No one my age can afford a stay at home wife
What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle and only have one parent working. It’s similar to how people earning 3-4X the median wages for an area will think they’re barely getting by, while someone earning 1/4 of what they do is raising a family with two kids.
True, goes without saying. I see most of the time when lifestyle is not even considered making a choice but simply as "everyone does it".
I might turn into most odd person in some sense among friends, colleagues, family/ relatives because I just happen to say things explicitly which makes for weird conversation.
Everyone around me expects these between the lines.
If you work in tech, this is possible. It's gonna suck, and you'll feel poor relative to your peers, but it's entirely possible.
It may very well be impossible in certain markets but I wouldn't say its true across every family with the parents being around 30 years old.
Its an "easier" thing to do (not claiming its an easy thing) when you're not living in a very wealthy area. Far easier to own a home when home prices are $200k not $2M. Groceries are often cheaper in less expensive areas. The few times you do decide to eat out the restaurants are also usually cheaper in the cheaper parts of town. There's more demand for good second-hand stores so they tend to thrive more in those areas. Very rich people often vote against public transit and bike lanes, at least in many parts of the country.
If you're trying to do it on a normal-ish kind of salary in an expensive place to live, its no wonder it seems impossible.
> personal anecdote
Anecdotes can refute an absolute claim like "no one my age can afford a stay at home wife". If you claim all screwdrivers are blue and I point to a red screwdriver in my tool drawer you can't just wave it away and say that's an anecdote. In reality, more millennials are opting for a single working parent lifestyle than Gen X did, largely due to extreme childcare costs.
When the cost for childcare is essentially eating a whole normal person's salary, there's a strong question of why have that parent go to wage-earning job.
https://policycommons.net/artifacts/617147/stay-at-home-moms...
Everybody who thinks they absolutely cannot do it needs to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask how it is that 7 billion or so other people manage it with even less. It's nice not ever worrying about bills or paying much attention to what anything costs, but it's not that nice. I'm not actually any happier now than when I was living with four guys in a two bed apartment in the slums of Long Beach.
school launch + supervision for the 11:30 - 13:30 period is ~42 USD per day per kid, kita (pre-kindergarten) is easily ~3100 USD/month or more per kid. (I've put the numbers here in USD as most of the audience is outside of Switzerland for easier comparability), so for a lot of families, if mom works, mom's salary is spent on these costs.