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Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

The last few decades in the US have seen a shift from 1 parent working sufficing to support a family to 2 parents working beening needed for middle class living, and longer hours than before. And more kids have only 1 parent in the household. There simply isn't time for participating in the community-building activities that filled the gaps before. So we are more isolated, and people's lies are in a more fragile balance.

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I know lots of my friends have families where single income would sustain them but both husband and wife go to work.

We have stigmatized staying at home and raising children as a society.

Who is this "we" ? People without kids?

Society, in general.

This is perhaps one of my favorite Bittman quotes. I can't remember it verbatim, but it was essentially lamenting how we have devalued working in your own home. In his case, he was referring to cooking, but I feel the overall point is rather relevant.

"We" is not a who, but rather a "what" - namely, a useful indication of poor thinking.

I'd say is a net positive for society that women nowadays are more financially independent compared to the 1960s-1970s. Consider it this way, you're a stay-at-home mom who has decided to focus on her kids in her later 20s, and then you're 40 and divorce happens.

In the happy case your ex-husband and father to your kids still pays for their education and food and relared stuff, but what about you and your own financial needs? Now that you've been out of the work-force for 10+ years you're basically unemployable.

> then you're 40 and divorce happens

Magic happens here?

> what about you and your own financial needs?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alimony

Regardless, there is a sneaky equivocation of women in the workplace & two-income households. Obviously women, as fellow humans, do and should have the choice to work outside the home if they want. But IMO one parent should stay home. Is it any surprise that it takes the salary of two people to buy an average house? Things just get more expensive to take advantage of the increased income, and the net result is we spend more time working. Not a net positive.

???

Those are net positives for divorcing males and females. Which is what it should be. Why should "society" be benefiting???

I think the real issue here... is that we want "society" to benefit from interpersonal relationships. A benefit to "society" is fine if it happens, and sometimes it might happen, but mostly it won't. And that's OK... I don't believe benefiting "society" should be the goal of interpersonal relationships.

I would think that the best solution is both parents work 20-25 hours per week. Less money spent on child care, more time spent with children, spreads the burden of both work and raising children across both parents, and quite frankly would make life more interesting. I'd definitely prefer working less and spending more time with my kids if I had them.

Well, in those days you couldn't be divorced that easily, so it was more viable to be a stay-at-home mum.

California was the first U.S. state to adopt what are now called 'no-fault' divorces in the United States in 1969.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-fault_divorce

I agree. If you have more than one child, one parent's salary will go directly and entirely to pay for child care. It's also likely that one parent will need to work fewer hours and be available to drop off / pick up / emergency pick up the kids at day care -- which means at least one parent will need to be partially not working or at least not advancing in his/her career.

However, raising kids is very difficult and emotionally draining. Personally, I feel parental involvement is much more important than whatever might have been called a middle class lifestyle.

> The last few decades in the US have seen a shift from 1 parent working sufficing to support a family to 2 parents working beening needed for middle class living

The last few decades have seen an increased marketization of labor such that it is more likely that two parents will need to do wage labor to support a middle class lifestyle, where previously a middle class lifestyle involved one parent working at wage labor and one parent doing labor outside of the market.

Hours worked per worker is slightly down from 1950: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/qr/qr2812.pdf (Table 1). Inflation-adjusted single earner income is flat since 1950: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/pdf/cah_slides.pdf, while HHI for two-income households is up over 15%. In summary, people have made the choice to have more money instead of having one parent stay home.

And who can blame them? I love being a parent, but child care is messy, often gross, and physically exhausting. It's blue collar work. Across the economy, people eschew physically-demanding blue collar work for service jobs, even when the former pays more. So it's totally unsurprising that, given the choice, women (or men for that matter) would rather go work, even if most of the money goes to child care, instead of staying home with kids. You don't need to create a false rationalization about the economy forcing both parents to work to explain the labor trends.

> In summary, people have made the choice to have more money instead of having one parent stay home.

Not really, disposable income has gone down, savings have gone down, while health insurance and mortgage payments (for roughly equivalent housing) have gone up.

It looks like having two earners is more out of necessity than preference for the middle class.

Median house size has increase DRAMATICALLY over the past 50 years.

https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf

I was citing mortgage costs for equivalent sized housing.

Is that actually up on an inflation adjusted basis?

Yes

FWIW some casual web searching says that's not true. shrug

https://youtu.be/akVL7QY0S8A?t=20m28s

She doesn't say that it's for equivalent sized housing. As I said square footage per person has increased DRAMATICALLY over the past 50 years.

She uses # rooms as equivalent, not sq-foot.

Maybe sq-footage has increased, but your data is about new housing across all economic classes and we are interested in median middle class housing. Besides the problem of data skew (richer people live in bigger houses), Warren claims that most of the middle class live in old homes, not new ones. She specifically says that new homes are being built for upper middle class and above.

The chart I linked to way above was for median housing.

It was median new housing developments. Not the housing of a median family, nor the housing of a median middle class family.

Again, Warren's claim is that median middle class families live in old homes. And even if they didn't median middle class homes are potentially smaller than median homes.

But before that the majority of human history has either both parents or both parents and the children (as they are able) helping out to sustain the family. We need to be sure to survey a long-enough time-line to understand the actual norms and what may have been a relatively small period of recent fortune.

> But before that the majority of human history has either both parents or both parents and the children (as they are able) helping out to sustain the family.

For most of that history, much of that "helping out to sustain the family" did not mean "working in wage labor".

In two parent homes of, say, the 1950s with one parent working outside the home, the other one was also engaged in work to "sustain the family", it just wasn't work for an outside capitalist that sustained the family through a paycheck.

Indeed, I'm saying the period of the 1950s up until recently was an _anomaly_ that allowed one parent to work for wages while the other stayed at home to manage the home while the children had relatively little responsibility compared to thousands of years previous.

Yet some people here think it would be feasible to skip completely over one working parent all the way to no working parent, via guaranteed income. I personally think it's not, but I can see how it's appealing since it sidesteps the fear that a single worker household would cause a reversal of women's liberation, without appearing to be in favor of equality of suffering under wage work.

Average annual hours actually worked per worker has decreased over the past few decades, not increased [0,1]. Household size is decreasing as well [2], lowering the percent of households with multiple workers.

[0] http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

[1] http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

[2] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884238.html

This is capitalism failing humanity.

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