interaction and moments of success where we achieve something together.
Screw the economy, love your kid (or kids).
they easiest because of our needs. we don't exist to meet its needs.
Nowadays such a lifestyle will get social workers on your ass, unless you can get some Mennonite or Amish preacher or something to vouch for you. After a long enough period of failing to meet some arbitrary modern "quality of life" that can only be afforded by going along with the mainstreams economic system and expectations, the legal system will likely get involved in some capacity.
Economy is a bit of a one way valve. If you don't flow with it they'll rip away your children and then you'll be dumped to the curb along with the homeless or other inmates at the jail.
Now everyone's screaming about a declining population.
We should embrace and prepare for degrowth for a better chance at a wonderful future, not shout at the sky hoping people will make more babies for the economy.
And guess what, if we prepare for degrowth, where a generation or two or three of the entire planet never goes hungry, never goes to war, and has the freedom of movement, creativity, innovation, interaction... Those people will want to have many many babies, and we can once again start worrying about overpopulation.
In general (don't know about the person you're responding to) the worry isn't so much that it's happening as it is the rate it's happening.
Can a good part of the mental load be attributed to the need for the parents to ‘do it all’ themselves rather than share the load and responsibility with other loved ones and caregivers without the need to tightly control all aspects of parenting?
On a separate note - Insta is constantly feeding my wife with versions of parenting which is completely unattainable. That really is at the heart of the mental load we are experiencing in our situation of raising two under five. If only Insta was banned, life would have been far more better for parents.
Of course, 50+ years ago diaper changing was often skilled labor (as was cooking) - it’s much easier to change a modern diaper and cook a modern ready-to-make meal.
I am incredibly allergic to the U.S.-American understanding of cooking as this unfathomably difficult task. No wonder there's an obesity crisis across the pond. The worst thing is, this unhealthy relationship to food seems to be exported all across the world these days.
The real benefiter of this is the capitalist who can now have twice the workforce at the price of one.
How about we start paying market price to the parent who takes care of the kids irrespective of mothers or fathers ? Investing in next generation is way more important than making useless widgets faster.
> How about we start paying market price to the parent who takes care of the kids irrespective of mothers or fathers ? Investing in next generation is way more important than making useless widgets faster.
Considering that the current political majority in the US wants people to have more kids, this would be a really reasonable thing to do if they were serious about that.
Count the EITC and the child tax credit as “wife income” if you must. Also the increase in the standard deduction.
my wife doesn't work. and she didn't work before we had a baby. because one of our salaries was enough, so instead we work less. and again due to remote work, work has barely been top 5 in my life focus areas for the last decade.
Out of close family and friends I only know of … three where they both work, and none have kids.
or were. tough out there rn.
You may not like it, but women benefited a lot. And fought a lot to get those benefits.
Not just in terms of money. They are beaten less. When they are beaten or constantly insulted, they can leave and feed themselves.
In the 1950s, fathers worked and paid for everything. Mothers raised the kids. This was taught in schools, girls were steered into marriage, motherhood, and housekeeping and men into vocations or college.
Let's not pretend that many women didn't go to work so they could have more, and feel like they were a more complete person. Many people just don't want to be pigeonholed into roles defined by tradition, and the 1960s were a huge rebellion against this. This wasn't some grand capitalist scheme.
It's still possible to raise a family on one professional income, if you live like most people did in the 1960s. Can you do it on minimum wage? No, but you couldn't do it then either.
Everything that starts out with a few well meaning people is, especially now, immediately turned into an astroturfing campaign to fuel some specific economic or political (is there really a difference?) end.
Fundamentally, the economy is sustained by energy. In preindustrial society, that energy was provided by agriculture, which tends to be somewhat sustainable. Fossil fuels fuelled explosive expansion, leading to the paradigm that unlimited geometric expansion of the economy was desirable, which led to delusional theories that it was uncapped even in limited space.
Now the world is near its carrying capacity in several dimensions, and we are going to find the limits to our delusion. Automation may help us find the economic limits of this paradigm before we hit the physical wall, which might turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing.
At any create, I am convinced that the next century will be marked by systemic change that fundamentally reorganises global priorities and might best be described in terms of collapsing paradigms as economies move away from human labor, in the process changing focus from the accumulation of money, which is mostly useful for paying wages, to pure power and resource control.
Tired old socialist rhetoric.
The real benefiter of this is the state which can now have many times the tax base at the price of none. Where women used to take care of the children and do the housekeeping those tasks are now often done by paid day care, taxed by the state and paid help, again taxed by the state. From a single tax payer a family - father, mother, two children - now supplies two tax payers and several 'downstream' tax payers.
Guess who owns the politicians!
How can you be so ignorant.
And you don’t need snidely whiplash to create an evil master plan, it can just be how everything “naturally” works out.
As a father I try and balance it out but I definitely don’t do as much as my dad did growing up.
Financial strains (family disposable income, high cost of living, wealth inequality)
Expand of electronic device use (from TVs to modern ones) and their apps
Convergence of gender roles, making males less masculine
General loss of classical values, promotion of easy life, short term goals and superficial qualities leading to misery and deactivation
I wonder what percentage of folks are now stuck in caretaking instead of raising their own families themselves. I basically predict my family line is extinct after my generation.
If I do nothing both will be in their rooms all day. Makes me sick.
This article, and the place it has on Hackernews and the quality of "commments" raises serious questions for me about Hacker News as a whole, the moderation, the readers and mechanism.
My complaint is not that this kind of thing exists. My complaint is that something better does not.
At the risk is stating the obvious, crops do not have the ability to notice whether or not the farmer spends time with them. If you think that a child won't notice that one of their parents doesn't spend time with them and will be affected by it, I don't know what to tell you.
If you don't believe me, fold a load of laundry the next time you visit a friend with little kids. Or play with their kid for half an hour so the parent can let their guard down for a bit. It has an incredible impact.
Good to know! I thought it was a bit weird for the team to have been disbanded so abruptly. Perhaps if this aspect of the story is not correct, other aspects will turn out to have been untrue as well.
I mentioned that I really felt how a space marine feels some days: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Daily_rituals_of_a_Space_Ma...
Mostly in the short sleep period, but also in the 'free time' too. I tend to get about 30 minutes at the end of the day, after all have (finally) gone to sleep, but still.