I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of people out there who want to be parents, but who put it off in favor of employment because they feel like they need money, and end up having fewer children than they wanted to have. I don't think they're all delaying motherhood because they prefer delayed motherhood.(Or fatherhood for that matter).
I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.
At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.
This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.
(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").
That is the solution used for most labor shortages. Typically when people talk about "shortages," they actually mean something where the market price is higher than they arbitrarily think it should be.
It's the correct solution, but I'm not sure it is put into practice so universally. In some fields, yes, but in others the offered price is quite stubbornly anchored and the people with the authority to increase their offered wage seem to prefer to shrug, complain that nobody wants to work these days, and then go out of business, rather than continue increasing their bid until the market clears.
Just the other day there was a thread about how Zeiss is the production bottleneck for ASML and can't scale because they are running out of glassworkers, because nobody wants the job, because it doesn't pay enough to make up for the lack of job security.
Even better, what if you transform that stolen CD into an MP3, so the data isn’t the same as a lossy process was used, then share the MP3 with the world as your own work?
I don’t get why the training process doesn’t count as any other form of transformation but then I’m not a lawyer.
Unfortunately, the only robots available will be connected to the cloud, paid by subscription, and will gather a continuous feed of audio-video data from you and your home. And sometimes it will be teleoperated, and you might not know when.
Cloud connected (robot AI in cloud) home robots would be very unsafe, due to network slowdown/outages. Imagine it freezing/stopping right after it turns on water faucet or stovetop.
Why would consumers settle for that? Local models have scaled quite quickly. Just pair the bot with a LAN server as the brain that keeps all your data private.
Barring that, choose bots that use Zero Knowledge Proof architectures for all data so you know there's no in/out of personal data, only security proofs. This makes rental robots certifiably private too.
Yeah Alaska plates are fairly rare so you could maybe get away with them not adopting the standard. Hawaii plates are EXTREMELY rare because of the cost of freighting a car over and there's no real reason to register a car in Hawaii that I'm aware of. [0]
[0] I'm thinking here of places like Montana which attracts a fair number of out of state registrations to avoid sales and registration taxes in some states. PS don't try this most states already consider this and you're often violating the sales tax laws if the car doesn't leave the state within a few days of purchase.
It seems like a safe guess that very few of the moms complaining about their partners on r/parenting are also married to the dads who are posting on r/daddit.
I don't really understand this mindset that being at home and raising your kids is only something you do when forced to. For my family, if we had more options -- ie, more money -- then both of us would be stay-at-home parents. It's much more of a joy than going to work.
Your comment's framing makes no sense to me. My wife pushed for me to go into engineering instead of academia so she could stay home and we could be comfortable. We're married. We have kids. The entire point is we're not independent. That's what married literally means. Unioned. Joined. There is no her and me. There is us.
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?
Plenty of women (and men) end up in relationships they hate, and if they have no independence they are pretty much fucked. They have no way to escape. Women having options makes a huge difference.
What you are describing is pretty much ideal for a lot of people, but it's not what everybody gets.
How does this happen though? It's not like you wake up one day, look around and see you've started life in the middle, you're married and have kids, and you hate your spouse. Did your spouse have a stroke and undergo some massive personality change or something?
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 think the simple fact of the matter is that most people have absolutely no clue what they’re doing when it comes to relationships, and think their social media hot takes are indicative of what they ought to want.
This is on top of societal pressures. In more liberal parts of the US (and the world) it's accepted that you will take your time finding a partner, or even stay single if you want. In more conservative societies the expectation that you will marry young and start popping out kids is intense.
I think it goes both ways. I moved from a liberal to a conservative area. Maybe there are people shaming those who don't pop out kids, but more so I I've noticed it's that they're not shamed if they want to just let loose to their instincts and get impregnated as an 18-year-old and yield to their natural desires and interests. In a liberal city a 18 year old popping out a kid and is often viewed as a pariah.
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.
We don't have a trust fund, of course, which is why I'm working to earn an income.
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.
For what it's worth, we're the first type, which is why my wife will probably join the workforce in a few years too, for want of money. But while the kids are young she thinks it's really important to stay home with them, even if it means living in a cramped basement for now.
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.
>as though everyone deeply wants to spend their waking days at an office desk / driving an Uber / etc,
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.
Your framing makes perfect sense to me, and I agree with it. It comes down to economic forces requiring parents to sacrifice time at home with their children.
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.
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