I also wonder at what salary level does it make more sense for a breadwinner household over a dual income household. Childcare is expensive, and likely scales with your standard of living. I net of increased tax rates, child care costs, and time spent navigating childcare costs, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of dual income households that might actually get more disposable income with one person staying home.
It could be the difference between having enough to pay child support and your own expenses, and ending up with a felony charge and losing your property+passport+freedom+licenses because paying both alimony and child support (now higher because of higher income differential) can be insurmountable for some after going through a divorce. If you're a high income earner it's basically the kiss of death at any chance of ever changing your career (or taking a break), even if you psychologically burnt out on it.
The range I've seen is on the order of $30k-$60k.
I dunno, a little sympathy goes a long way.
Not really, if you care for arts or culture. The cheap places are car-centric cultural wastelands.
Bring on the hate HN. Source: married to south east Asian foreign national.
We're pretty sure that multigenerational households lead to less loneliness and less strictly individualistic people than nuclear families, but it's hard to prove it without a proper study.
EDIT: Dealing with ailing grandparents is a very situational problem, but I think that effects nuclear families just as much.
There is commentary about the involvement of men and women in the workforce over time, but nothing about the outcomes for various family members on metrics that matter to them. There isn't even an obvious definition of "nuclear family" in the article.
What would "working" even mean to this author?
Changing a culture's norms is pretty hard. When it's something "easy", like "give all people respect/human rights", that only takes around 120 years to take effect (or about 60 in the case of gay rights, a crazy fast timeline). But changing gender roles? That's so ingrained that it's foundational in many languages.
I think it will be a lot easier to tackle this economically than via social norms. Give women more money for work, child care, maternity, etc and give men a small stipend if they don't work. Give both a bonus if they work in a non-gender-traditional field. It won't flip the whole thing on its head, but the change will start immediately.
Like for example being discriminated against throughout your life, first because your parents are the gay weirdos at the corner, and then later because with all your liberal, non-conformist ideas you always strike the wrong chords with people.
Wild imagination, I know.
I would also wager having a "better" child of the sort that would have good outcomes also helps hold families together better. If you have a kid that just is downright "broken" somehow in a way that places unusual demands from the parents, it often harms the marriage. That is, perhaps it is also the case the kind of children that have better outcomes tend to place less unusual demands on their parents, allowing the family to continue to bond. A particular violent, psychologically psychopathic child that might be measured as having bad outcomes might also drive the parents apart as family life becomes unbearable.
Health insurance should be done at the Fed level, period. Thats how every other country does it. We can have our own version. It also saves money, instead of hording profits for some Insurance Companies CEO to buy a 2nd yacht.
There are no pricing regulations on any drugs and thats the problem. Also if you believe in capitalism so much then we should be able to buy our drugs from anywhere in the world. Just like we do our food.
The solution of families just doubling up is just dumb. Housing is expensive because real estate is artificially scarce. Real estate ghouls pay off local politicians to not expand zones or have zoning changed. Also some people just don't want to live with their parents. We want to raise our children our way without repeating the errors of the past. Also some grandparents can't help because of medical issues or just don't want to. This idea of forcing people into large families or groups to survive just sounds like trying to squeeze blood from a stone without fixing the problem thats causing this.
Also big surprise this article never mentions how the elites cause all of these problems. They control the zoning for housing, they control what gets passed in Congress to budget for Universal Healthcare, they control if prices should be regulated by paying off politicians, they control minimum wage rates, etc etc
We should use the hours-per-week overtime threshold to control the aggregate supply/demand for labor (this also will require removing exceptions, of course).
Proposal: the overtime threshold should be at 3 days per week. This leaves a nuclear family contributing ~6 days a week to the workforce -- more than it did in the 50s -- while still leaving 8 person-days a week for raising kids.
Objection: but China will catch us if we slack off!
Counter-Objection: China has the same problem but worse, and they have a government that loves big central plans more than ours does. Compromise would be possible if we wanted it.
Objection: but we are ruled by capitalists who will never allow it.
Counter-Objection: yeah, probably. If they do nothing, reduced birth rate will eventually reduce the aggregate supply of labor for them -- but automation will probably land by then, so I doubt they are too worried. We need to put an end to the situation where they profit enormously from mismanaging the situation.
And working 10 days of 14 works great and is possible to combine with a decent fertility so long as there is cheap care options as the article suggests.