This seems pretty reductionist to me. Men can absolutely raise children. Husbands in heterosexual couples should absolutely be raising their children and not leaving the entire task of raising them to their wives. Gay men can also raise children. I don't think you meant to be disrespectful, but when you essentialize like this you end up putting women in a box where their role in society is defined by their biology, and you put men in a box where they feel like they can't and shouldn't participate in certain kinds of labor, leading to women shouldering an unfair proportion.
An anecdote that helped this hit home for me was a story this father told about a neighbor of his. He'd be running errands at the grocery store or whatever, with his kids in tow, and he'd run into his neighbor (also a father) who'd say something like, "Oh, you're stuck babysitting again?" And he didn't have the words to tell him, "I'm not babysitting, I'm raising my kids." The neighbor viewed it as his wife's responsibility to be looking after the kids, and if he was participating in this, it was some sort of exception; and furthermore, a chore.
Personally, that's not the sort of father or husband I intend to be.
Beyond that, most women strongly want to be with their babies. There was a NYT article a few years back about the boom of internet baby monitors, and it was kind of heartbreaking -- a bunch of women sitting at their desks glued to their baby monitors wishing they could be with their babies.
I think we've really fucked up as a society when "women can have kids and be with them" is considered strange or a luxury -- it should be the most natural thing in the world.
No profit in it, though.
I then went on to quit work and stayed home to raise our daughter (she's now nearing 28 year old).
I'm a strong believer in having a stay-at-home parent, but this "women raise children" thing needs to stop.
But that doesn't change that the mother-child bond is a unique and special thing, and that there are real benefits to breast-feeding, straight from the breast.
And beyond, the simple fact is that many women really want to be with their babies.
It's misguided to pretend that there aren't biological realities underlying these preferences. We should try to tailor our policies to meet the desires of the most people possible.
(Not, of course, in a coercive way! If a mother would like to continue working and pump, then of course she should be supported in that. In past societies maybe this was the fight that needed to be fought, but now I think it's the opposite.)
It has always been a luxury.
Unless they were wealthy enough to hire domestic servants or happened to participate in the postwar economic boom in the West that reduced the intensity of household domestic labor via household appliances, women of the past also got limited time with their children.
They were doing intense labor at home, in the fields, and as domestic servants for wealthier people. The same scenario happens today, as anyone who has hired in-home childcare knows.
Historically, precious few women could afford not to work, whether that work was compensated or not.
I agree that we should strive for an economic system that gives more parents more options to spend time raising their children, but we shouldn't couch that in faux-naturalistic ideals of what the situation was in the past.
People living this way of life are not working themeslves to the bone; they spend lots of time just hanging out and socializing.
I think the gruling overwork that most of us experience is more a feature of fuedal and then industrial culture, than a natural state of existence.
But still we are in real terms actually super rich, so it should be possible to somehow rearrange things to get back to that ideal, I think.
(Of course there are deeper issues here too -- just having a mom sit at home all alone with her baby is actually not very good either. Really, you want mom and baby to be integrated into a meaningful, rich cultural environment. And I think it would be nice if kids were more integrated into normal life, in general.)
Our priorities as a society have been inverted in this area.
No, they have not. The states that protected abortion rights are also the states that offer paid parental leave and paid disability leave to new moms. And the states that restricted abortion rights are the states that offer zero parental leave.
A significant portion of US society supports helping new parents, and especially mothers. It does not have enough votes in the Senate though.
Just handwaving "but pumps!" really undermines how much effort this takes for women.
Of course none of this stuff is critical, but I think for most people, the ideal scenario really is breastfeeding, straight from the breast -- and it's a shame that's so hard for so many to do in our society.
Both my sibling and I, along with my wife and her siblings were formula fed. My kids were 100% formula-fed as well, because my wife decided she didn't want to waste her time pumping. Both generations are perfectly normal and healthy. We all caught COVID with only minimal symptoms.
Not having to breastfeed took an enormous amount of stress off my wife, and allowed us to split the work of raising our kids more efficiently
In Canada, I've heard that breastfeeding has been taken to a religious morality war, where some parents had to sneak in formula into the hospital because the mother couldn't either breastfeed properly or weren't producing enough, or simply didn't want to.
There are some advantages to breastfeeding and some disadvantages. I think the narrative of companies in the 3rd world trying to hook low-income families on formula should be considered a crime. But there's nothing inherently wrong with formula and it raises perfectly healthy children.
Unfortunately, they had a hard time getting their daughter to cooperate.
At their first post-natal checkup with their doctor, their daughter had not gained any weight since leaving the hospital. He told them to just feed her formula and don't worry about it. Apparently, the "lactation consultant" was not affiliated with the hospital in any way and this sort of thing was very common.
It also seems certain that there are advantages to being breast-fed. Exactly how strong these are is hard to stay -- as far as I know, all the research is observational, and so it becomes hard to tease out what is the effect of breast-feeding and what is just coming along for the ride (correlated w/ the type of person that prioritizes breast-feeding).
It's still a worthy goal to have a society that makes it easy for women who want to breast-feed to do so.
(And I hear you on the moralizing, which is obnoxious. Let the parents decide what is best for their baby and life situation; it is not anyone else's business.)
I find this to be a bizarre metric to use.
Is this true in all societies, or just societies like USA where most people live in car-centric suburbs isolated from any sense of community?
In Africa there are women who go back to work selling things in the town market shortly after their babies are born - with the baby strapped to their back and breast fed on demand. No need for daycare but mom can still work!
Beyond that, yes, men are perfectly capable of performing child rearing tasks. Note, of course, this does not negate the argument against a two income family. Having a society where one income can support a family means fathers can devote themselves to raising their children, and so can mothers. Or alternate roles. Or one full time career and one part time career.
Why not (even if only partially)? Biology at the individual level has physical consequences, which necessarily affects the available roles and roles chosen. It makes no sense to expect that this relationship is different in aggregate.
And until you can find a way for biological males to have a baby, biology is going to determine the role of childbearing.
Just look at the amount of suspicion that men draw in elementary teaching roles.
This may seem reasonable but it also often ends marriages, which is arguably a worse outcome for the child(ren).
