All this to say that babies need their mothers. Something that humans across all cultures have known since the dawn of time. One thing that this article leaves out is that mothers also need their babies. The connection between mother and infant is the closest relationship that exists, and it is very detrimental to mothers to be parted from their infants for long stretches of time every day. I would be curious to see if the mother's cortisol levels were similar to those of the babies they left in daycare.
Right. Did I really have post partum depression or was I miserable being away from my baby and pumping while watching videos of him in order to do the best I could to care for him?
There's no way of knowing. Stay at home moms also suffer from PPD and even post partum psychosis. Have there been any studies comparing stay at home moms with working moms and PPD? Let's google.
I'd be fascinated to know. The three women I know who have had PPD were all highly ambitious and career-orientated, and waited until their mid to late 30s to have kids. It felt to me like they were experiencing a crisis of identity and were conflicted about giving up their careers -- even momentarily -- and being perceived as "just" mothers.
Moms need a lot of help after giving birth. Indigenous cultures around the world know that and give it. There doesn't seem to be a lot of help for isolated moms in "nuclear families". Of course the rich ones can hire help. But the rest?
I hated leaving my babies in daycare, and I was fortunate that I only left them about 25 hours a week, and it was a lively and loving home daycare that my children loved, especially my firstborn. I used to wish the Taliban would conquor America and declare that mothers should get to stay home with their babies. That's saying a lot!
Their father was terrified of being the sole support. And I was terrified of him after a while. Then he ended up bailing, whether it was a psychiatric break or his hidden evil self just burst through I'll never know, but I ended up being the sole support, give or take a couple hundred dollars a year, so I'm glad I worked.
Sorry to hear you had to be terrified of your child's father. I knew you were joking but "Taliban declaring mothers should get to stay home with their babies" would actually mean they could never leave the home.
Never leave the home without a male escort. Yes, I knew that. I knew a bit about the Taliban. I really really wanted to be home with my children. I meant what I said.
But why do you feel the Taliban would be needed to enable you to do that? If the Taliban were "in charge" how would your situation change? You would still be with the same man and then abandoned by him, so what difference would the Taliban make?
I’m a bit late to this article but it is spot on. We often also overlook that congregate care is literally harmful to children’s health. We take for granted that little kids get sick a lot, but that’s actually not normal and can lead to long term damage that affects them for life. I just wrote about this on my own humble stack:
How convenient for fathers! I guess they can just screw off and do whatever.
This social-deficit crisis was plainly started by television, and is plainly being accelerated into a death-spiral by phones. Talking about anything else is, frankly, retarded.
Wow, you are brave to publish this. I have been reading the tentative studies on this for years. I say tentative because you have to tiptoe around this if you want to keep your job. Everyone focuses on the increased tax revenues associated with the Quebec tax experiment (which "paid for itself plus some") but few will go down the road of asking if it was good for the kids.
Don't forget the importance of grandparents. At one time, the 2 sets of experienced grandparents with completed parenting skills were available to assist and advise the new parents in raising a child/family. Job mobility and working parents has too often left child development in the tender hands of strangers such as child care, public schools, mass media and university with disastrous results. Undoubtedly a major force in the disfunction of so many young people today.
The nuclear family is the break down of the traditional multi-generational family. But right wing conservatives seem to worship at the altar of the nuclear family (which nuked traditional family values). But I don't think it's fair to assume that grandmas and aunties WANT to engage in free child care labor. Maybe meet some older and middle aged women, put your phone/lap top down, make eye contact and ask them. And ask some grandpas and uncles too while you're at it. Men don't have to be left out of the "amazing opportunity" to bond with their grandchildren/nieces/nephews as a caregiver.
This is a misunderstanding of what conservatives are talking about when they refer to the "nuclear family". It never meant the exclusion of extended family. That's just a recent talking point from the left ( of which I am a part!).
Not from my memory. Decades ago conversatives here (I'm in the USA) whined and wailed about multiple generations and extended family members living under one roof. They would cite "fire hazards" and "are our neighborhoods even zoned for this?" and all kinds of nonsense. They didn't like the idea of even a medium-sized extended family sharing 1 car for example because it doesn't fuel the Capitalist 1-car-per-person model. They simply didn't see this culture as congruent with "American values" of nuclear families isolated in neat houses in quiet suburbs. You see, the sibilings Becky, Ben and Stacey are supposed to leave home at 18, go to college, get jobs, get married, and then set up their own houses, all seperate from one another, preferrably in differen towns, if not states. Their parents, Bob and Beth, are supposed to be "empty nesters" in their own home, and talk to each of their kids once a week on the phone. Family gatherings happen Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a few weeks in summer.
Ben is NOT supposed to bring his bride to live with parents in the "joint family home" (as is customary in many cultures). They are not supposed to raise their kids there and then have one or more of their own kids bring their spouse to live there either. Nope. Grandparents, great-grandparents, in-laws, etc - all are supposed to live separate.
Why do you think "single family home" is a thing?
Now, what I've noticed lately in real estate is that "multi-generational homes" and "mother in law suites" are starting to be a thing in home building. And if you look closely, they are being built in areas where people originally from "joint family" cultures are living. Such as Indians. So if you have a university somewhere that attracts a lot of students from India, you will see Indian owned business sprouting up shortly thereafter and then all these Indian families and then they will be looking to buy homes. Cue the "multi-generational home".
"Mother in law suite" is an interesting thing considering that Americans would of course PRESUME mother-in-laws to be given a small space somewhere detached from the house, like in the backyard. LOL! But in a tradtional joint family home, the mother-in-law is front and center.
I don't even consider American "conservatives" to be conservative. They are cold, detached people for whom large family is a hindrance. The multi-generatational, joint family home is abhorrant to them. In fact, they call it "communism".
Except when grandma had raised nine younger siblings, six of her own, taught school when she was widowed early, and by the time she had any leisure had less than zero interest in small children. Maybe I’m just a lot older than y’all but your romantic ideas of how life was more nurturing for young children before daycare is just....innacurate.
It's not. That grandma's experience wasn't natural either. Think about it: how's your average woman going to have ten kids if she's spacing them about four years apart? Traditional societies practiced child spacing and patriarchal civilized societies don't.
Define traditional please. It was traditional to expose infants too, thus ensuring a four year spacing. The fact is none of us have the faintest clue what pre-agricultural hunter gatherer groups actually did or how they lived unless they wrote things down and the written records somehow survived which I am not aware that many bands did. We do have accounts from Europeans who encountered these groups but it’s been well documented that those accounts can be wildly inaccurate. If a tribe practiced infanticide they aren’t going to tell the missionary about it and risk punishment. Early anthropologists were often inaccurate because it was a game to see who could concoct the wildest story for the earnest white lady who was asking nosy questions. I’d have to go back and dig into the history but Margaret Mead and Ruth Boaz got pranked like that.
I don't know why you'd say that. China and India were world renowned for infant femicide and yet we've never heard of missionaries getting eaten in either country.
Breastfeeding frequently day and night for 3-7 years, carrying their babies constantly and co-sleeping. Breastfeeding prevents more pregnancies globally than any other method of contraception. It is nature’s way of protecting the health of mothers and babies by natural child spacing. It doesn’t work so well in the industrialised world where separation of mothers and babies/young children is the norm. Even in industrialised countries with maternity leave menstruation often won’t return until breastfeeding mothers go back to work so around 12 months in the UK.
I know! These young people need to get off their phones and actually sit down and talk face to face with older women/grandmas and ask them if they WANT to spend their golden years changing diapers and wiping snotty noses. And notice it's always "grandmas and aunties" expected to do this labor (for free). Not grandpas or uncles.
"Job mobility and working parents has too often left child development in the tender hands of strangers such as child care, public schools, mass media and university with disastrous results"
University? By the time kids go to Uni they are adults.
People have to work and earn money to feed, clothe, shelter and educate their kids. There's no social safety net in the USA for parents and kids where parents can just take off work for years to be with their kids.
Wow. Thanks for writing and publishing this. I've been wondering for years, as someone who grew up (I'm 59 now) watching this way of raising children unfold, what the impacts were going to be. My most basic question (or concern really) was what would be the effect of separating children from their mothers at such early ages for anywhere from eight to ten hours a day while the kids are at their most aware and awake and curious and then uniting them for a few hours (typically rushed and a little chaotic based on the families I saw doing this) before putting them to bed. Essentially, my concern was that someone other than the mother, for whom I believe there is an attachment and bond like no other, was caring for and raising the child. I also wondered how this would affect the mother - most of her baby's 'firsts' would be seen, recognized, affirmed and celebrated by someone else (if at all).
Even 30 years ago, to voice concerns like these could get a man or even a woman howled out of the room. I haven't seen anyone willing to analyze the possible effects that a few decades of raising so many kids this way has had. Even with all the 'crises' young people seem to be having today, nobody is willing to go here and at least look at the data that's available after so many years and posit a connection, at least in part.
I've worked at an early childhood care center in NYC. During the job training, we were basically told to keep it a secret if any "firsts" happened. Most employees are NOT being paid enough to really care at those jobs. They're not thinking about you and your baby that much, they're thinking about their next audition or gig (many of them are performers using it as a "survival job").
There's no goddamn way I would ever have my kid go to any kind of school or daycare before age 5. Even then, I would consider homeschooling until about age 12, then get them in school mostly for advanced math.
Yes, I had the same training. The part that bugged me, besides the lying, was how does this affect general milestone reporting? If the parents don't find out the kid is walking/talking for 3 months, is the child then 'labelled?' And if an entire generation is 'behind' what are the consequences? And all based on a lie of ommission.
I hadn't even thought of that part, but that DEFINITELY makes it worse. And when you come down to it, that policy is all about protecting the feelings of a few fragile adults who are avoiding reality. Obviously if the child is at a center for most of their waking hours from birth, the employees and not the parents are going to see the "firsts". Anyone with a brain can figure that out. If the parents feel guilty about that, maybe they should examine why instead of putting that on someone being paid minimum wage to stand in for them.
The parents are working. The USA doesn't guarantee paid parental leave and even if it did, even let's say for as long as 2 years, eventually the parents have to return to work. When ever was the time when both parents ever got to be there at home for all the "firsts"?
What are the chances a kid who can walk or talk will choose never to demonstrate those skills on evenings or weekends? We’re almost certainly talking about a delay of days, not months.
In my experience, it was about 50/50. The difference seemed to be based on parents' behavior. Some parents were tuned in, and really involved, so day or a week would go by. Other parents just seemed to get stuck in a phase, maybe due to stress or lack of skills, who knows, and that's when months would go by. They always came in with big,
exciting, news when the 'first' happened, so it was easy to track. And in a game of averages, 1 delayed 'report' has consequences.
Isn't there always at least one parent who misses some or many of the firsts anyway? Where are these families where both parents are with their kids 24/7 to witness all these firsts?
And how would you pay the rent and other necessities of life while you were caring for/homeschooling your kid? Or do you have a trust fund or husband with a job that pays a wage sufficient to support a household (not enough of those to go around).
I'm in a VERY low cost of living area now. Didn't stay in NYC after 2020. Work from home with flexibility is also feasible to balance with being a home maker. There's home schooling networks where people trade off who's doing what. Extended families can take turns babysitting. Some families actually *save* money significantly by having one parent stay home because they never have to pay for childcare. In Middle America it's fairly common to have a parent stay home-- kind of like producing some of your own food is way more normal in those areas than in the cities. Obviously a lot of this doesn't work in high cost of living cities, though.
I’m going to reply here since I see it brought up, but was thinking about it in general with this essay. I hear the argument a lot that 2 people “have” to work, but I’m sorry, it’s not true. You can look at average wages, subtract taxes plus the extra costs of commuting, business clothing and lunches, take out/laundry drop off/house cleaning and whatever else you need to outsource because you’re too busy, extra sick days from daycare and times you will be late or not able to work because your child needs you, then subtract the GIGANTIC daycare expense, and you’re barely breaking even, if you’re lucky. We are in a relatively expensive area, and my husband does ok, but we are not rich by any means. My job before quitting when we had our first son was decent, but I can honestly say we would not be materially or financially better off if we’d gone the daycare route with me still working. I stay home and homeschool 3 kids now. We had to move to a cheaper area and make some other sacrifices but it’s definitely doable.
By “cheaper area” I mean we moved from a reasonable for the area 5th floor walk up in NYC to basically the cheapest town that is still commutable to NYC- not middle america, which I imagine would be easier :) it’s possible.
I would also point out that half of the population earns less than average wages, which is why I base all by analyses on unskilled labor because that is how a lot, if not most young, single moms obtain their income.
So, can a single mom make it on $30K per year? Daycare is not going to be nearly as expensive for them as it is for richer people since they live in poor neighborhoods where women who can't get regular jobs do daycare and since they have more kids there is more family that is local. If they are reasonably functional (and a lot are not) they work it out, but they are *not* raising their own kids. If you would like to return to a world where two parent families where one parent stayed home that I grew up with, you would need to support very high tax rates on the rich to bring back the economic culture that made this world possible.
And the obvious question is why do families have to, or feel they have to, have 2 working adults to be able to afford to survive.
Childcare 'should' be expensive and why would anyone think a paid carer would do a better job than someone who loves and is dedicated to that one child?
Living standards (which defined cost of living) scale with per capita GDP. For 50 years per capita GDP has risen 2.2-fold https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/#0 while base wages have not. You need two to bring in the same income as one did fifty years ago.
The fact that unskilled wages do not rise over time means that young men of below average abilities, who might be expected to occupy the bottom rungs of the labor ladder over their working life have nothing to bring into a marriage. And so increasing numbers of them do not get married as time goes on and you have an epidemic of single parents.
Thank you, Mike, for bringing the real world to this conversation. In order to provide one's kids just a middle-middle class life (I'm not even talking upper-middle class here), in a safe, clean and aesthetically pleasing neighborhood with good schools and parks to play in, both parents need to be working or one parent needs to be rich. One of the reasons young people aren't having kids these days is because they just can't afford to.
"And the obvious question is why do families have to, or feel they have to, have 2 working adults to be able to afford to survive."
Because feminists flooded the paid workforce 5 minutes after men invented mod cons to make housework much less time consuming.
As women competed with men (while abandoning their own children and motherhood duties) this lowered wages and allowed government to double taxes.
Before feminism a blue collar man could easily support his family on his wages alone, allowing his wife to raise the kids as nature intended, and also dip in and out of the workforce when it was convenient or when they needed extra money.
Before feminism 100% of a woman's labour contributed to her family. After feminism women ended up as tax slaves (just like men), working 2-3 days a week for the government (via taxes).
While children suffered abandonment, millions of new pointless, wasteful and destructive jobs were invented (HR etc) for women to occupy in order to 'live the dream' of a 'career'.
Also women's entry point for work became the administration level (comfortable office job). Traditionally these positions were give to male shop floor workers as a promotion, after they had spent years working the shop floor. Not only did women block this promotion route for men (and their families), but it also meant companies became filled up with women who had no real world experience of what the company actually did or how it functioned.
Admin/ managerial positions are full of women DELEGATING work to men they have never seen or met and have no idea what they actually do.
But apart from all that feminism has been great for society ;)
Why did we ever let it get to the point where mothers had to depend on one other adult to support us to raise children and that just happened to be some random man who we didn't grow up with, doesn't really know us, just wanted a cheap housekeeper and clean prostitute but isn't emotionally invested in a family much if at all? Why does everything have to happen in a factory or a machine? Why do men have to own everything? When are you going to get over this idea that we're your farm fields to grow your sons in? Don't write me off as a crackpot -- look at what's happened in the history of civilization with a dispassionate eye. Look at how men have talked about women over the centuries. Try to see it from women's point of view. This could have all been avoided.
Patriarchy is the simple answer. Women didn't accept being treated as slaves and breeders it was forced on them/us through rape, violence, war and the Church. People used to live in matrifocal kinship groups until "god" and the state decided women and kids were property. It is completely possible to build a healthy, functional society, but the people in charge want cheap labor and low taxes. We can demand better, but most people think the way things are is the way they ought to be. Try to propose something better and the wealthy yell Socialism and people fall for it Every. Damned. Time.
"Patriarchy is the simple answer. Women didn't accept being treated as slaves and breeders it was forced on them/us through rape, violence, war and the Church."
Throughout most of human history there were two basic roles/ lifestyles/ identities.
1. mining coal, ploughing fields, fishing the open seas, trading by land and sea, defending the village, building roads/ cathedral/ canals by hand, felling trees, forging iron, building ships etc
2. being a homemaker.
Feminists are the only people who define number number 1 as privilege and number 2 as slavery and oppression.
As soon as technology (mod cons) made being a homemaker a much less time consuming job, and provided paid work in safe, comfortable, indoor environments which resembled the home (the modern office and indoor factory with lighting, heating and indoor toilets) it was feminists who rushed to fill these jobs, abandoning their babies and children in the process and causing multi generational harm which has yet to be healed, and only keeps getting worse.
To denigrate the role of mother and abandon your own children to daycare in order to have a more 'fulfilling' lifestyle is the equivalent of men abandoning their role in power stations and maintaining the infrastructure in order to lead more 'fulfilling' lifestyle.
We would never let men abandon heir primary gender roles, but feminism has used decades of shaming tactics, hysteria and bullying to convince society to let women abandon their primary gender role.
This is definitely a challenge. Maybe instead of paying for universal child care we subsidize a parent staying home.
The point is that we need to be actually talking about the problem, and that it exists, and how do we fix it? Pretending there isn't a problem because it will hurt people's feelings or doesn't appear to have an easy fix is a major cop out.
"During the job training, we were basically told to keep it a secret if any "firsts" happened".
I don't get it. Do stay at home parents ever keep "firsts" a secret from the working parent?
"There's no goddamn way I would ever have my kid go to any kind of school or daycare before age 5. Even then, I would consider homeschooling until about age 12,"
If you're single and so wealthy (like a trust fund baby or something) that you don't have to work and can stay home with your kid, great. But if you are partnered and not wealthy I'm going to assume that your partner will have to work and therefore miss some of the "firsts" and lots of quality time with his/her kids too.
There's just no way around it, in most cases there's always at least one parent who misses out. And yet life goes on.
In the USA in order to live a solidly middle class life in a safe and beautiful neighborhood with good schools, both parents have to work, in most cases. The USA does not guarantee parental leave. There is no social safety net for new parents.
I lived with a tribe in West Africa. The shock of the experience that *never left my consciousness* was the deep humanity, mutual affection, and conscious embodiment I witnessed. Factors I noted were: cosleeping, extended breastfeeding, baby holding and wearing, alloparenting, deep spirituality/religion.
Yes. This tribe was agriculturalist with some nomadic pastoralists that would visit during part of the year. A rare case of maintaining attitudes classically seen in hunter gather bands.
Maybe those orphanages could be seen as one end of the child care spectrum? Their statistics, as we've all heard, are rife with many of the same kind of cognitive and emotional issues or disabilities that this piece discusses, only turned up to 11.
An open question, to me, is what happens when you have a high-achieving, possibly guilty-feeling, possibly daycare-experienced mother raising a child now as a stay-at-home mom. Does she attempt privately to overcompensate for what she feels she "shouldn't" publicly acknowledge as a modern woman (she "should" be career-focused), does she overcompensate publicly and privately because she didn't learn from her own mom how to be an appropriately balanced mother, or does she achieve appropriate balance between safety and freedom because she consciously tries to do so?
I was in the first group - felt I should have been career-focused, but I happened to live in an attachment parenting area AND my husband went back to school while our oldest was a toddler and came out making enough money that I could stay at home for the next two. So the oldest did have early daycare but also was "worn" on our bodies in a sling whenever he was with us, was exclusively breastfed for a long time by most people's standards, and slept with us until he was two. After that, we went pretty free-range with him. Nevertheless he's the most anxious of our three. The other two had the same experiences except that they didn't go to daycare as babies at all. Anecdote is not data, and oldest kids are often anxious, I know, but I'm kind of wishing we'd made the rest of the sacrifice with him now...
People think mothering is intuitive-- it is, if you have been sensitively mothered. Those who lack mothering need mentoring, like The Nurse Family Partnership. There are skills and values best imbued by RECEIVING them from others (unconditional positive regard). We need someone to co-regulate us, in order to know how to do it for others.
In my experience Neurofeedback is extremely useful as 'reset' on certain right brain issues like anxiousness. Check into Neurofeedback. It's quick (Twenty 30-min sessions is typical course of treatment.) I am familiar with "Neuroptimal" which my CASA youth did and it made such a difference i tried it for myself. It's a simple feedback program that rewards brain regulation and pokes you (via music and visual pattern skips and hitches) if you become dysregulated. No effecting. It typically put me to sleep. I noticed deeper, restful sleep and much more patience with petty irritations after NF.
First borns are often more anxious - I believe this is because the parents themselves are more nervous about how to care. I certainly remember being frightened of breaking my first baby when changing, and interrupting their self-soothing due to overconcern of the smallest sound, etc. Whereas by the time we got to the third we knew exactly what we were doing and the fourth child was a dream. Also parents expectations tend to be highest on the first child. The Birth Order book details these effects in society at large.
So this effect on first borns may also have an effect.
This begins with feminists denigrating motherhood. "Women are so much more than that" blah blah blah. Well for most women, they are now less than they were. Just a teacher. Just a data entry cog. Just a nurse. Not a mother.
Children growing up in daycare as opposed to close to their natal mothers could also be combined with single mothers to result in the instability we see today.
I grew up in the 60s and 70s. My mother tells a story of sending me to daycare. Since she was a housewife, I gather this was to get a break. In any case, she yanked me out after noticing a VERBAL DECLINE. I was already speaking in complete sentences, she says, and after two days in daycare reverted to baby talk. So it figures (this is merely anecdotal I realize) that there would be a NORM in the daycare center to which children would conform (just as they are conforming to being transgender these days). Also, the day care personnel very likely insist on CONFORMITY in this large group, rather than allowing individuality to emerge, because nurturing individuals is simply impossible when shepherding a large group of strangers. This also might explain the insistence on ideological conformity today, the temper tantrums to get their way, and the unbridled sense of entitlement as when they were at home they probably got whatever they wanted because mom was too tired to negotiate or regulate them. I'm thinking of a tempter tantrum I witnessed where the parents immediately capitulated rather than acclimating the kid to that the picture had been moved upstairs. That's all it would have taken -- hey look your picture is here -- instead they moved it immediately saying "It's just easier." These are parents whose careers come first, their children second, they just do what's "easier" and the result is an unregulated kid.
A single mother is also going to capitulate and not stand her ground as opposed to working with a partner who would push back on her spinelessness. And this could go the other way around, except that women generally are more agreeable. In the trans mess, it's much more often the father who pushes back and the mother who's zealously getting on the bandwagon.
The question is, how can feminism actually renew celebrating motherhood, which is women's unique and vital contribution to the world? There's no greater feat, if you ask me, than a well-rounded adult raised in a solid home, launched successfully, who feels supported, and whose mother was there during their formative years -- and these are the memories they carry all their lives? Even though my mother narcissistically resented motherhood, she was THERE, and she absolutely nurtured us as individuals. Each of us is given to speaking glowingly of the things she made, her humor, her fortitude. Someone said to me, as if this were a deterrent, "It's hard work." So what's your point, I asked. People shouldn't work hard?
"The question is, how can feminism actually renew celebrating motherhood, which is women's unique and vital contribution to the world? "
It can't. Feminism is a toxic ideology which needs to be torn down and then buried in concrete for a million years like a leaky nuclear power station made out of asbestos. It cannot be saved or redeemed or rebranded.
Feminism was never pro women, or even about women. It was always designed to break up the family, create a war between the sexes, and devalue women's contributions to society in order to demoralise society and trick women into becoming wage slaves - just like men already were.
Feminism doubled tax revenue by doubling the workforce, which of course lowered wages so that now most women cannot afford to mother their own children (a privilege that even zoo animals still get to enjoy). The aim was always to separate mothers from their children so that the state could indoctrinate them (and traumatised them) from the earliest age.
Feminism is essentially a harem for women, run by the state and corporations (the most 'patriarchal' men in society). The state offered women a better life than their hard working husbands could provide, and women took the bait. Feminism is how the social engineers skilfully exploited women's natural hypergamous nature (and men's natural tendency to sacrifice themselves to save women) to gain power and control over society.
The next wave of feminism will be artificial wombs. And already we are seeing the propaganda telling young women artificial wombs will free them from 'having to' suffer the chore of pregnancy, and allow them to live 'normally' instead (ie pregnancy and childbirth are now being defined as unnatural and degrading - just as motherhood was defined as unnatural and degrading 50 years go).
The only way to celebrate and value motherhood (and fatherhood), and save children from their spiral into complete mental and emotional collapse, is to put feminism in the garbage and return to the nuclear family.
There really is only one way to pilot a 747 successfully. The pilot and co pilot cannot throw the rule book out of the window, make up their own rules, without ending up in a mess of twisted and burning wreckage. The same is true for parenting.
Handing your children over to minimum wage daycare staff (and then ideologically possessed school teachers) is like the pilots of a 747 letting the passengers fly the plane so they can be more 'empowered' and 'liberated' watching a movie or catching up on their social media feeds.
It is not feminism's job to celebrate motherhood. Does the US offer paid leave to a parent with newborn babies at full salary and benefits until age 4, when they can go to pre-school during the day? Nope. Conservatives are dead set against it. They want women to provide all this childcare for free. That shows you how much conservatives value mothering. They think it is worth zero dollars.
"It is not feminism's job to celebrate motherhood."
I agree. Feminism's job is to erase gender/ the family/ parenting from society and turn us all into asexual worker drones. Reproduction is to be achieved by artificial wombs (which are about 10 years away apparently) with children raised by the state. All that nonsense about 'women's liberation' was just a cover story for the actual agenda which was always transhumanism and technocracy (ie Brave New World).
Transhumanism requires us to discard notions of biological sex/ gender (ie sexual dimorphism). Feminism's claim that gender is no more than a social construct (rather than driven by innate biology) brought us to where we are today with non binary identities and the banning of words like 'mother', 'father', 'breast feeding' etc. Male and female are literally being erased from culture and language and an asexual culture is being brought in - complete with collapsing fertility and birth rates.
None of this would have been possible without a century of feminist ideology to prepare the ground and normalise such unnatural concepts and lifestyles. Feminism is anti woman, anti mother, anti family. Always has been.
"Does the US offer paid leave to a parent with newborn babies at full salary and benefits until age 4, when they can go to pre-school during the day? "
The US cannot offer anything because it has nothing to offer. The only source of value comes from real people (workers). The government can only redistribute other people's income by force. The government does not want families, it wants genderless worker drones. Obviously, it is not going to support women the way husbands do. Governments make terrible husbands/ fathers.
If we are to restore childhood (ie give children their mothers back) we must reject government as a suitable 'husband' and go back to marrying ordinary working men EXCLUSIVELY. As the saying goes.... three's a crowd!
If husbands are forced to fund government's wars, bureaucracy, green energy scams etc then obviously they have less resources left to support their wives.
"They want women to provide all this childcare for free."
The idea that women provide anything for free is feminist propaganda which makes no sense. Marriage is a business partnership. Traditionally the husband is like the sales team and the wife is like the admin team. The sales team generate the actual revenue, which also supports the salaries of the admit staff who contribute value to the company and free up time so the sales team can focus on selling all day long (rather than processing their sales and dealing with customer complaints).
Nobody would say admin don't get paid just because they generate no actual cash for the business. They get paid! In the same way a wife also gets paid from her husband's income. He pays for the food, mortgage, clothing, bills etc. She is not working 'for free'. In most households women control the majority of the household income, even though men bring in the majority of that income.
In the days of full blown 'patriarchy' it was common for working class miners to come home black with soot and literally hand over their earnings to their wives to manage. If we reverse the sexes we'd say the wives were slave labour for the husbands!
"That shows you how much conservatives value mothering. They think it is worth zero dollars."
In a traditional family the wife is PAID for her domestic work from the husband's income. They are a business partnership who have chosen to OPTIMISE their skills in the most practical way. The husband works away from home while the wife works in and around the home (where she can be pregnant and raise their children). They are both working. They are both getting paid.
It is the optimum arrangement for earning money because when the wife is incapacitated by pregnancy and early parenting, the husband can still work flat out to earn money to pay the bills. There is no 'dropping out' of the workforce. He can keep climbing the ladder and getting promotions, or building his business without any interruptions.
When the 10 -15 year project called 'having children' is largely done the wife can opt for part time work, or study or even full time work - as appropriate.
To say a stay-at-home wife doesn't get paid is nonsense. It's like saying a cab driver gets paid, but the person taking the bookings and directing the cab on the radio doesn't get paid just because they don't actually get handed any money from customers. But everyone gets paid. They share the income .... just as husbands and wives do.
If stay-at-home mothers were not paid they would not be able to eat, pay the bills, have clothes etc. Feminism's claim that 'motherhood' and 'domestic duties' are not paid is utter nonsense.
When a single woman has a job and lives alone in an apartment does she complain that she has to do all the housework? Does she claim her housework is 'unpaid labour'? If she decides to get a cat does she claim this is 'unpaid care work'? ... of course not.
So why would it be any different in a marriage where they agree to split duties to be more efficient (and be able to have children)?
The manosphere, and specifically MGTOWs, are largely irrelevant. They have no social sway. Most people don't know what MGTOW even means, let alone that such people exist. Yes they welcome sex robots who can mimic femininity and sexual desire (apparently men need more sophisticated sex toys than a mere disembodied phallus in the top drawer of the bedside table!)
Feminism has been defining female biology - and specifically motherhood - as oppression for a century. They campaign for gender equality, without fully realising this can only be achieved, by erasing gender altogether.
(Be careful what you wish for)
Artificial wombs will cater to feminism's demands by un-burdening women from reproduction. When men and women have been reduced to genderless and sterile worker drones (global citizens) manufactured in pods and raised by AI the goal of feminism will finally have been achieved.
Men cannot oppose artificial wombs. They will be branded as misogynists, denying women the right to liberating technology. Only women can stop the transhuman agenda. But it means embracing female biology again, and accepting the burdens and responsibilities (and joys) that come with being female.... instead of aspiring to live as men.
I don't know what universe you're living in but Gen Z doesn't really want kids - from real OR artificial wombs. The generation coming up after Gen Z really, really, REALLY won't want kids.
When a single woman has a job and lives alone in an apartment does she complain that she has to do all the housework? Does she claim her housework is 'unpaid labour'? If she decides to get a cat does she claim this is 'unpaid care work'? ... of course not.
So why would it be any different in a marriage where they agree to split duties to be more efficient (and be able to have children)?
The complaint is that the duties are not really split evenly. A man or woman working and living on their own does all their own cooking, dishes, house chores, pet care etc. But after marriage it seems the bulk of the cooking, childcare, house chores, pet care, etc fall on the wife regardless if she works outside the home or not. And even if she is a stay at home wife and mom there is no reason why the bulk of it should fall on her because for the 9 hours the husband may be at an outside job, she is at her inside job, inside the home doing all I just listed. So it still makes sense that when he returns home he should start doing his portion of the work since that is what he did when he was single and working.
Anyway, these arguments are kind of moot points now. Gen Z isn't going to have kids like that and the generation coming up after them is going to have even less. That's why conservatives are clutching their crotches and crying so much now about "under population" and "young people are sexless" and "labor shortage"
"The complaint is that the duties are not really split evenly."
Studies show that women only complain about doing the housework or washing up when they are earning significantly less than their partners. As soon as they are earning the same (or more) than their male partners they stop complaining about housework, even if they are the only ones doing it.
This tells us the complaints about uneven labour in the relationship are actually due to men contributing more than women, not less. Women who earn less than men (women who are supported by men) will often assert their value (their contribution) by complaining about having to do the housework. This moaning is to emphasise the work she does around the home, rather than a genuine attempt to get the man to do it.
Studies also show that when men routinely do the washing up and other household chores the sex in the marriage tends to dry up. Couples with great sex lives typically have traditional gender roles, with the woman doing the majority of household chores. It's almost as if seeing your husband washing the dishes after dinner is a huge turn off for women....
Also, a lot of women prefer to do the housework so they can do it just the way they like it done. When the man tries to help he is 'interfering'. And on a practical level running a household requires planning and multi tasking, such as planning what clothing gets loaded into the washing machine and when, or what to cook based on what food needs using up.
It is often a lot easier for one person to manage things, rather than have two people second guessing each other all the time.
Without linking to any "studies". Sample size, control group, etc. would have to be given to see if these "studies" qualify as more than just an online pole of 52 people.
Anyway, these arguments are getting more and more moot because with each passing day, Gen Z and the generation coming up behind are consistently saying "no" to the whole kit and kaboodle.
It shouldn’t be the state or governments job to pay parents. While it might be a short term fix I think society as a whole needs to celebrate family, mothering, simple living and hopefully get back to a living standard of a one salary family. Which means tackling inflation and materialism at the least.
This. Feminists, those feminists fighting for women’s rights have well and long been critiquing how motherhood is impossible in this kind of system.
If we go back in time the structures of society was quite different, children often lived along, not apart from their parents and as the way if making money oftentimes was more like a small scaled family business, farming, artisanships aso children were raised in that, with their mother close - and if we go back really far, they were counted in the tribes by everyone, not pushed away to be out of the way, an in both cases family structures also most often had grandparents and other members caring and supporting each other.
In this no, if you are a mother it is treated like a hindrance, and expectations are a double egged sword.
How is it that mothers, to have the possibility to be an active part of society working, is “managed” by forcing mothers to put their children away for “care”?
Where is the logical act to make it possible to grow the next generation, that in the will benefit all those with the financial powers by being work-force, carers, tax-payers?
The logical act to make it possible for mothers to be working, like mothers did before and long way back before this financial and one-eyed system built only on the premise of the male-biology?
If this world is supposed to be the best possible version of itself, creating instead of destroying, it should be built for both women and men, and suit the biological needs also for women.
Without locking them into an either-or.
Productivity and intelligence in the workforce would benefit, as well as happiness and mental stability for both parents and children.
"Feminists, those feminists fighting for women’s rights have well and long been critiquing how motherhood is impossible in this kind of system."
The system is a consequence of feminism. Before feminism a blue collar man was able to support a family on his wages alone, giving women the privilege (as it feels today) of being a stay-at-home mother to her own children.
It was feminists who declared motherhood to be degrading and convinced women to reject their maternal responsibilities and assume a male role and male identity in society. This has caused endless disruption in the workplace, a massive decline in mental health for women and it's completely destroyed the childhoods of several generations now.
Feminism's destruction of the family has caused driven children to gang culture, early onset puberty, childhood depression, criminality, promiscuity/ teenage pregnancy, failure to launch ... etc.
"if you are a mother it is treated like a hindrance,"
Pregnancy/ motherhood is a hindrance. It's a MASSIVE undertaking. The reason why we always emphasised the importance of finding a good man and settling down as soon as possible was to create the best possible circumstances for a woman to embark on motherhood.
It was feminism that devalued and trivialised motherhood as something to be 'slotted in' to your otherwise hectic lifestyle of consumerism, socialising and career building.... and doing all of this without necessarily even bothering to find a reliable man and marrying him.
Men and women are essentially a single organism. Reproduction and parenting is a joint effort. Feminism's battle of the sexes, defines men and women not as complimentary partners, but as rivals or even waring tribes. This alone makes motherhood impossible. Motherhood is enabled by male support (their provision of resources and protection). That is why feminism's war on men is ultimately a war on women too (and children).
"Before feminism a blue collar man was able to support a family on his wages alone, giving women the privilege (as it feels today) of being a stay-at-home mother to her own children."
Post WWII rise of the middle class and baby boom were a fluke for a privileged set of people. The reason was a heavily taxed corporate class and other government benefits like the GI bill. You can read Mike Alexander's links which he posted on this thread. The economy was completely different during this time. History bears out that the vast majority of women throughout time had to work outside the home to earn money to support their families. Not just women, but children as well. The only women who never had to do so were a small percentage of wealthy women.
You want to pay mothers for four years? What if they have a 2nd child? They will be paid for 8 years out of the govts tax revenue? Where will the money come from?
Well, if we are going to insist operating under the Neoliberal-Shareholder Primacy political-economic order, then yeah the trend is going to be towards something like paying moms. Under this order, profits are not reinvested back into the economic to generate jobs and rising wages, but rather they flow OUT of the economy and into financial markets through dividends and stock buybacks. This outflow of money, and the associated outflow of money from the trade deficit, are strongly deflationary, and can allow for a significant amount of continuous deficit spending without generating much inflation. This is why we have had deficits for all but a handful of years for forty years and only had a couple of years of high inflation after we ran ginormous deficits during the pandemic. So the way he pay for this is the way we pay for everything nowadays, by a combination of taxes and deficits so that the deficits do not exceed the threshold that generates excessive inflation. See this post for more details on the inflation bit.
My wife and I chose children over her “career,” and we relied on my income and our shared economizing and he skills at all the homemaking tasks so belittled by feminists. Four of our children are now adults, one happily MWKs and the others experiencing life in healthy ways. If you read Maslow, BTW, the Third Wave (I think the book is called) describes WWII orphans for whom all the hierarchy of needs was satisfied in orphanages, but mortality was high and unexplained. My response is that Maslow’s Hierarchy is wrongly represented in two dimensions rather than three, explaining why the institutionalized infants and toddlers were dying through lack of the love they needed.
Glad it worked for you. But suppose your wife had the greater income, would you have been willing to stay home with the kids? My Little Brother (from the Big Brother program) was in this situation and did stay home while the kids were young. He did a wonderful job with his two boys. It was hard on him and after returning to work, his career progress has suffered.
Would you be willing to have done that? I don't think I would. So I don't think I could rightly demand my wife to give up her career to be a homemaker.
"That shows you how much conservatives value mothering. They think it is worth zero dollars."
BINGO. And that is exactly why more and more and MORE women are opting out of having kids altogether. It's so delicious to hear conservatives now cry over decline in population and try to shame young women into marrying and having kids again. NOPE. Not gonna happen. The only people who can afford it are the upper middle class to the filthy rich. They will continue to have kids, at least for a while. But their kids aren't going to work the jobs that need filling out here. So they will have to keep brining in poor migrants. And then they will cry about that. They made their bed - let them lie in it.
Yes, I think that the cost of housing and transportation is a big reason why people are reluctant to have children but aside from that we are richer than ever before. I think the decline in the birth rate is more the result of shifting mores about premarital sex which are the result of birth control allowing women to engage in sex without fear of pregnancy and the opportunity for women to support themselves, allowing women to delay marriage. These are inevitable results of technological progress which reduced the number of hours of labor needed to maintain a household which allowed women to work. With this greater sexual freedom and lack of dependence on men, some women started to compete with other women for the most desirable men by having sex sooner and with less commitment. Over time this forced the normal commitment needed by a man to obtain sex downward. Now people's 20s and 30s offer the possibility of lots of sex with lots of different partners. Ironically this means fewer babies. It also means the less attractive lose out because people are taking longer to pair up if they do at all.
"some women started to compete with other women for the most desirable men ... It also means the less attractive lose out..."
I don't know which country you live in but I live in the USA where most people are a 5 at best on the 1-10 looks scale. The couples here are average on a good day, obese much of the time and not making a lot of money.
I couldn’t agree more! Just wish I hadn’t fallen for it, but then again, feminism has made mating much harder than it has to be, and having children even more difficult.
It amazes me how many screwed Boomers and under don’t see the abysmal state-run ends to our lives. Of course assisted suicide will solve that problem….
Feminism has nothing to do with it. Plenty of women right through the start of Feminism up until this very moment have managed to be stay at home moms - some even while being Feminists. Because Feminism is about choice. If you didn't do it it's because you really didn't want to OR because you couldn't afford it. Neither of which is Feminism's fault.
That’s a simplistic take on a complex matter and movement that wielded huge societal shifts. It’s fallacious to say feminism had “nothing to do with it.” It changed a lot of things and not all for the better.
"The state offered women a better life than their hard working husbands could provide"
- Where is evidence of "the state" ever paying women the equivalent of a middle class income?
Do you also believe that "welfare took the Black man out of the home"?
"The next wave of feminism will be artificial wombs. And already we are seeing the propaganda telling young women artificial wombs will free them from 'having to' suffer the chore of pregnancy, and allow them to live 'normally' instead"
- It won't work. Even if science advances to that point and even if AI robot nannies are invented, Gen Z are just not into having kids. The generation coming up behind them will be even less so.
"The only way to celebrate and value motherhood (and fatherhood), and save children from their spiral into complete mental and emotional collapse, is to put feminism in the garbage and return to the nuclear family."
- Again, the younger generations just aren't into it. And for the lingering few that may be, they see more value in a multi-generational extended family living situation than in the modern western "nuclear" (because it nuked the joint/extended family).
This is great stuff, but often hard for me to read because I had the OPPOSITE experience: cared for by a loving and attentive stay-at-home mother...and then homeschooled by her with my siblings until I was 11. I have very, VERY strong reservations about homeschooling (even though there were amazing things I got to experience and wonderful, beneficial opportunities, perspectives and privileges I gleaned from it!). Interestingly, I believe my mother did this partly because her mother had a health condition that resulted in my mother being separated from her for some time right after birth. My mother was also a latchkey-kid, so that generation tends to overcorrect in favor of hands-on parenting to the point of helicopter parenting. So of course I agree that prior to toddlerhood, children need their mothers pretty much constantly, and I’m privileged to have gotten that.
But where does that lead us? We need some sort of social structure to make that happen. And children also need their fathers. There seems to be no data here about aggression, hyperactivity and criminality in boys that were in daycare, and whether they did or didn’t have dads in their lives. A conversation about women and childcare is automatically ridiculous when it doesn’t address fathers (the second voice they should have been hearing in the womb for nine months), and grandparents (the third and fourth voices they should have been hearing in the womb for nine months), because it is impossible and ridiculous to expect women to spend 100% of their time with their children for years. Like my grandma- you could get sick. Or you could get postpartum depression. Or you could just need a break. Women should be able to take their baby into work with them in ALL fields that aren’t physically dangerous, and society should accept and tolerate babies screaming, crying, and needing milk AT WORK. Society needs a reset and remembering that children come first before ALL ELSE is that reset. It also brings women up to equal status with men. You should be able to legislate, do a presentation, write emails, talk to clients with children nearby at all times. The fact that this is considered unnatural is itself unnatural. At no point in human history prior to patriarchy/civilization did anyone ask women to not hand her baby to the elders and STOP hunting and gathering, STOP exploring that riverbank with a baby on her back, STOP painting that cave wall with her baby wrapped up near her, STOP performing that religious rite with her child watching, STOP butchering and preparing that aurochs carcass while her child is nearby, STOP cleaning and sewing that hunter’s leg wound shut while her child is propped against a tree watching. The expectation that society extricate all children from men’s presences and women must cease living in order to “properly raise kids” is ridiculous, and a patriarchal ploy to keep women oppressed.
While I fully support scientific accuracy about motherhood and childrearing- I don’t support an over-correction from the mainstream sex-denialism-we’re-the-exact-same-as-men feminism to a sentimentalized, sexist woman-on-a-pedestal “the-fairer-sex” feminism. Daycare has obvious problems. I’m lucky to have not experienced those problems. But so too does this notion that “proper parenting” involves specifically AND ONLY a mother spending literally every hour of every day with her child until the child is ready to start school (well past toddlerhood). That is not healthy either.
“Being calmed by a well-regulated mother habituates the infant to the experience of calming down through slowed breathing and soothing talk.” What if your mother is a human, and not some magical angel who is “well-regulated” all the time, or for some- ever well-regulated? I support traditional child rearing, aka pre-modern, pre-patriarchal, hunter-gatherer-style child rearing where the child is raised by both the mother AND the father and grandparents and friends (aka it takes a village).
Childcare will never be healthy for mother and baby unless the mother is able to hand off the child to a variety of close and trusted family and friends when she needs a break, and when she has stopped breastfeeding and it is time to start to detach a bit from the child. The problem is that it’s all-or-nothing for women: complete separation at too early an age (developmentally-inappropriate), or stay-at-home mothering 24/7 only her with the kid until the kid starts school- or even way past that if homeschooled (developmentally-inappropriate as well). Everyone knows there’s problems with daycare- but I don’t hear any solutions.
And I’m just going to float out there a warning to the “gender-critical” response I tend to see flavoring discussions of things like daycare a lot like “I’m going to helicopter parent my child forever so they don’t become trans.” Just FYI: that style of parenting is just as psychologically and developmentally harmful as the opposite.
Regaeding "why demand that women stop living life when raising infants" -- I love this idea in theory, and it works well in social /shopping/daily life situations, but not *paid work.* In practice I think it's very, very difficult to focus enough on a job to actually *perform job duties* while caring for a baby. Have you had a baby? Even if you're carrying the baby in a sling while they sleep, you might get at most 2-ish hours at a time, a few times a day, to do some focused thinking/white-collar type of work. I suspect most professionals would find it incredibly challenging to carve out enough time in a day to do a decent amount of focused work, keep a baby fed, and still get enough sleep and rest to stay sane (speaking from experience here, I am a working, pregnant mom of a three year old). And just forget about customer service or any of the more accessible jobs, where you actually need to be available on demand. Even in the most mother-friendly environments, eg. my midwives office, I would still expect at an appointment that my midwife be focused on me and not actively tending to her own newborn during my appointment.
Other people expecting one's full attention during a presentation, or phone call, or check out line is not somehow anti mothering - but it is acknowledging that if you are focused on one thing (eg. Baby), you are by definition not focused on the other thing (eg. Work). This goes both ways, too - I would be incredibly sad to see a young mother trying to appease her baby "just enough" that she can get back to the Important Zoom Conversation or whatever.
Parental leave is good for the mothers, too. Focusing on baby (and resting/napping when you get a moment in the day) is important for the baby and the mom.
You make really great points. No I don’t have kids and you’re right, I’m probably viewing the kids at/nearer to work approach with some naïveté. That being said, I do think kids can be kept closer to work than some expect (that aspect of homeschooling was really cool- being able to interact with adults and see their jobs/day-to-day lives. It think it makes kids smarter and worldly). I lived the “mom at home 100% while dad works” and I wouldn’t choose it for the world. But again, I had that extended far beyond just infancy-5 years old. I still think children should be raised by a village and that while an attentive mother (and father) are crucial and I’m lucky to have had that, it’s actually biologically impossible for mothers to live inside a 1 structure for 10 years focused on only or primarily their kids and for anyone to be emotionally and psychologically healthy people by the end of that.
I agree that parental leave is crucial for women to be anywhere near equal status citizens to men. I think it’s crazy this article left out the Scandinavian model which often includes 2 years of fully or partially paid leave for each kid (long enough to not only recover for the mother, but to bond and breast feed as well) and also paid leave for fathers in addition to the mother- such that the child bonds with both parents and then only enters daycare just before starting school anyways.
Yes! The stay at home lifestyle may work for some, but definitely not most. My comment applies mostly to that crucial infancy /early development period; once your kids are a few years old (maybe like 5+) it's a totally different ball game, and they absolutely could be expected to behave appropriately alongside their parents in a work setting. My point is more that for very young kids, they still need a lot of individual attention a lot of the time (my toddler often plays independently, but often needs Mom & Dad's attention too). And it's honestly more stressful to imagine trying to operate my normal work day while also juggling my daughter's attention ... With care, I know she is receiving appropriate attention and engagement when she needs it. (And if you're thinking babyhood, it's just a totally different ball game... I took 12 months of mat leave and that was about the minimum amount of time I needed to get my brain back to a point where I could work again. The US expectations about maternal leave being, like, 3 months at maximum, are so outrageous I think they are inhumane.)
Your response reminds me of an article I read several years ago that stated that since we're having less children, children will no longer be a priority for the culture at large. That would be the government, Hollywood/media, and employers. I think we're seeing the downstream effects of a culture that believes children are mini-adults rather than children still growing and forming and being unable to mentally accommodate the adult concepts they're being asked to. Fred Rogers used to say that it's the adults' job to protect the children. Clearly, across all levels of our culture, that isn't happening.
"Your response reminds me of an article I read several years ago that stated that since we're having less children, children will no longer be a priority for the culture at large. That would be the government, Hollywood/media, and employers."
I don't know that American culture ever prioritized children. If it had, the government would have mandated paid maternal AND paternal leave. Don't get me wrong. We like to pay a lot of lip service to "family values", especially politicians around election time (cough, ahem, Vivek Ramaswamy) but our policies reflect our deepest held values, and "family" or "children" isn't one of them.
" I think we're seeing the downstream effects of a culture that believes children are mini-adults rather than children still growing and forming"
It's the opposite. Children had way more responsibility and were treated as adults back before child labor laws came into effect (and actually started to be practiced, which took some time). Young people were marrying, working and having kids at ages we now considered "children" and "minors". Minors used to be actual miners. Now we coddle kids, helicopter over them and have extended adolescence into the 20s and sometimes even 30s. There's a whole sub-culture that actually worships at the altar of childhood, and many homeschoolers fall into this.
Thanks for your response! I think we’re still doing the modern concept of parenting: enslave the wife and kick the dad out of the house to the farm/factories. The traditional form of parenting is a tight unit of a few different nuclear and extended families all of whom have a variety of responsibilities and interests that they pursue (aka Hunter gatherer/it takes a village). The “children are mini adults” comes from post agricultural into industrial societies, all of which are patriarchal by their nature, which depends on warrior-bands growing the gigantic civilizations by seizing and hoarding resources, thus requiring lots of labor to keep developing the civilization and keep it running, thus turning children into extra labor and women into labor-growers.
But in pre-agro and pre-industrial societies young people have sex and babies at a time we would still consider them "children". It's post-agricultural and industrial societies that brought about age of consent and minimum age for marriage laws.
India still does the "joint family" thing - that is multiple generations living under one roof. And many Indian women are getting sick of that arrangement for various reasons and desiring a "nuclear family" set up instead.
I 100% agree with this réponse! This lens and perspective makes the most sense. And is the most doable in my opinion. If we could bring our kids with us to work daycares, partially subsidized by the government let’s say to make it more affordable, that would be AMAZING. I could breastfeed my kid on my phone calls. Take 15-20 min breaks to snuggle them. And yo your point, this aligns most with what most likely occurred in the before times lol, when we lived in tribes, various aged folks all around us, everyone working when they could find time to do so, everyone supporting each other and each others children.
Yes. I was homescholed. I'm also Latina with a large extended family. My titis had no obvious shame or hangups about careers the way white women seem to have. My siblings have far worse mental health challenges, both visible and disruptive, than my cousins. Kids need happy moms and extended families. My own mom was loving but miserably overextended. Why is the solution always the Victorian era "angel in the household?" We saw how well that worked out 🙄
I can relate! My family is Italian and it’s a similar dynamic. People who come from more generational privilege notoriously romanticize traditionalism bc they can look back on it and pick the sentimental bits while taking for granted what made people seek “progress” in the first place. I can’t stand the bourgeois gender critical women complaining about how awful and selfish it is that some women don’t want to give up their financial independence and intellectual growth just bc they want to have kids 🙄. There’s such a predictable reactionary misogyny to this whole gender issue of “oh well if the mother just stayed at home, then her kid wouldn’t be trans.” The only GC communities that lay the blame at the right doorstep are the radical feminists (ie this is happening bc of sexism and homophobia). Overextended mothers drowning at home ≠ best option. While I actually hugely benefitted from many aspects of homeschooling, and my mother is a fantastic mom, I would never lie about the downsides of homeschooling where one parent (aka the mother in 99.99% of cases) takes on the never ending duty while the husband works and lives. Never, ever. You couldn’t pay me to do it. I have a working zia who had kids way later...and she is just as close to her kids and they are doing GREAT.
I'm for exploring all potential causes in the growing rates of chronic conditions. I'd be curious how this maps out across different countries with different timelines on the amount of daycare. I believe Qatar may be the most recent nation to face a dramatic spike in autism diagnosis. So that may be an interesting place to start such a comparison.
Something else I’m questioning, simply anecdotally, is whether increased drug use in this country has an effect on babies’ brains? Perhaps, and especially, with the rise in autism? (https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2023/07/18/marijuana-use-linked-to-epigenetic-changes/) But I suspect it’s a combination of effects: Instability of care due to the breakdown of the family, exposure to media violence at too early ages, less time outside, less free play time, less modeling and structure, less sleep, too many choices, too much focus on the externals as opposed to the internal (look v quality of character). Toss in the pandemic with two+ years of online school (and a completely digital social life) and now you have kids completely unmoored and unable to cope.
I’ve wondered about that too. All my artisanal mothering did nothing to protect my children from mental health difficulties. Sometimes I privately wonder if my husbands (pre-marriage) history of heavy drug use could have impacted his sperm.
If you want to make yourself really unpopular, state publicly that daycare is bad for babies. There is so much evidence out there that this is true, but many choose to ignore it because mothers are only valued in patriarchal capitalistic systems when they are operating as employed women. Here is one man who really knew the value of that human society fundamental relationship, which is the mother/baby dyad. https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/donald-woods-winnicott
Yes capitalism is the problem. What comes next for USA? Capitalism is so embedded here that if you allow an adult family member who's fallen on hard times to move in with you, you're called a "commie". So what to do?
What does capitalism have to do with it? Do you see stay-home moms in socialist countries like China? Nope. The states that most need the income taxes from working parents are the least likely to consider the impact on children.
The concerns raised bear deeper analysis. Feminism unquestionable adopts the view that what’s best for the mother must be best for the child - it’s an adult, ego/centric view and dangerous to question it. Dangerous because one risks being labelled anti-women. Sadly, this closes off the discourse needed to analyze objectively. The tax burden on families plays a big role in leading to ever-more moms feeling they must “get back to paid work.” This whole topic needs to be opened for thoughtful, non hysterical discussion. Thanks for the article.
"Unfortunately, most households need two incomes these days."
Stefan Molyneux (who has been exposing the harm of daycare, spanking and fatherless homes for decades) put it brilliantly when he said if you're going to have children, sell your house and go and live in a tent if that's what it takes to give your children a stay at home parent. Give up Starbucks, Hollywood movies, Netflix, computer games and other non essentials. Just make sure the children have a proper upbringing.
It's so true. All those material comforts and toys count for nothing if the child is being traumatised and indoctrinated in daycare/ schools. What we consider poverty today was a normal childhood in the 60's and 70's. Children used to play in the dirt and wear clothes with patches on them. And they weren't self harming or having identity issues.
"Stefan Molyneux (who has been exposing the harm of daycare, spanking and fatherless homes for decades) put it brilliantly when he said if you're going to have children, sell your house and go and live in a tent if that's what it takes to give your children a stay at home parent. "
What's "brilliant" about suggesting that families put their kids in danger by becoming essentially homeless? If someone needs to live in a tent in order to stay at home with their kids then having kids in the first place should be out of the question. And that's the reason why a lot of young people in the USA are opting out of having kids. They can't afford it. Molyneux is a stay at home dad while his wife works. His wife made good money as a psychologist and now he makes good money from the internet. I'm pretty sure they are an upper-middle class family. Also, Molyneux is the last person anyone should take personal advice from regarding family - or anything. Several years ago he was embroiled in a big scandal regarding advice he was giving people to separate from their "FOI"/family of origin over the most trivial of things, like not agreeing with Libertarian politics. He caused a lot of harm to families and grandparents were even forbidden from seeing their grandchildren because some stupid advice he gave to people he never even met - AND he's not a licensed therapist or anything like that. I believe there may have been lawsuits as well.
"Give up Starbucks, Hollywood movies, Netflix, computer games and other non essentials. "
I don't know that giving up one, a few or even all of these things will add enough to a family's budget to make a huge difference. Mike Alexander gives links elsewhere on this thread to economic analysis on his Substack that shows what's really going on with our economy right now.
In my experience what's good for the baby is often left completely out of the equation. I teach at a community college and was asking a female coworker the other day whether she believed that if our outreach was perfect and women were encouraged to go into whatever field they wanted, if we should expect to see proportional representation in all fields. Her response was, "not in our society". She went on to say that what we really need to close equity gaps is 100% childcare, including weekends. The question of whether childcare is actually equal to the traditional alternative remained entirely unexamined. Frankly I think the reason it remains unexamined is that they wish for it to be true and the process of examining it might make it impossible for them to continue ignoring the needs of the child.
The other thing worth noting is that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Let's say that we go with the author's closing idea of providing developmentally appropriate leave for the working mother. Even if this is paid leave it will result in the loss of work experience, which will show up on the statistical level as a "pay gap" between men and women; a man and woman who got hired at the same time for the same job likely won't make the same amount in the long run, because the woman will have less experience and will probably lag behind on the promotion ladder. This will be seen as just another example of the toxic patriarchy, when really it's just a mundane fact that people with less experience get paid less.
We need to adopt the Scandinavian model. Paid leave is provided for both parents. And being "proud 'muricans" we should be able to improve upon it as well. We're still the richest country in the world (or at least the 2nd richest). There really is no excuse.
Yes, extended kin groups and aunties are still common in small towns and rural areas. However for those young adults that leave and form families in cities distant from home, the value of extended kin groups is often lost to distance.
Extended kin groups and aunties (what about uncles?) may still be common in certain areas but what makes you think they are jumping for joy at the "opportunity" to take care of someone else's kid? That too for free? Aren't the aunties and cousins and everyone else in these kin groups also working? Aren't grandma and grandpa still working plus dealing with health issues and hoping to enjoy some free time at some point during their golden years? And you know damn well none of the young nieces, nephews and cousins are going to "watch" some baby/little kid for free, or even do a good job of it considering how addicted young people are to their phones.
All this to say that babies need their mothers. Something that humans across all cultures have known since the dawn of time. One thing that this article leaves out is that mothers also need their babies. The connection between mother and infant is the closest relationship that exists, and it is very detrimental to mothers to be parted from their infants for long stretches of time every day. I would be curious to see if the mother's cortisol levels were similar to those of the babies they left in daycare.
Right. Did I really have post partum depression or was I miserable being away from my baby and pumping while watching videos of him in order to do the best I could to care for him?
There's no way of knowing. Stay at home moms also suffer from PPD and even post partum psychosis. Have there been any studies comparing stay at home moms with working moms and PPD? Let's google.
I'd be fascinated to know. The three women I know who have had PPD were all highly ambitious and career-orientated, and waited until their mid to late 30s to have kids. It felt to me like they were experiencing a crisis of identity and were conflicted about giving up their careers -- even momentarily -- and being perceived as "just" mothers.
Moms need a lot of help after giving birth. Indigenous cultures around the world know that and give it. There doesn't seem to be a lot of help for isolated moms in "nuclear families". Of course the rich ones can hire help. But the rest?
I was a SAHM and I suffered from PPD. One little data point!
The 13 years I was home with my three kids was a wonderful time in my life and I'm so happy for it.
Moms need a lot of care and help after giving birth. The isolated "nuclear family" doesn't provide that.
I hate to leave my dogs for the day--I can't imagine the stress of having to leave your baby!
In fact I take my dog everywhere. :-)
Same.
I hated leaving my babies in daycare, and I was fortunate that I only left them about 25 hours a week, and it was a lively and loving home daycare that my children loved, especially my firstborn. I used to wish the Taliban would conquor America and declare that mothers should get to stay home with their babies. That's saying a lot!
Plenty of moms stay at home with their babies in the USA. What factors prevented you from doing so?
Their father was terrified of being the sole support. And I was terrified of him after a while. Then he ended up bailing, whether it was a psychiatric break or his hidden evil self just burst through I'll never know, but I ended up being the sole support, give or take a couple hundred dollars a year, so I'm glad I worked.
Sorry to hear you had to be terrified of your child's father. I knew you were joking but "Taliban declaring mothers should get to stay home with their babies" would actually mean they could never leave the home.
Never leave the home without a male escort. Yes, I knew that. I knew a bit about the Taliban. I really really wanted to be home with my children. I meant what I said.
But why do you feel the Taliban would be needed to enable you to do that? If the Taliban were "in charge" how would your situation change? You would still be with the same man and then abandoned by him, so what difference would the Taliban make?
Very true. Also mothers who are separated from their babies for long periods may over-compensate with affection and positive emotion.
And less discipline. I see that a lot.
I’m a bit late to this article but it is spot on. We often also overlook that congregate care is literally harmful to children’s health. We take for granted that little kids get sick a lot, but that’s actually not normal and can lead to long term damage that affects them for life. I just wrote about this on my own humble stack:
https://open.substack.com/pub/goodchildren/p/daycare-attendance-could-be-shortening?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
How convenient for fathers! I guess they can just screw off and do whatever.
This social-deficit crisis was plainly started by television, and is plainly being accelerated into a death-spiral by phones. Talking about anything else is, frankly, retarded.
Wow, you are brave to publish this. I have been reading the tentative studies on this for years. I say tentative because you have to tiptoe around this if you want to keep your job. Everyone focuses on the increased tax revenues associated with the Quebec tax experiment (which "paid for itself plus some") but few will go down the road of asking if it was good for the kids.
Don't forget the importance of grandparents. At one time, the 2 sets of experienced grandparents with completed parenting skills were available to assist and advise the new parents in raising a child/family. Job mobility and working parents has too often left child development in the tender hands of strangers such as child care, public schools, mass media and university with disastrous results. Undoubtedly a major force in the disfunction of so many young people today.
This is why I have spent about half of my grand children's life helping with them in another town. Grand parents are natural alloparents!
Grandparents and aunties! The nuclear family versus traditional extended kin groups is another cause of this problem worth investigating.
The nuclear family is the break down of the traditional multi-generational family. But right wing conservatives seem to worship at the altar of the nuclear family (which nuked traditional family values). But I don't think it's fair to assume that grandmas and aunties WANT to engage in free child care labor. Maybe meet some older and middle aged women, put your phone/lap top down, make eye contact and ask them. And ask some grandpas and uncles too while you're at it. Men don't have to be left out of the "amazing opportunity" to bond with their grandchildren/nieces/nephews as a caregiver.
This is a misunderstanding of what conservatives are talking about when they refer to the "nuclear family". It never meant the exclusion of extended family. That's just a recent talking point from the left ( of which I am a part!).
Not from my memory. Decades ago conversatives here (I'm in the USA) whined and wailed about multiple generations and extended family members living under one roof. They would cite "fire hazards" and "are our neighborhoods even zoned for this?" and all kinds of nonsense. They didn't like the idea of even a medium-sized extended family sharing 1 car for example because it doesn't fuel the Capitalist 1-car-per-person model. They simply didn't see this culture as congruent with "American values" of nuclear families isolated in neat houses in quiet suburbs. You see, the sibilings Becky, Ben and Stacey are supposed to leave home at 18, go to college, get jobs, get married, and then set up their own houses, all seperate from one another, preferrably in differen towns, if not states. Their parents, Bob and Beth, are supposed to be "empty nesters" in their own home, and talk to each of their kids once a week on the phone. Family gatherings happen Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a few weeks in summer.
Ben is NOT supposed to bring his bride to live with parents in the "joint family home" (as is customary in many cultures). They are not supposed to raise their kids there and then have one or more of their own kids bring their spouse to live there either. Nope. Grandparents, great-grandparents, in-laws, etc - all are supposed to live separate.
Why do you think "single family home" is a thing?
Now, what I've noticed lately in real estate is that "multi-generational homes" and "mother in law suites" are starting to be a thing in home building. And if you look closely, they are being built in areas where people originally from "joint family" cultures are living. Such as Indians. So if you have a university somewhere that attracts a lot of students from India, you will see Indian owned business sprouting up shortly thereafter and then all these Indian families and then they will be looking to buy homes. Cue the "multi-generational home".
"Mother in law suite" is an interesting thing considering that Americans would of course PRESUME mother-in-laws to be given a small space somewhere detached from the house, like in the backyard. LOL! But in a tradtional joint family home, the mother-in-law is front and center.
I don't even consider American "conservatives" to be conservative. They are cold, detached people for whom large family is a hindrance. The multi-generatational, joint family home is abhorrant to them. In fact, they call it "communism".
It’s only communism when the */government*/ forces one to share one’s home with another.
Nonetheless, Americans have said the multi-generational joint family system is communistic and "against American values" of freedom and individualism.
Except when grandma had raised nine younger siblings, six of her own, taught school when she was widowed early, and by the time she had any leisure had less than zero interest in small children. Maybe I’m just a lot older than y’all but your romantic ideas of how life was more nurturing for young children before daycare is just....innacurate.
It's not. That grandma's experience wasn't natural either. Think about it: how's your average woman going to have ten kids if she's spacing them about four years apart? Traditional societies practiced child spacing and patriarchal civilized societies don't.
Define traditional please. It was traditional to expose infants too, thus ensuring a four year spacing. The fact is none of us have the faintest clue what pre-agricultural hunter gatherer groups actually did or how they lived unless they wrote things down and the written records somehow survived which I am not aware that many bands did. We do have accounts from Europeans who encountered these groups but it’s been well documented that those accounts can be wildly inaccurate. If a tribe practiced infanticide they aren’t going to tell the missionary about it and risk punishment. Early anthropologists were often inaccurate because it was a game to see who could concoct the wildest story for the earnest white lady who was asking nosy questions. I’d have to go back and dig into the history but Margaret Mead and Ruth Boaz got pranked like that.
If the tribe practices infanticide, they're going to eat the missionary first. :)
I don't know why you'd say that. China and India were world renowned for infant femicide and yet we've never heard of missionaries getting eaten in either country.
Because they got eaten. :)
What methods did they use for spacing?
Breastfeeding frequently day and night for 3-7 years, carrying their babies constantly and co-sleeping. Breastfeeding prevents more pregnancies globally than any other method of contraception. It is nature’s way of protecting the health of mothers and babies by natural child spacing. It doesn’t work so well in the industrialised world where separation of mothers and babies/young children is the norm. Even in industrialised countries with maternity leave menstruation often won’t return until breastfeeding mothers go back to work so around 12 months in the UK.
I know! These young people need to get off their phones and actually sit down and talk face to face with older women/grandmas and ask them if they WANT to spend their golden years changing diapers and wiping snotty noses. And notice it's always "grandmas and aunties" expected to do this labor (for free). Not grandpas or uncles.
"Job mobility and working parents has too often left child development in the tender hands of strangers such as child care, public schools, mass media and university with disastrous results"
University? By the time kids go to Uni they are adults.
People have to work and earn money to feed, clothe, shelter and educate their kids. There's no social safety net in the USA for parents and kids where parents can just take off work for years to be with their kids.
Wow. Thanks for writing and publishing this. I've been wondering for years, as someone who grew up (I'm 59 now) watching this way of raising children unfold, what the impacts were going to be. My most basic question (or concern really) was what would be the effect of separating children from their mothers at such early ages for anywhere from eight to ten hours a day while the kids are at their most aware and awake and curious and then uniting them for a few hours (typically rushed and a little chaotic based on the families I saw doing this) before putting them to bed. Essentially, my concern was that someone other than the mother, for whom I believe there is an attachment and bond like no other, was caring for and raising the child. I also wondered how this would affect the mother - most of her baby's 'firsts' would be seen, recognized, affirmed and celebrated by someone else (if at all).
Even 30 years ago, to voice concerns like these could get a man or even a woman howled out of the room. I haven't seen anyone willing to analyze the possible effects that a few decades of raising so many kids this way has had. Even with all the 'crises' young people seem to be having today, nobody is willing to go here and at least look at the data that's available after so many years and posit a connection, at least in part.
Again, thank-you.
I've worked at an early childhood care center in NYC. During the job training, we were basically told to keep it a secret if any "firsts" happened. Most employees are NOT being paid enough to really care at those jobs. They're not thinking about you and your baby that much, they're thinking about their next audition or gig (many of them are performers using it as a "survival job").
There's no goddamn way I would ever have my kid go to any kind of school or daycare before age 5. Even then, I would consider homeschooling until about age 12, then get them in school mostly for advanced math.
Yes, I had the same training. The part that bugged me, besides the lying, was how does this affect general milestone reporting? If the parents don't find out the kid is walking/talking for 3 months, is the child then 'labelled?' And if an entire generation is 'behind' what are the consequences? And all based on a lie of ommission.
I hadn't even thought of that part, but that DEFINITELY makes it worse. And when you come down to it, that policy is all about protecting the feelings of a few fragile adults who are avoiding reality. Obviously if the child is at a center for most of their waking hours from birth, the employees and not the parents are going to see the "firsts". Anyone with a brain can figure that out. If the parents feel guilty about that, maybe they should examine why instead of putting that on someone being paid minimum wage to stand in for them.
The parents are working. The USA doesn't guarantee paid parental leave and even if it did, even let's say for as long as 2 years, eventually the parents have to return to work. When ever was the time when both parents ever got to be there at home for all the "firsts"?
What are the chances a kid who can walk or talk will choose never to demonstrate those skills on evenings or weekends? We’re almost certainly talking about a delay of days, not months.
In my experience, it was about 50/50. The difference seemed to be based on parents' behavior. Some parents were tuned in, and really involved, so day or a week would go by. Other parents just seemed to get stuck in a phase, maybe due to stress or lack of skills, who knows, and that's when months would go by. They always came in with big,
exciting, news when the 'first' happened, so it was easy to track. And in a game of averages, 1 delayed 'report' has consequences.
That's interesting about the 'firsts'. I hadn't thought about that - staff not mentioning them.
Yeah, the idea is that the parents assume it's actually the first time when they see it first.
Isn't there always at least one parent who misses some or many of the firsts anyway? Where are these families where both parents are with their kids 24/7 to witness all these firsts?
It's weird. Do parents who witness firsts while the other parent isn't around also "not mention it"?
And how would you pay the rent and other necessities of life while you were caring for/homeschooling your kid? Or do you have a trust fund or husband with a job that pays a wage sufficient to support a household (not enough of those to go around).
I'm in a VERY low cost of living area now. Didn't stay in NYC after 2020. Work from home with flexibility is also feasible to balance with being a home maker. There's home schooling networks where people trade off who's doing what. Extended families can take turns babysitting. Some families actually *save* money significantly by having one parent stay home because they never have to pay for childcare. In Middle America it's fairly common to have a parent stay home-- kind of like producing some of your own food is way more normal in those areas than in the cities. Obviously a lot of this doesn't work in high cost of living cities, though.
I’m going to reply here since I see it brought up, but was thinking about it in general with this essay. I hear the argument a lot that 2 people “have” to work, but I’m sorry, it’s not true. You can look at average wages, subtract taxes plus the extra costs of commuting, business clothing and lunches, take out/laundry drop off/house cleaning and whatever else you need to outsource because you’re too busy, extra sick days from daycare and times you will be late or not able to work because your child needs you, then subtract the GIGANTIC daycare expense, and you’re barely breaking even, if you’re lucky. We are in a relatively expensive area, and my husband does ok, but we are not rich by any means. My job before quitting when we had our first son was decent, but I can honestly say we would not be materially or financially better off if we’d gone the daycare route with me still working. I stay home and homeschool 3 kids now. We had to move to a cheaper area and make some other sacrifices but it’s definitely doable.
By “cheaper area” I mean we moved from a reasonable for the area 5th floor walk up in NYC to basically the cheapest town that is still commutable to NYC- not middle america, which I imagine would be easier :) it’s possible.
"By “cheaper area” I mean we moved from a reasonable for the area 5th floor walk up in NYC "
This tells me you are upper middle class. The vast majority of Americans are not.
I would also point out that half of the population earns less than average wages, which is why I base all by analyses on unskilled labor because that is how a lot, if not most young, single moms obtain their income.
https://mikebert.neocities.org/Real%20Wage%201875-2022.gif
So, can a single mom make it on $30K per year? Daycare is not going to be nearly as expensive for them as it is for richer people since they live in poor neighborhoods where women who can't get regular jobs do daycare and since they have more kids there is more family that is local. If they are reasonably functional (and a lot are not) they work it out, but they are *not* raising their own kids. If you would like to return to a world where two parent families where one parent stayed home that I grew up with, you would need to support very high tax rates on the rich to bring back the economic culture that made this world possible.
References:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/an-overview-of-my-thesis-in-response
Hell, my whole substack.
Mike, you are the voice of reason here for the vast majority of Americans. Mrs. B sounds like she's upper middle class.
I stayed home because I wanted to, and it also made financial sense. My salary would have been eaten up with the cost of daycare.
And the obvious question is why do families have to, or feel they have to, have 2 working adults to be able to afford to survive.
Childcare 'should' be expensive and why would anyone think a paid carer would do a better job than someone who loves and is dedicated to that one child?
The reason why is here; https://mikebert.neocities.org/Real%20Wage%201875-2022.gif
Living standards (which defined cost of living) scale with per capita GDP. For 50 years per capita GDP has risen 2.2-fold https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/#0 while base wages have not. You need two to bring in the same income as one did fifty years ago.
The fact that unskilled wages do not rise over time means that young men of below average abilities, who might be expected to occupy the bottom rungs of the labor ladder over their working life have nothing to bring into a marriage. And so increasing numbers of them do not get married as time goes on and you have an epidemic of single parents.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/social-consequences-of-economic-evolution
Thank you, Mike, for bringing the real world to this conversation. In order to provide one's kids just a middle-middle class life (I'm not even talking upper-middle class here), in a safe, clean and aesthetically pleasing neighborhood with good schools and parks to play in, both parents need to be working or one parent needs to be rich. One of the reasons young people aren't having kids these days is because they just can't afford to.
"And the obvious question is why do families have to, or feel they have to, have 2 working adults to be able to afford to survive."
Because feminists flooded the paid workforce 5 minutes after men invented mod cons to make housework much less time consuming.
As women competed with men (while abandoning their own children and motherhood duties) this lowered wages and allowed government to double taxes.
Before feminism a blue collar man could easily support his family on his wages alone, allowing his wife to raise the kids as nature intended, and also dip in and out of the workforce when it was convenient or when they needed extra money.
Before feminism 100% of a woman's labour contributed to her family. After feminism women ended up as tax slaves (just like men), working 2-3 days a week for the government (via taxes).
While children suffered abandonment, millions of new pointless, wasteful and destructive jobs were invented (HR etc) for women to occupy in order to 'live the dream' of a 'career'.
Also women's entry point for work became the administration level (comfortable office job). Traditionally these positions were give to male shop floor workers as a promotion, after they had spent years working the shop floor. Not only did women block this promotion route for men (and their families), but it also meant companies became filled up with women who had no real world experience of what the company actually did or how it functioned.
Admin/ managerial positions are full of women DELEGATING work to men they have never seen or met and have no idea what they actually do.
But apart from all that feminism has been great for society ;)
Why did we ever let it get to the point where mothers had to depend on one other adult to support us to raise children and that just happened to be some random man who we didn't grow up with, doesn't really know us, just wanted a cheap housekeeper and clean prostitute but isn't emotionally invested in a family much if at all? Why does everything have to happen in a factory or a machine? Why do men have to own everything? When are you going to get over this idea that we're your farm fields to grow your sons in? Don't write me off as a crackpot -- look at what's happened in the history of civilization with a dispassionate eye. Look at how men have talked about women over the centuries. Try to see it from women's point of view. This could have all been avoided.
'some random man'?
You have a very weird outlook on life.
Good Lord yes. Holy dysfunctional upbringing and projection, Batman.
Patriarchy is the simple answer. Women didn't accept being treated as slaves and breeders it was forced on them/us through rape, violence, war and the Church. People used to live in matrifocal kinship groups until "god" and the state decided women and kids were property. It is completely possible to build a healthy, functional society, but the people in charge want cheap labor and low taxes. We can demand better, but most people think the way things are is the way they ought to be. Try to propose something better and the wealthy yell Socialism and people fall for it Every. Damned. Time.
"Patriarchy is the simple answer. Women didn't accept being treated as slaves and breeders it was forced on them/us through rape, violence, war and the Church."
Throughout most of human history there were two basic roles/ lifestyles/ identities.
1. mining coal, ploughing fields, fishing the open seas, trading by land and sea, defending the village, building roads/ cathedral/ canals by hand, felling trees, forging iron, building ships etc
2. being a homemaker.
Feminists are the only people who define number number 1 as privilege and number 2 as slavery and oppression.
As soon as technology (mod cons) made being a homemaker a much less time consuming job, and provided paid work in safe, comfortable, indoor environments which resembled the home (the modern office and indoor factory with lighting, heating and indoor toilets) it was feminists who rushed to fill these jobs, abandoning their babies and children in the process and causing multi generational harm which has yet to be healed, and only keeps getting worse.
To denigrate the role of mother and abandon your own children to daycare in order to have a more 'fulfilling' lifestyle is the equivalent of men abandoning their role in power stations and maintaining the infrastructure in order to lead more 'fulfilling' lifestyle.
We would never let men abandon heir primary gender roles, but feminism has used decades of shaming tactics, hysteria and bullying to convince society to let women abandon their primary gender role.
This is definitely a challenge. Maybe instead of paying for universal child care we subsidize a parent staying home.
The point is that we need to be actually talking about the problem, and that it exists, and how do we fix it? Pretending there isn't a problem because it will hurt people's feelings or doesn't appear to have an easy fix is a major cop out.
Another thing you are supposed to keep a secret is how often the kids call you "mommy".
"During the job training, we were basically told to keep it a secret if any "firsts" happened".
I don't get it. Do stay at home parents ever keep "firsts" a secret from the working parent?
"There's no goddamn way I would ever have my kid go to any kind of school or daycare before age 5. Even then, I would consider homeschooling until about age 12,"
If you're single and so wealthy (like a trust fund baby or something) that you don't have to work and can stay home with your kid, great. But if you are partnered and not wealthy I'm going to assume that your partner will have to work and therefore miss some of the "firsts" and lots of quality time with his/her kids too.
There's just no way around it, in most cases there's always at least one parent who misses out. And yet life goes on.
In the USA in order to live a solidly middle class life in a safe and beautiful neighborhood with good schools, both parents have to work, in most cases. The USA does not guarantee parental leave. There is no social safety net for new parents.
I lived with a tribe in West Africa. The shock of the experience that *never left my consciousness* was the deep humanity, mutual affection, and conscious embodiment I witnessed. Factors I noted were: cosleeping, extended breastfeeding, baby holding and wearing, alloparenting, deep spirituality/religion.
Much closer to hunter gatherer sweet spot.
Yes. This tribe was agriculturalist with some nomadic pastoralists that would visit during part of the year. A rare case of maintaining attitudes classically seen in hunter gather bands.
Also birth spacing (3+ years)
Due to cosleeping and extended bfeeding?
Yes, that was my assumption. Sex taboo for postpartum. Parts of the year there was less food, so malnutrition played a role.
I'm reminded of Ceaușescu and the Romanian orphanages, and all the problems so many of the children had because of them.
Orphanages and daycare are two VERY DIFFERENT animals
Maybe those orphanages could be seen as one end of the child care spectrum? Their statistics, as we've all heard, are rife with many of the same kind of cognitive and emotional issues or disabilities that this piece discusses, only turned up to 11.
An open question, to me, is what happens when you have a high-achieving, possibly guilty-feeling, possibly daycare-experienced mother raising a child now as a stay-at-home mom. Does she attempt privately to overcompensate for what she feels she "shouldn't" publicly acknowledge as a modern woman (she "should" be career-focused), does she overcompensate publicly and privately because she didn't learn from her own mom how to be an appropriately balanced mother, or does she achieve appropriate balance between safety and freedom because she consciously tries to do so?
I was in the first group - felt I should have been career-focused, but I happened to live in an attachment parenting area AND my husband went back to school while our oldest was a toddler and came out making enough money that I could stay at home for the next two. So the oldest did have early daycare but also was "worn" on our bodies in a sling whenever he was with us, was exclusively breastfed for a long time by most people's standards, and slept with us until he was two. After that, we went pretty free-range with him. Nevertheless he's the most anxious of our three. The other two had the same experiences except that they didn't go to daycare as babies at all. Anecdote is not data, and oldest kids are often anxious, I know, but I'm kind of wishing we'd made the rest of the sacrifice with him now...
People think mothering is intuitive-- it is, if you have been sensitively mothered. Those who lack mothering need mentoring, like The Nurse Family Partnership. There are skills and values best imbued by RECEIVING them from others (unconditional positive regard). We need someone to co-regulate us, in order to know how to do it for others.
In my experience Neurofeedback is extremely useful as 'reset' on certain right brain issues like anxiousness. Check into Neurofeedback. It's quick (Twenty 30-min sessions is typical course of treatment.) I am familiar with "Neuroptimal" which my CASA youth did and it made such a difference i tried it for myself. It's a simple feedback program that rewards brain regulation and pokes you (via music and visual pattern skips and hitches) if you become dysregulated. No effecting. It typically put me to sleep. I noticed deeper, restful sleep and much more patience with petty irritations after NF.
First borns are often more anxious - I believe this is because the parents themselves are more nervous about how to care. I certainly remember being frightened of breaking my first baby when changing, and interrupting their self-soothing due to overconcern of the smallest sound, etc. Whereas by the time we got to the third we knew exactly what we were doing and the fourth child was a dream. Also parents expectations tend to be highest on the first child. The Birth Order book details these effects in society at large.
So this effect on first borns may also have an effect.
From an infant's point of view, not that different.
Children can be neglected, ignored, or mistreated in each.
This begins with feminists denigrating motherhood. "Women are so much more than that" blah blah blah. Well for most women, they are now less than they were. Just a teacher. Just a data entry cog. Just a nurse. Not a mother.
Children growing up in daycare as opposed to close to their natal mothers could also be combined with single mothers to result in the instability we see today.
I grew up in the 60s and 70s. My mother tells a story of sending me to daycare. Since she was a housewife, I gather this was to get a break. In any case, she yanked me out after noticing a VERBAL DECLINE. I was already speaking in complete sentences, she says, and after two days in daycare reverted to baby talk. So it figures (this is merely anecdotal I realize) that there would be a NORM in the daycare center to which children would conform (just as they are conforming to being transgender these days). Also, the day care personnel very likely insist on CONFORMITY in this large group, rather than allowing individuality to emerge, because nurturing individuals is simply impossible when shepherding a large group of strangers. This also might explain the insistence on ideological conformity today, the temper tantrums to get their way, and the unbridled sense of entitlement as when they were at home they probably got whatever they wanted because mom was too tired to negotiate or regulate them. I'm thinking of a tempter tantrum I witnessed where the parents immediately capitulated rather than acclimating the kid to that the picture had been moved upstairs. That's all it would have taken -- hey look your picture is here -- instead they moved it immediately saying "It's just easier." These are parents whose careers come first, their children second, they just do what's "easier" and the result is an unregulated kid.
A single mother is also going to capitulate and not stand her ground as opposed to working with a partner who would push back on her spinelessness. And this could go the other way around, except that women generally are more agreeable. In the trans mess, it's much more often the father who pushes back and the mother who's zealously getting on the bandwagon.
The question is, how can feminism actually renew celebrating motherhood, which is women's unique and vital contribution to the world? There's no greater feat, if you ask me, than a well-rounded adult raised in a solid home, launched successfully, who feels supported, and whose mother was there during their formative years -- and these are the memories they carry all their lives? Even though my mother narcissistically resented motherhood, she was THERE, and she absolutely nurtured us as individuals. Each of us is given to speaking glowingly of the things she made, her humor, her fortitude. Someone said to me, as if this were a deterrent, "It's hard work." So what's your point, I asked. People shouldn't work hard?
"The question is, how can feminism actually renew celebrating motherhood, which is women's unique and vital contribution to the world? "
It can't. Feminism is a toxic ideology which needs to be torn down and then buried in concrete for a million years like a leaky nuclear power station made out of asbestos. It cannot be saved or redeemed or rebranded.
Feminism was never pro women, or even about women. It was always designed to break up the family, create a war between the sexes, and devalue women's contributions to society in order to demoralise society and trick women into becoming wage slaves - just like men already were.
Feminism doubled tax revenue by doubling the workforce, which of course lowered wages so that now most women cannot afford to mother their own children (a privilege that even zoo animals still get to enjoy). The aim was always to separate mothers from their children so that the state could indoctrinate them (and traumatised them) from the earliest age.
Feminism is essentially a harem for women, run by the state and corporations (the most 'patriarchal' men in society). The state offered women a better life than their hard working husbands could provide, and women took the bait. Feminism is how the social engineers skilfully exploited women's natural hypergamous nature (and men's natural tendency to sacrifice themselves to save women) to gain power and control over society.
The next wave of feminism will be artificial wombs. And already we are seeing the propaganda telling young women artificial wombs will free them from 'having to' suffer the chore of pregnancy, and allow them to live 'normally' instead (ie pregnancy and childbirth are now being defined as unnatural and degrading - just as motherhood was defined as unnatural and degrading 50 years go).
The only way to celebrate and value motherhood (and fatherhood), and save children from their spiral into complete mental and emotional collapse, is to put feminism in the garbage and return to the nuclear family.
There really is only one way to pilot a 747 successfully. The pilot and co pilot cannot throw the rule book out of the window, make up their own rules, without ending up in a mess of twisted and burning wreckage. The same is true for parenting.
Handing your children over to minimum wage daycare staff (and then ideologically possessed school teachers) is like the pilots of a 747 letting the passengers fly the plane so they can be more 'empowered' and 'liberated' watching a movie or catching up on their social media feeds.
It is not feminism's job to celebrate motherhood. Does the US offer paid leave to a parent with newborn babies at full salary and benefits until age 4, when they can go to pre-school during the day? Nope. Conservatives are dead set against it. They want women to provide all this childcare for free. That shows you how much conservatives value mothering. They think it is worth zero dollars.
"It is not feminism's job to celebrate motherhood."
I agree. Feminism's job is to erase gender/ the family/ parenting from society and turn us all into asexual worker drones. Reproduction is to be achieved by artificial wombs (which are about 10 years away apparently) with children raised by the state. All that nonsense about 'women's liberation' was just a cover story for the actual agenda which was always transhumanism and technocracy (ie Brave New World).
Transhumanism requires us to discard notions of biological sex/ gender (ie sexual dimorphism). Feminism's claim that gender is no more than a social construct (rather than driven by innate biology) brought us to where we are today with non binary identities and the banning of words like 'mother', 'father', 'breast feeding' etc. Male and female are literally being erased from culture and language and an asexual culture is being brought in - complete with collapsing fertility and birth rates.
None of this would have been possible without a century of feminist ideology to prepare the ground and normalise such unnatural concepts and lifestyles. Feminism is anti woman, anti mother, anti family. Always has been.
"Does the US offer paid leave to a parent with newborn babies at full salary and benefits until age 4, when they can go to pre-school during the day? "
The US cannot offer anything because it has nothing to offer. The only source of value comes from real people (workers). The government can only redistribute other people's income by force. The government does not want families, it wants genderless worker drones. Obviously, it is not going to support women the way husbands do. Governments make terrible husbands/ fathers.
If we are to restore childhood (ie give children their mothers back) we must reject government as a suitable 'husband' and go back to marrying ordinary working men EXCLUSIVELY. As the saying goes.... three's a crowd!
If husbands are forced to fund government's wars, bureaucracy, green energy scams etc then obviously they have less resources left to support their wives.
"They want women to provide all this childcare for free."
The idea that women provide anything for free is feminist propaganda which makes no sense. Marriage is a business partnership. Traditionally the husband is like the sales team and the wife is like the admin team. The sales team generate the actual revenue, which also supports the salaries of the admit staff who contribute value to the company and free up time so the sales team can focus on selling all day long (rather than processing their sales and dealing with customer complaints).
Nobody would say admin don't get paid just because they generate no actual cash for the business. They get paid! In the same way a wife also gets paid from her husband's income. He pays for the food, mortgage, clothing, bills etc. She is not working 'for free'. In most households women control the majority of the household income, even though men bring in the majority of that income.
In the days of full blown 'patriarchy' it was common for working class miners to come home black with soot and literally hand over their earnings to their wives to manage. If we reverse the sexes we'd say the wives were slave labour for the husbands!
"That shows you how much conservatives value mothering. They think it is worth zero dollars."
In a traditional family the wife is PAID for her domestic work from the husband's income. They are a business partnership who have chosen to OPTIMISE their skills in the most practical way. The husband works away from home while the wife works in and around the home (where she can be pregnant and raise their children). They are both working. They are both getting paid.
It is the optimum arrangement for earning money because when the wife is incapacitated by pregnancy and early parenting, the husband can still work flat out to earn money to pay the bills. There is no 'dropping out' of the workforce. He can keep climbing the ladder and getting promotions, or building his business without any interruptions.
When the 10 -15 year project called 'having children' is largely done the wife can opt for part time work, or study or even full time work - as appropriate.
To say a stay-at-home wife doesn't get paid is nonsense. It's like saying a cab driver gets paid, but the person taking the bookings and directing the cab on the radio doesn't get paid just because they don't actually get handed any money from customers. But everyone gets paid. They share the income .... just as husbands and wives do.
If stay-at-home mothers were not paid they would not be able to eat, pay the bills, have clothes etc. Feminism's claim that 'motherhood' and 'domestic duties' are not paid is utter nonsense.
When a single woman has a job and lives alone in an apartment does she complain that she has to do all the housework? Does she claim her housework is 'unpaid labour'? If she decides to get a cat does she claim this is 'unpaid care work'? ... of course not.
So why would it be any different in a marriage where they agree to split duties to be more efficient (and be able to have children)?
"Reproduction is to be achieved by artificial wombs (which are about 10 years away apparently)"
The Manosphere is the thing that's celebrating that (along with sex-robots and 3D virtual reality sex) not Feminism.
The manosphere, and specifically MGTOWs, are largely irrelevant. They have no social sway. Most people don't know what MGTOW even means, let alone that such people exist. Yes they welcome sex robots who can mimic femininity and sexual desire (apparently men need more sophisticated sex toys than a mere disembodied phallus in the top drawer of the bedside table!)
Feminism has been defining female biology - and specifically motherhood - as oppression for a century. They campaign for gender equality, without fully realising this can only be achieved, by erasing gender altogether.
(Be careful what you wish for)
Artificial wombs will cater to feminism's demands by un-burdening women from reproduction. When men and women have been reduced to genderless and sterile worker drones (global citizens) manufactured in pods and raised by AI the goal of feminism will finally have been achieved.
Men cannot oppose artificial wombs. They will be branded as misogynists, denying women the right to liberating technology. Only women can stop the transhuman agenda. But it means embracing female biology again, and accepting the burdens and responsibilities (and joys) that come with being female.... instead of aspiring to live as men.
I don't know what universe you're living in but Gen Z doesn't really want kids - from real OR artificial wombs. The generation coming up after Gen Z really, really, REALLY won't want kids.
When a single woman has a job and lives alone in an apartment does she complain that she has to do all the housework? Does she claim her housework is 'unpaid labour'? If she decides to get a cat does she claim this is 'unpaid care work'? ... of course not.
So why would it be any different in a marriage where they agree to split duties to be more efficient (and be able to have children)?
_________________________________________________________________
The complaint is that the duties are not really split evenly. A man or woman working and living on their own does all their own cooking, dishes, house chores, pet care etc. But after marriage it seems the bulk of the cooking, childcare, house chores, pet care, etc fall on the wife regardless if she works outside the home or not. And even if she is a stay at home wife and mom there is no reason why the bulk of it should fall on her because for the 9 hours the husband may be at an outside job, she is at her inside job, inside the home doing all I just listed. So it still makes sense that when he returns home he should start doing his portion of the work since that is what he did when he was single and working.
Anyway, these arguments are kind of moot points now. Gen Z isn't going to have kids like that and the generation coming up after them is going to have even less. That's why conservatives are clutching their crotches and crying so much now about "under population" and "young people are sexless" and "labor shortage"
"The complaint is that the duties are not really split evenly."
Studies show that women only complain about doing the housework or washing up when they are earning significantly less than their partners. As soon as they are earning the same (or more) than their male partners they stop complaining about housework, even if they are the only ones doing it.
This tells us the complaints about uneven labour in the relationship are actually due to men contributing more than women, not less. Women who earn less than men (women who are supported by men) will often assert their value (their contribution) by complaining about having to do the housework. This moaning is to emphasise the work she does around the home, rather than a genuine attempt to get the man to do it.
Studies also show that when men routinely do the washing up and other household chores the sex in the marriage tends to dry up. Couples with great sex lives typically have traditional gender roles, with the woman doing the majority of household chores. It's almost as if seeing your husband washing the dishes after dinner is a huge turn off for women....
Also, a lot of women prefer to do the housework so they can do it just the way they like it done. When the man tries to help he is 'interfering'. And on a practical level running a household requires planning and multi tasking, such as planning what clothing gets loaded into the washing machine and when, or what to cook based on what food needs using up.
It is often a lot easier for one person to manage things, rather than have two people second guessing each other all the time.
"Studies show..."
"Studies also show..."
Without linking to any "studies". Sample size, control group, etc. would have to be given to see if these "studies" qualify as more than just an online pole of 52 people.
Anyway, these arguments are getting more and more moot because with each passing day, Gen Z and the generation coming up behind are consistently saying "no" to the whole kit and kaboodle.
It shouldn’t be the state or governments job to pay parents. While it might be a short term fix I think society as a whole needs to celebrate family, mothering, simple living and hopefully get back to a living standard of a one salary family. Which means tackling inflation and materialism at the least.
This. Feminists, those feminists fighting for women’s rights have well and long been critiquing how motherhood is impossible in this kind of system.
If we go back in time the structures of society was quite different, children often lived along, not apart from their parents and as the way if making money oftentimes was more like a small scaled family business, farming, artisanships aso children were raised in that, with their mother close - and if we go back really far, they were counted in the tribes by everyone, not pushed away to be out of the way, an in both cases family structures also most often had grandparents and other members caring and supporting each other.
In this no, if you are a mother it is treated like a hindrance, and expectations are a double egged sword.
How is it that mothers, to have the possibility to be an active part of society working, is “managed” by forcing mothers to put their children away for “care”?
Where is the logical act to make it possible to grow the next generation, that in the will benefit all those with the financial powers by being work-force, carers, tax-payers?
The logical act to make it possible for mothers to be working, like mothers did before and long way back before this financial and one-eyed system built only on the premise of the male-biology?
If this world is supposed to be the best possible version of itself, creating instead of destroying, it should be built for both women and men, and suit the biological needs also for women.
Without locking them into an either-or.
Productivity and intelligence in the workforce would benefit, as well as happiness and mental stability for both parents and children.
"Feminists, those feminists fighting for women’s rights have well and long been critiquing how motherhood is impossible in this kind of system."
The system is a consequence of feminism. Before feminism a blue collar man was able to support a family on his wages alone, giving women the privilege (as it feels today) of being a stay-at-home mother to her own children.
It was feminists who declared motherhood to be degrading and convinced women to reject their maternal responsibilities and assume a male role and male identity in society. This has caused endless disruption in the workplace, a massive decline in mental health for women and it's completely destroyed the childhoods of several generations now.
Feminism's destruction of the family has caused driven children to gang culture, early onset puberty, childhood depression, criminality, promiscuity/ teenage pregnancy, failure to launch ... etc.
"if you are a mother it is treated like a hindrance,"
Pregnancy/ motherhood is a hindrance. It's a MASSIVE undertaking. The reason why we always emphasised the importance of finding a good man and settling down as soon as possible was to create the best possible circumstances for a woman to embark on motherhood.
It was feminism that devalued and trivialised motherhood as something to be 'slotted in' to your otherwise hectic lifestyle of consumerism, socialising and career building.... and doing all of this without necessarily even bothering to find a reliable man and marrying him.
Men and women are essentially a single organism. Reproduction and parenting is a joint effort. Feminism's battle of the sexes, defines men and women not as complimentary partners, but as rivals or even waring tribes. This alone makes motherhood impossible. Motherhood is enabled by male support (their provision of resources and protection). That is why feminism's war on men is ultimately a war on women too (and children).
"Before feminism a blue collar man was able to support a family on his wages alone, giving women the privilege (as it feels today) of being a stay-at-home mother to her own children."
Post WWII rise of the middle class and baby boom were a fluke for a privileged set of people. The reason was a heavily taxed corporate class and other government benefits like the GI bill. You can read Mike Alexander's links which he posted on this thread. The economy was completely different during this time. History bears out that the vast majority of women throughout time had to work outside the home to earn money to support their families. Not just women, but children as well. The only women who never had to do so were a small percentage of wealthy women.
You want to pay mothers for four years? What if they have a 2nd child? They will be paid for 8 years out of the govts tax revenue? Where will the money come from?
Well, if we are going to insist operating under the Neoliberal-Shareholder Primacy political-economic order, then yeah the trend is going to be towards something like paying moms. Under this order, profits are not reinvested back into the economic to generate jobs and rising wages, but rather they flow OUT of the economy and into financial markets through dividends and stock buybacks. This outflow of money, and the associated outflow of money from the trade deficit, are strongly deflationary, and can allow for a significant amount of continuous deficit spending without generating much inflation. This is why we have had deficits for all but a handful of years for forty years and only had a couple of years of high inflation after we ran ginormous deficits during the pandemic. So the way he pay for this is the way we pay for everything nowadays, by a combination of taxes and deficits so that the deficits do not exceed the threshold that generates excessive inflation. See this post for more details on the inflation bit.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-new-way-to-look-at-inflation-revised
My wife and I chose children over her “career,” and we relied on my income and our shared economizing and he skills at all the homemaking tasks so belittled by feminists. Four of our children are now adults, one happily MWKs and the others experiencing life in healthy ways. If you read Maslow, BTW, the Third Wave (I think the book is called) describes WWII orphans for whom all the hierarchy of needs was satisfied in orphanages, but mortality was high and unexplained. My response is that Maslow’s Hierarchy is wrongly represented in two dimensions rather than three, explaining why the institutionalized infants and toddlers were dying through lack of the love they needed.
Glad it worked for you. But suppose your wife had the greater income, would you have been willing to stay home with the kids? My Little Brother (from the Big Brother program) was in this situation and did stay home while the kids were young. He did a wonderful job with his two boys. It was hard on him and after returning to work, his career progress has suffered.
Would you be willing to have done that? I don't think I would. So I don't think I could rightly demand my wife to give up her career to be a homemaker.
"That shows you how much conservatives value mothering. They think it is worth zero dollars."
BINGO. And that is exactly why more and more and MORE women are opting out of having kids altogether. It's so delicious to hear conservatives now cry over decline in population and try to shame young women into marrying and having kids again. NOPE. Not gonna happen. The only people who can afford it are the upper middle class to the filthy rich. They will continue to have kids, at least for a while. But their kids aren't going to work the jobs that need filling out here. So they will have to keep brining in poor migrants. And then they will cry about that. They made their bed - let them lie in it.
Yes, I think that the cost of housing and transportation is a big reason why people are reluctant to have children but aside from that we are richer than ever before. I think the decline in the birth rate is more the result of shifting mores about premarital sex which are the result of birth control allowing women to engage in sex without fear of pregnancy and the opportunity for women to support themselves, allowing women to delay marriage. These are inevitable results of technological progress which reduced the number of hours of labor needed to maintain a household which allowed women to work. With this greater sexual freedom and lack of dependence on men, some women started to compete with other women for the most desirable men by having sex sooner and with less commitment. Over time this forced the normal commitment needed by a man to obtain sex downward. Now people's 20s and 30s offer the possibility of lots of sex with lots of different partners. Ironically this means fewer babies. It also means the less attractive lose out because people are taking longer to pair up if they do at all.
"some women started to compete with other women for the most desirable men ... It also means the less attractive lose out..."
I don't know which country you live in but I live in the USA where most people are a 5 at best on the 1-10 looks scale. The couples here are average on a good day, obese much of the time and not making a lot of money.
Yes, but there are fewer of them and they wait longer.
I couldn’t agree more! Just wish I hadn’t fallen for it, but then again, feminism has made mating much harder than it has to be, and having children even more difficult.
It amazes me how many screwed Boomers and under don’t see the abysmal state-run ends to our lives. Of course assisted suicide will solve that problem….
Feminism has nothing to do with it. Plenty of women right through the start of Feminism up until this very moment have managed to be stay at home moms - some even while being Feminists. Because Feminism is about choice. If you didn't do it it's because you really didn't want to OR because you couldn't afford it. Neither of which is Feminism's fault.
That’s a simplistic take on a complex matter and movement that wielded huge societal shifts. It’s fallacious to say feminism had “nothing to do with it.” It changed a lot of things and not all for the better.
In what way have you "fallen for Feminism" that made you forego stay-at-home-momism?
"The state offered women a better life than their hard working husbands could provide"
- Where is evidence of "the state" ever paying women the equivalent of a middle class income?
Do you also believe that "welfare took the Black man out of the home"?
"The next wave of feminism will be artificial wombs. And already we are seeing the propaganda telling young women artificial wombs will free them from 'having to' suffer the chore of pregnancy, and allow them to live 'normally' instead"
- It won't work. Even if science advances to that point and even if AI robot nannies are invented, Gen Z are just not into having kids. The generation coming up behind them will be even less so.
"The only way to celebrate and value motherhood (and fatherhood), and save children from their spiral into complete mental and emotional collapse, is to put feminism in the garbage and return to the nuclear family."
- Again, the younger generations just aren't into it. And for the lingering few that may be, they see more value in a multi-generational extended family living situation than in the modern western "nuclear" (because it nuked the joint/extended family).
This is great stuff, but often hard for me to read because I had the OPPOSITE experience: cared for by a loving and attentive stay-at-home mother...and then homeschooled by her with my siblings until I was 11. I have very, VERY strong reservations about homeschooling (even though there were amazing things I got to experience and wonderful, beneficial opportunities, perspectives and privileges I gleaned from it!). Interestingly, I believe my mother did this partly because her mother had a health condition that resulted in my mother being separated from her for some time right after birth. My mother was also a latchkey-kid, so that generation tends to overcorrect in favor of hands-on parenting to the point of helicopter parenting. So of course I agree that prior to toddlerhood, children need their mothers pretty much constantly, and I’m privileged to have gotten that.
But where does that lead us? We need some sort of social structure to make that happen. And children also need their fathers. There seems to be no data here about aggression, hyperactivity and criminality in boys that were in daycare, and whether they did or didn’t have dads in their lives. A conversation about women and childcare is automatically ridiculous when it doesn’t address fathers (the second voice they should have been hearing in the womb for nine months), and grandparents (the third and fourth voices they should have been hearing in the womb for nine months), because it is impossible and ridiculous to expect women to spend 100% of their time with their children for years. Like my grandma- you could get sick. Or you could get postpartum depression. Or you could just need a break. Women should be able to take their baby into work with them in ALL fields that aren’t physically dangerous, and society should accept and tolerate babies screaming, crying, and needing milk AT WORK. Society needs a reset and remembering that children come first before ALL ELSE is that reset. It also brings women up to equal status with men. You should be able to legislate, do a presentation, write emails, talk to clients with children nearby at all times. The fact that this is considered unnatural is itself unnatural. At no point in human history prior to patriarchy/civilization did anyone ask women to not hand her baby to the elders and STOP hunting and gathering, STOP exploring that riverbank with a baby on her back, STOP painting that cave wall with her baby wrapped up near her, STOP performing that religious rite with her child watching, STOP butchering and preparing that aurochs carcass while her child is nearby, STOP cleaning and sewing that hunter’s leg wound shut while her child is propped against a tree watching. The expectation that society extricate all children from men’s presences and women must cease living in order to “properly raise kids” is ridiculous, and a patriarchal ploy to keep women oppressed.
While I fully support scientific accuracy about motherhood and childrearing- I don’t support an over-correction from the mainstream sex-denialism-we’re-the-exact-same-as-men feminism to a sentimentalized, sexist woman-on-a-pedestal “the-fairer-sex” feminism. Daycare has obvious problems. I’m lucky to have not experienced those problems. But so too does this notion that “proper parenting” involves specifically AND ONLY a mother spending literally every hour of every day with her child until the child is ready to start school (well past toddlerhood). That is not healthy either.
“Being calmed by a well-regulated mother habituates the infant to the experience of calming down through slowed breathing and soothing talk.” What if your mother is a human, and not some magical angel who is “well-regulated” all the time, or for some- ever well-regulated? I support traditional child rearing, aka pre-modern, pre-patriarchal, hunter-gatherer-style child rearing where the child is raised by both the mother AND the father and grandparents and friends (aka it takes a village).
Childcare will never be healthy for mother and baby unless the mother is able to hand off the child to a variety of close and trusted family and friends when she needs a break, and when she has stopped breastfeeding and it is time to start to detach a bit from the child. The problem is that it’s all-or-nothing for women: complete separation at too early an age (developmentally-inappropriate), or stay-at-home mothering 24/7 only her with the kid until the kid starts school- or even way past that if homeschooled (developmentally-inappropriate as well). Everyone knows there’s problems with daycare- but I don’t hear any solutions.
And I’m just going to float out there a warning to the “gender-critical” response I tend to see flavoring discussions of things like daycare a lot like “I’m going to helicopter parent my child forever so they don’t become trans.” Just FYI: that style of parenting is just as psychologically and developmentally harmful as the opposite.
Agree with the overall sentiment.
Regaeding "why demand that women stop living life when raising infants" -- I love this idea in theory, and it works well in social /shopping/daily life situations, but not *paid work.* In practice I think it's very, very difficult to focus enough on a job to actually *perform job duties* while caring for a baby. Have you had a baby? Even if you're carrying the baby in a sling while they sleep, you might get at most 2-ish hours at a time, a few times a day, to do some focused thinking/white-collar type of work. I suspect most professionals would find it incredibly challenging to carve out enough time in a day to do a decent amount of focused work, keep a baby fed, and still get enough sleep and rest to stay sane (speaking from experience here, I am a working, pregnant mom of a three year old). And just forget about customer service or any of the more accessible jobs, where you actually need to be available on demand. Even in the most mother-friendly environments, eg. my midwives office, I would still expect at an appointment that my midwife be focused on me and not actively tending to her own newborn during my appointment.
Other people expecting one's full attention during a presentation, or phone call, or check out line is not somehow anti mothering - but it is acknowledging that if you are focused on one thing (eg. Baby), you are by definition not focused on the other thing (eg. Work). This goes both ways, too - I would be incredibly sad to see a young mother trying to appease her baby "just enough" that she can get back to the Important Zoom Conversation or whatever.
Parental leave is good for the mothers, too. Focusing on baby (and resting/napping when you get a moment in the day) is important for the baby and the mom.
You make really great points. No I don’t have kids and you’re right, I’m probably viewing the kids at/nearer to work approach with some naïveté. That being said, I do think kids can be kept closer to work than some expect (that aspect of homeschooling was really cool- being able to interact with adults and see their jobs/day-to-day lives. It think it makes kids smarter and worldly). I lived the “mom at home 100% while dad works” and I wouldn’t choose it for the world. But again, I had that extended far beyond just infancy-5 years old. I still think children should be raised by a village and that while an attentive mother (and father) are crucial and I’m lucky to have had that, it’s actually biologically impossible for mothers to live inside a 1 structure for 10 years focused on only or primarily their kids and for anyone to be emotionally and psychologically healthy people by the end of that.
I agree that parental leave is crucial for women to be anywhere near equal status citizens to men. I think it’s crazy this article left out the Scandinavian model which often includes 2 years of fully or partially paid leave for each kid (long enough to not only recover for the mother, but to bond and breast feed as well) and also paid leave for fathers in addition to the mother- such that the child bonds with both parents and then only enters daycare just before starting school anyways.
Yes! The stay at home lifestyle may work for some, but definitely not most. My comment applies mostly to that crucial infancy /early development period; once your kids are a few years old (maybe like 5+) it's a totally different ball game, and they absolutely could be expected to behave appropriately alongside their parents in a work setting. My point is more that for very young kids, they still need a lot of individual attention a lot of the time (my toddler often plays independently, but often needs Mom & Dad's attention too). And it's honestly more stressful to imagine trying to operate my normal work day while also juggling my daughter's attention ... With care, I know she is receiving appropriate attention and engagement when she needs it. (And if you're thinking babyhood, it's just a totally different ball game... I took 12 months of mat leave and that was about the minimum amount of time I needed to get my brain back to a point where I could work again. The US expectations about maternal leave being, like, 3 months at maximum, are so outrageous I think they are inhumane.)
Your response reminds me of an article I read several years ago that stated that since we're having less children, children will no longer be a priority for the culture at large. That would be the government, Hollywood/media, and employers. I think we're seeing the downstream effects of a culture that believes children are mini-adults rather than children still growing and forming and being unable to mentally accommodate the adult concepts they're being asked to. Fred Rogers used to say that it's the adults' job to protect the children. Clearly, across all levels of our culture, that isn't happening.
"Your response reminds me of an article I read several years ago that stated that since we're having less children, children will no longer be a priority for the culture at large. That would be the government, Hollywood/media, and employers."
I don't know that American culture ever prioritized children. If it had, the government would have mandated paid maternal AND paternal leave. Don't get me wrong. We like to pay a lot of lip service to "family values", especially politicians around election time (cough, ahem, Vivek Ramaswamy) but our policies reflect our deepest held values, and "family" or "children" isn't one of them.
" I think we're seeing the downstream effects of a culture that believes children are mini-adults rather than children still growing and forming"
It's the opposite. Children had way more responsibility and were treated as adults back before child labor laws came into effect (and actually started to be practiced, which took some time). Young people were marrying, working and having kids at ages we now considered "children" and "minors". Minors used to be actual miners. Now we coddle kids, helicopter over them and have extended adolescence into the 20s and sometimes even 30s. There's a whole sub-culture that actually worships at the altar of childhood, and many homeschoolers fall into this.
Thanks for your response! I think we’re still doing the modern concept of parenting: enslave the wife and kick the dad out of the house to the farm/factories. The traditional form of parenting is a tight unit of a few different nuclear and extended families all of whom have a variety of responsibilities and interests that they pursue (aka Hunter gatherer/it takes a village). The “children are mini adults” comes from post agricultural into industrial societies, all of which are patriarchal by their nature, which depends on warrior-bands growing the gigantic civilizations by seizing and hoarding resources, thus requiring lots of labor to keep developing the civilization and keep it running, thus turning children into extra labor and women into labor-growers.
But in pre-agro and pre-industrial societies young people have sex and babies at a time we would still consider them "children". It's post-agricultural and industrial societies that brought about age of consent and minimum age for marriage laws.
India still does the "joint family" thing - that is multiple generations living under one roof. And many Indian women are getting sick of that arrangement for various reasons and desiring a "nuclear family" set up instead.
I 100% agree with this réponse! This lens and perspective makes the most sense. And is the most doable in my opinion. If we could bring our kids with us to work daycares, partially subsidized by the government let’s say to make it more affordable, that would be AMAZING. I could breastfeed my kid on my phone calls. Take 15-20 min breaks to snuggle them. And yo your point, this aligns most with what most likely occurred in the before times lol, when we lived in tribes, various aged folks all around us, everyone working when they could find time to do so, everyone supporting each other and each others children.
Yes. I was homescholed. I'm also Latina with a large extended family. My titis had no obvious shame or hangups about careers the way white women seem to have. My siblings have far worse mental health challenges, both visible and disruptive, than my cousins. Kids need happy moms and extended families. My own mom was loving but miserably overextended. Why is the solution always the Victorian era "angel in the household?" We saw how well that worked out 🙄
I can relate! My family is Italian and it’s a similar dynamic. People who come from more generational privilege notoriously romanticize traditionalism bc they can look back on it and pick the sentimental bits while taking for granted what made people seek “progress” in the first place. I can’t stand the bourgeois gender critical women complaining about how awful and selfish it is that some women don’t want to give up their financial independence and intellectual growth just bc they want to have kids 🙄. There’s such a predictable reactionary misogyny to this whole gender issue of “oh well if the mother just stayed at home, then her kid wouldn’t be trans.” The only GC communities that lay the blame at the right doorstep are the radical feminists (ie this is happening bc of sexism and homophobia). Overextended mothers drowning at home ≠ best option. While I actually hugely benefitted from many aspects of homeschooling, and my mother is a fantastic mom, I would never lie about the downsides of homeschooling where one parent (aka the mother in 99.99% of cases) takes on the never ending duty while the husband works and lives. Never, ever. You couldn’t pay me to do it. I have a working zia who had kids way later...and she is just as close to her kids and they are doing GREAT.
Why is it hard for you to read about experiences that are not like yours?
Have you ever met a well-adjusted and mentally sound homeschool kid?
Yes. But their families were intellectual and not religious.
I'm for exploring all potential causes in the growing rates of chronic conditions. I'd be curious how this maps out across different countries with different timelines on the amount of daycare. I believe Qatar may be the most recent nation to face a dramatic spike in autism diagnosis. So that may be an interesting place to start such a comparison.
Excellent, important piece! The Australian maternal feminist Anne Manne covered very similar territory in her book Motherhood from 2005.
Something else I’m questioning, simply anecdotally, is whether increased drug use in this country has an effect on babies’ brains? Perhaps, and especially, with the rise in autism? (https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2023/07/18/marijuana-use-linked-to-epigenetic-changes/) But I suspect it’s a combination of effects: Instability of care due to the breakdown of the family, exposure to media violence at too early ages, less time outside, less free play time, less modeling and structure, less sleep, too many choices, too much focus on the externals as opposed to the internal (look v quality of character). Toss in the pandemic with two+ years of online school (and a completely digital social life) and now you have kids completely unmoored and unable to cope.
I’ve wondered about that too. All my artisanal mothering did nothing to protect my children from mental health difficulties. Sometimes I privately wonder if my husbands (pre-marriage) history of heavy drug use could have impacted his sperm.
If you want to make yourself really unpopular, state publicly that daycare is bad for babies. There is so much evidence out there that this is true, but many choose to ignore it because mothers are only valued in patriarchal capitalistic systems when they are operating as employed women. Here is one man who really knew the value of that human society fundamental relationship, which is the mother/baby dyad. https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/donald-woods-winnicott
Great link, thank you for sharing.
Winicott is so wise and humane
" mothers are only valued in patriarchal capitalistic systems when they are operating as employed women"
Same with fathers. So what is the solution?
Capitalism is the problem. What was the question?
Post-capitalism is the solution.
Yes capitalism is the problem. What comes next for USA? Capitalism is so embedded here that if you allow an adult family member who's fallen on hard times to move in with you, you're called a "commie". So what to do?
What does capitalism have to do with it? Do you see stay-home moms in socialist countries like China? Nope. The states that most need the income taxes from working parents are the least likely to consider the impact on children.
The concerns raised bear deeper analysis. Feminism unquestionable adopts the view that what’s best for the mother must be best for the child - it’s an adult, ego/centric view and dangerous to question it. Dangerous because one risks being labelled anti-women. Sadly, this closes off the discourse needed to analyze objectively. The tax burden on families plays a big role in leading to ever-more moms feeling they must “get back to paid work.” This whole topic needs to be opened for thoughtful, non hysterical discussion. Thanks for the article.
Unfortunately, most households need two incomes these days.
"Unfortunately, most households need two incomes these days."
Stefan Molyneux (who has been exposing the harm of daycare, spanking and fatherless homes for decades) put it brilliantly when he said if you're going to have children, sell your house and go and live in a tent if that's what it takes to give your children a stay at home parent. Give up Starbucks, Hollywood movies, Netflix, computer games and other non essentials. Just make sure the children have a proper upbringing.
It's so true. All those material comforts and toys count for nothing if the child is being traumatised and indoctrinated in daycare/ schools. What we consider poverty today was a normal childhood in the 60's and 70's. Children used to play in the dirt and wear clothes with patches on them. And they weren't self harming or having identity issues.
"Stefan Molyneux (who has been exposing the harm of daycare, spanking and fatherless homes for decades) put it brilliantly when he said if you're going to have children, sell your house and go and live in a tent if that's what it takes to give your children a stay at home parent. "
What's "brilliant" about suggesting that families put their kids in danger by becoming essentially homeless? If someone needs to live in a tent in order to stay at home with their kids then having kids in the first place should be out of the question. And that's the reason why a lot of young people in the USA are opting out of having kids. They can't afford it. Molyneux is a stay at home dad while his wife works. His wife made good money as a psychologist and now he makes good money from the internet. I'm pretty sure they are an upper-middle class family. Also, Molyneux is the last person anyone should take personal advice from regarding family - or anything. Several years ago he was embroiled in a big scandal regarding advice he was giving people to separate from their "FOI"/family of origin over the most trivial of things, like not agreeing with Libertarian politics. He caused a lot of harm to families and grandparents were even forbidden from seeing their grandchildren because some stupid advice he gave to people he never even met - AND he's not a licensed therapist or anything like that. I believe there may have been lawsuits as well.
"Give up Starbucks, Hollywood movies, Netflix, computer games and other non essentials. "
I don't know that giving up one, a few or even all of these things will add enough to a family's budget to make a huge difference. Mike Alexander gives links elsewhere on this thread to economic analysis on his Substack that shows what's really going on with our economy right now.
We’re slaves to the system. Just because you cannot see the slave-chains doesn’t mean they are not there.
What if income tax (established ostensibly to pay off war debt) was abolished?
Thanks for publishing this. Reminded me of this piece from Mary Harrington: https://open.substack.com/pub/reactionaryfeminist/p/denying-my-existence?r=885e3&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
In my experience what's good for the baby is often left completely out of the equation. I teach at a community college and was asking a female coworker the other day whether she believed that if our outreach was perfect and women were encouraged to go into whatever field they wanted, if we should expect to see proportional representation in all fields. Her response was, "not in our society". She went on to say that what we really need to close equity gaps is 100% childcare, including weekends. The question of whether childcare is actually equal to the traditional alternative remained entirely unexamined. Frankly I think the reason it remains unexamined is that they wish for it to be true and the process of examining it might make it impossible for them to continue ignoring the needs of the child.
The other thing worth noting is that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Let's say that we go with the author's closing idea of providing developmentally appropriate leave for the working mother. Even if this is paid leave it will result in the loss of work experience, which will show up on the statistical level as a "pay gap" between men and women; a man and woman who got hired at the same time for the same job likely won't make the same amount in the long run, because the woman will have less experience and will probably lag behind on the promotion ladder. This will be seen as just another example of the toxic patriarchy, when really it's just a mundane fact that people with less experience get paid less.
We need to adopt the Scandinavian model. Paid leave is provided for both parents. And being "proud 'muricans" we should be able to improve upon it as well. We're still the richest country in the world (or at least the 2nd richest). There really is no excuse.
Yes, extended kin groups and aunties are still common in small towns and rural areas. However for those young adults that leave and form families in cities distant from home, the value of extended kin groups is often lost to distance.
Extended kin groups and aunties (what about uncles?) may still be common in certain areas but what makes you think they are jumping for joy at the "opportunity" to take care of someone else's kid? That too for free? Aren't the aunties and cousins and everyone else in these kin groups also working? Aren't grandma and grandpa still working plus dealing with health issues and hoping to enjoy some free time at some point during their golden years? And you know damn well none of the young nieces, nephews and cousins are going to "watch" some baby/little kid for free, or even do a good job of it considering how addicted young people are to their phones.