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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

We have brainwashed our western minds to make women leave their kids in daycare sometimes weeks after being born. Then we are brainwashed to let kids sleep in a separate room so that mommy can get a good night's rest and be productive at work. We need a minimum of 3 years of maternity leave in our country to being with. It is insane as one of the best countries in the world we don't let people have kids naturally.

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Truly a modern heresy. I'd add the culture of parenting "technique" micro-analysis as another toxic drain on the potential of childrearing. Way too much thought given to dubious "science" of parenting decisions that cause parents too focus too heavily on things that ultimately don't matter.

Related modern heresies: https://www.secretorum.life/p/20-modern-heresies?s=w

The line between Galileo and Bozo the Clown is as fine as ever.

Families with "women in the workplace" are not brainwashed, they are wielding hard earned rights and freedoms against violently indifferent economic structures.

Under capitalism, we are not free unless we draw a wage, and women have learned there are no wages for housework.

Yes those free loading kids need to be paying their mothers for all the labor they provide.

Having kids is a benefit to society. Even though nobody has kids "for the greater good", it still is in everyone's interest that there is a strong upcoming generation. I think it's not unreasonable for a society to pay parents who decide to stay at home during the first years for their efforts, if only to make having kids sufficiently attractive.

Lots of people just can't afford to stay home and capitalism makes it hard enough to rejoin the workforce after 3 years, let alone advance your career. A societal advance in this regard would also be needed imo

This is where theory and practice collide. In theory, society should pay parents. In practice, paying parents results in incentivizing the people you do not want being parents into having more kids.

What society really wants is to incentivize good parents to have kids, but that is nowhere near possible to measure and implement.

Do you have any evidence supporting this?

Sorry, I missed the “first years” portion of your comment. I had originally read it as simply paying people to be stay at home parents for the whole time they have children at home.

Paid parental leave up until at least breastfeeding is done is a no brainer.

Just spitballing, here, but maybe some sort of voucher system to distribute leave among all your "alloparents?" But that's hard to systematize. Probably the simplest thing is simply to increase wages and PTO across the board, and let workers/consumers act on their own priorities.

no need for vouchers. we just need the right and the support for more people to work part time. that right for example is already law in germany. the problem is that not many people make use of it, partly because it would reduce their income but partly also because there is no broad social support for people to reduce their worktime in order to do other useful things.

actually it is possible: education. basically, the reason one might not want some people to have kids is their lack of education. provide them with better education and that "problem" goes away.

Edit: before you read this, I want you to understand that I am not giving a flippant answer. I spent a half hour of my own working day to draft this response.

Childhood education is a mechanism that reproduces the existing social order, by transmitting the dominant culture—shared outlook, beliefs, knowledge, and skills which influence one’s educational and occupational opportunities—and legitimizing the inequalities that result from it.

Parents are training their children on employers behalf—to the child's detriment—when they, for example, encourage their children to adopt the dominant language, accent, dress code, manners, hobbies, and tastes. (This is especially true of extrametropolitan families.) Likewise, when parents limit their children’s exposure to their own culture and language (even only as an opportunity cost), they are complicit in reproducing the dominant cultural superstructure which principally benefits the dominant economic institutions and only incidentally benefits the workers these children go into—if at all.

Parents who cook, clean, and care for their children are providing essential services that enable their children to grow up healthy, educated, and productive. These services have a monetary value. Parents are owed wages from the employers who hire their children in the future and profit from their skills and abilities. Since we can't predict the future to track individual employers down, we might implement a form of insurance which would wring compensation from the private sector en mass.

To the detriment of the child.

You'll hear no argument from me that the loss of alloparenting is devastating to our national trajectory, but I can't take seriously any suggestion that we return to the Cult of Domesticity; those are the conditions that brought these about! If you want Stepford Wives, you'll need to bioengineer them.

The movie "The Pod Generation" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15768848/) has a theme that touches what you state. No need to get pregnant, give birth, stay home with your kid. While in the pod the fetus can be trained, educated, etc...

> We need a minimum of 3 years of maternity leave in our country to being with

And a year of mandatory evaluation and treatment at a psycologist for various baggage, complexes and plain stupidity that will manifest when raising a child.

I don't know about mandatory, but well funded and expected in that period would go a long way. Child rearing, especially, will surface things you might have not known were there or were so painful. You might also need a variety of help, from talking therapy to cptsd/desensitising. To parents feeling overwhelmed and daily triggered suddenly, in the presence or thinking of your children, you're really not alone, and I strongly advise getting all the help you can, as soon as possible.

completely agree. 3 years would be enough time for parents to string maternity leave across multiple children. Assuming a normal person works from 22 to 67, taking 6-9 years off to raise children is only 20% of that time at most.

Culturally we need to make it much easier for women to leave and re-enter the workforce and to also work part time.

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