The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.
Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.
If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway. I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
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To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.
I guess this will work for something like 10-20%? Maybe? (Speaking from a very german cultural background)
Even then, it would not solve any problems here, really.
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
Fuck that.
Why do you need an entire room each for an office? I work in a corner of a bedroom, and have previously had a desk in a living room. I know lots of people who do the same. I know few families where both parents work from home. Where more than one person works from home they can share an office.
If people work from home to a large extent, less office space is required, so the cost of land should go down. It does not because most people are not working from home.
No one said that one cannot make do. One can always make do.
That's a lot of bodies.
Exact times do vary by country, but female 'emancipation' is largely starting around WWI, whereas the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the employment of married women. Common in English-speaking countries from the late 19th century to the 1970s, the practice often called for the termination of the employment of a woman on her marriage, especially in teaching and clerical occupations. Further, widowed women with children were still considered to be married at times, preventing them from being hired, as well. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar)
> the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
Most US families owned a car before WWII. 60% in 1929. Around half of the people in the US owned their home in 1890. They actually owned the homes too. Before 1934 Americans typically paid off their homes in just 3-5 years. After that the 15 and 30 year mortgage had a strong majority of Americans in houses, but they were actually owned by the bank for decades.