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0 pointsdilap3y ago0 comments

"Do no work and be with your kid" is probably a rarity, but the impression I have is that in traditional indigenous cultures you could do work around your home or village, in a rich social environment of other women and mothers, while being with your baby.

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.)

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danans3y ago

> 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.

Sure, but so are a lot of other features like modern medicine, communications, transportation, that come with industrial culture.

Assuming that you are talking about making the privilege of being a stay-at-home parent universal (independent of one's financial means), then I agree with the goal, but that is only realizable via industrial culture coupled with an income and wealth distribution that makes it possible for only 1 parent in the house to work.

It would also probably require people to live with less. When mothers were staying at home in the 1950s, the median home size was 983 square feet. Today it's about 2700 square feet.

All that extra space and the stuff it is filled with costs a lot, which is another reason that both parents need to work.

dilapOP3y ago

I've been looking at real-estate in Austin recently -- all those tiny 1950s houses are still around, and they are not cheap! So I don't think the main causal factor is everyone living in 3000 square foot McMansions.

Plus, technology has made us way more capable -- productivity has increased a lot since the '50s, but wages have not kept up.

Which makes me think it's more of an organizational / incentives kind of thing, rather than a pure amount of wealth kind of thing.

(Something similar going on to the way in an purely competitive market, profits tend to get driven to 0, but with wages and quality of life, perhaps?)

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