"But again, very few women have to stay home or have to be the primary caregiver, so don’t do it if you don’t want to."
This is doubtless racist, sexist and homophobic, but I have noticed a lot of college-educated human females develop an interest in taking the Mommy Track at about the time they discover that, not only is office life a lot of long. unglamorous and fundamentally bullshit work (think "The Office" and not "SATC"), they also are not going to be rocketing up the corporate ladder.
Since they have options, they can take them.
Anyway, its very different for cats. Every cat I ever knew or heard of was raised by a single mom.
I'm a single dad who inherited sole-responsibility for a grumpy elderly cat, thank you very much. She's constantly puking on the floor and yet she doesn't feel responsible for any of the housework...
"Fathers who do relatively more financially rewarded external work typically share the financial gains equally with the whole family but keep the associated status mostly for themselves." They don't share this because, for almost al! of us, there just ain't any. There is no status associated from being some nameless worker or low to mid level manager. Public status wise, there is more status in being a mother. And this is all before we even start talking about the unstated part of status: status according to *whom*? A nameless worker will be remembered by nobody after he is gone. A mother will be remembered several generations of her family.
Totally agree with this. But I think that the women most worried about this are often high income earners themselves, or in high status low earning careers and are excessively concerned with external status (and marry men who are as well). I think many middle class women would love to work less, they simply don’t feel that they can afford it as a family.
I have beenthinking about it There is actually a lot of sharing status from husbands to wives, if the man has status to share. Women definitely gain status, amongst other women but also within society, by her husband. She also loses status with him. "Marrying up" is very much a thing for women, and it is not just having more money. I do not believe, however, that the man gains status via his wife. I also think you underestimate just how little most men care about social status. Mainly it's the men with status that care, possibly because of self-selection.
Depends on what you mean by status. I don’t think anybody really respects a doctor’s wife unless she has a high powered title of her own. People kind of assume she’s rich, hot and pampered. So yes, you can share financial status. But not necessarily social status. In fact “doctors wife’s car” is a meme and not a positive one. It’s seen as kind of frivolous. Other women may want to social climb through her (maybe the doctor’s wife can set her up with other doctors she knows through his work?) but it’s definitely not respect the same way a doctor has respect and is assumed to be inherently competent, hardworking, virtuous, etc. it’s not like you can really become a countess or princess anymore, where it’s status for status’s sake. Most royalty and aristocracy are kind of sssimed to be frivolous, politicking socialites anyway, in which case looking hot is their countess’s JOB. A doctor’s wife confers very little respect, IMO.
One's beauty, and to varyingly lesser extents, the beauty of those you have relationships with, convey higher status. I'm not sure having a hot wife imbues particularly higher status except perhaps to other women?
Around 1974, U.S. federal banking regulations (FDIC and OCC) were amended to allow banks to take two spouses' incomes into account when making a credit decision to give mortgage loans and on what terms. Before, banks were permitted only to take one spouse's income into account; the other income was considered "temporary".
The upshot of this change was that, if you wanted to own a home in a semi decent exurban neighborhood with adequate schools and you weren't also a hedge fund billionaire or a feral cat, both spouses had to work. Otherwise you were competing against two income families, the equivalent of bringing a water pistol to a gunfight.
This also was partly responsible for the upward surge in residential real estate prices in the later 1970's. More money was chasing a relatively constant number of properties. It was great if you were a seller or holder of residential real estate.
This seemingly minor change in an obscure regulation probably had more real world impact on families and on the way most people live today than almost any Supreme Court decision or presidential election ever, not to mention all the trannies ever to draw breath, yet it went almost unremarked at the time, and has not become more notorious since then.
We can also discuss later whether this change in regulations was justified or a good idea, but at this point, good luck getting that particular genie back into the bottle.
You can also add no-fault divorce to that as well. If one Marriage does not work out financially, just marry into another until you get the house (not the spouse) you want.
When the US dollar was no longer redeemable for gold, this removed the main constraint from the Federal Reserve being able to create more dollars and expand credit. The massive transfer of wealth this creates and encouragement of debt financing was probably the single biggest factor in making housing prices what they are today.
A possible complicating factor here is the "greedy work" that Claudia Goldin researches. If returns to white-collar work were more linear, then its unlikely that the trade-offs with domestic work would be so frustrating, but those extra hours of focusing on careerism rather than household responsibilities can have disproportionate returns.
Yes this is a good point. Looking at my own career options I realized that to make the money that was actually worth grinding for I’d have to work really hard at least until 40, in which case I’d be missing time with young kids and this was part of what made me decide it’s not worth it.
It depends. One thing I think women are more likely to do is overestimate how much they have to put into their careers to advance. There is a lot of useless makework at the office, and you really don’t need to do it (or worse create more of it) to advance your career. I’ve found men are better at making this distinction.
In the work from home era especially there is a very low reputation cost to just not wasting time, people don’t even see you at your desk.
Thought provoking piece. I am a simple thinker: It seems much of the issue with marriages and children has to do with the perception that one of the parents is giving up something in the new roles that are demanded by being a parent, something that is not given up by the other, and which seems unfair.
But I think this perception is ego, and unwillingness to grow. It is a type of provincialism.
Of course being a parent means giving up something, in fact it means giving up a lot. But a career isn’t everything—and even if your career is something you are passionate about and brings you meaning, soon you will learn that no one will love your child more than you and your partner. If you are the main earner with a dream career, you have to “bring home the bacon” (i.e. other people are dependent on you financially). Choices and sacrifices have to be made—even if you are “lucky” to outsource much of the “parenting” to someone else. It is just that for women (but I also think ultimately men) of a certain status/culture, being a partner, lover, parent, etc have not been emphasized in formal education nor in their own cultural milieu. What has been emphasized is career/education as a way to self-fulfillment/life meaning. Private domestic life is not seen as rich or rewarding.
In other words, living in the world as the best version of yourself with all the strengths and weaknesses you have as an individual isn’t emphasized or discussed, when what you most want and desire is a family and home full of love.
And it ends up that men and women do have differences in how we want to live in the world, and that gets glossed over. Having children with a partner and what it means for secular elite urban America isn’t much discussed apart from it being a problem of money. Wanting a family and being a domestic partner with primary focus on your family and friends is not a weakness or a sign that you are less important, less interesting, or less sophisticated; in fact it may allow you to witness and experience insights into yourself and others that enrich your understanding of the world. It is about the ego- letting yourself live the best life you can and forgetting what others outside your world demand of you.
I live in rural America, where people are more aware of what family means, even if imperfect with all its warts.
After all, no one dies wishing they worked more—it is the missed opportunities for time with their loved ones they wished they treasured more.
Men do what women reward. If the best looking women rewarded the tiniest guys, guys would start doing that. If women want men to do more housework, mate select for that trait - move it ahead of other things in your mate trait priority list. I do all the homework in my family-it isn't hard to tell in the dating phase if a guy does housework or not...just check out his own single living habits. My wife, when we were in the hookup and dating phase, noted immediately how tidy my place was, that my sheets and towels always smelled fresh, my place always vacuumed, dishes always put away. If the guy is a slob, he isn't going to change.
I think men will compromise a little bit yes, broadly agree. Whoever has higher standards (usually the woman) will end up doing more than 50% of the work to achieve them
In my household, my husband expects me to do 100% of the cleaning. I hate cleaning, and furthermore, I'm the type that just doesn't "see" mess. He's always pointing out things I don't even notice.
He doesn't even hate cleaning that much, it's just that he refuses to do it whatsoever because he makes so much more money than me.
“Since mothers tend to do more of the childcare and household tasks, a larger portion of their efforts are spent on things that benefit everyone in the family. Fathers who do relatively more financially rewarded external work typically share the financial gains equally with the whole family but keep the associated status mostly for themselves.”
In general, there’s no reason to assume that *any* type of labor, paid or unpaid, will benefit both partners equally unless they just happen to have identical preferences. To take my own example, my wife arguably benefits more than I do from our collective paid labor because she has much more expensive hobbies and tastes than I do, and she probably also benefits more from our collective unpaid labor because, for example, she’s much more invested in having a house that looks nice. (Examples: The 10,000 hours she once spent choosing the right pattern and color for throw pillows that served no functional purpose whatsoever didn’t improve my life very much, but hopefully it improved hers some. Ditto for the day I once spent rehanging all the curtains in our house at the “proper” height, which was about four inches above where the previous resident had hung them.) Once you notice that the *benefits* of a couple’s collective labor may not be split 50/50—the split is probably different for every couple—it seems less obvious that 50/50 is the uniquely fair, universally correct way of splitting up the *burden* for every couple.
Good article. I am a SAHM and I think it does help that my husband and I are extremely aligned about what I have “sacrificed”. Yes, in general I would psychologically do better being the SAHM than working full time like him, nit we are psychologically similar enough that he actually MISSES the kids even though he works from home with a flexible schedule, so he’s able to take a lot of free time when the kids are awake.
Our sex is really the biggest difference between us, I think. And that helps him empathize with me and appreciate what I do. Otherwise, we have the same degree from the same school. Enjoy the same hobbies. Even have mostly the same speech patterns. Worked in the same field. He can imagine exactly how I feel doing some of the things I do, and admits that some of it would be really unpleasant (cleaning, taxes, etc). Likewise, I can imagine how stressed I would feel being the SOLE income provider. He also does a lot of physical work I don’t want to do.
He is the main playground parent and I am SO grateful I don’t have to do it 😅 I simply cannot tolerate being outside in this heat. But he and the kids go crazy if they don’t go out.
Thank you! I think it’s so great you’re both able to appreciate what the other does and work to each of your strengths, even if they aren’t all that different! And your point about being able to relate to one another well making that easier is a good one - it does feel like a lot of people don’t know all that their partner is actually doing for them
Full disclosure, SAHM whose husband both works hard at his 9-to-5 and does a large portion of the meal planning and cooking and most of the household maintenance, while I do daily cleaning tasks, laundry, bills, etc. and support the children 90% of the time. I got my PhD and was on track to do very well in higher ed administration, and I did indeed choose to leave that because I preferred to care for my kids.
Generally I feel like couples are too fixated on marriage/partnership being egalitarian as opposed to complementarian. When I embraced this distinction, it transformed my relationship with my husband and made us a much better team. We can look at this all in terms of concrete elements like time and money, but at the end of the day I absolutely do not give a s*** that I'm doing a majority of the "unpaid labor," and I resent it when people say being a SAHM is a "full time job." Minding one's children is not a "job:" it's an honor in a category far loftier than a job or career. I wish that as a culture we would stop pitting career and caregiving antagonistically against each other, both between fathers and mothers and within a woman's life experience.
Caregiving is sometimes tedious and tiring and hard, but I truly can't imagine spending my children's early years in a cinderblock office climbing after ephemeral achievements or money. And my husband personally feels far more suited to managing the stress of working out of the home, and it makes him feel proud to support his family in that way.
Tl;dr these stats track pretty much identically with my experience.
Thanks for the comment, Emmie! It sounds like you and your husband share the responsibility in a way that highlights what you both want to do, I hope to find a similarly complementary balance once I have kids. I think I’d also ideally like to do most of the childcare when I have young kids, but will have to see once I get there!
Good luck!! Its very possible to figure out a comfortable way forward, but can be a hard balance to strike at first, especially if you're planning to do something like exclusively breastfeed, for example.
Two of several issues with your proposed solutions are that A. Outsourcing childcare has a hard limit if you want emotionally healthy kids and/or kids that are being raised in accordance with your desires. B. Agreements made regarding housework and parenting prior to marriage and children very very often don’t materialize. In fact so often I’d say it’s almost useless to make them to begin with. (My husband fed me homemade matzo ball soup on our second date… ten years later we had serious issues because he really wanted me to cook and though it certainly gave me ammunition in some sense it was also totally useless and irrelevant that I could say “but I told you I didn’t cook and had no interest in doing so when we were dating!”)
I think this is a much more realistic description of what happens. The book "How Not to Hate Your Husband After Having Kids" goes into this a bit, but I was struck by:
1. What the author describes of how her husband seemed to feel much more entitled to his leisure time, whereas she felt she could always be doing something more for the household rather than herself
2. The extent to which there is "maternal gatekeeping", where for example, the mom is more effective at soothing a newborn than a dad, or more quickly figures out how to diaper for minimizing blowouts, so in the short-term it just "makes sense" for her to do more of it and get up in the night, but it compounds (and also gets mixed up with weaponized incompetence) such that what was workable on a short-term basis calcifies into much larger resentment later on.
I also think this piece underestimates the extent to which men have lower standards for their household's emotional state and cleanliness, so there's an optimizers vs satisficers going on here too. There's a kernel of truth that people have revealed preferences and make their own choices, but many, many moms do not feel "I pack my kids' lunches because I want to" but rather, "I want to be a good mom and a good mom cares about their kids' nutrition but also without spending too much money, but because I'm the one that cares the most about this goal, I have to pack lunches, otherwise their dad will send them to school with processed food or spend too much money." Definitions of "good mom" and "good dad" are VERY different. But if you had a free way for your kids to have everything that you want for them and you only do the fun parts, everyone would take that deal!
I feel lucky in that I happen to have a temperament where I'm pretty clear about holding boundaries and communicating/negotiating goals, and it turned out that my husband is 99%ile giving towards his family vs. his own needs. But I wasn't necessarily consciously thinking about selecting for that when I was dating.
Fundamentally, being a SAHM is a job like any other. You can be good at it or bad at it.
At work you've got a boss and if you don't pull your weight you get fired. Also, someone is telling you what to do.
As a SAHM who's your boss? If your husband, that has plusses and minuses.
Maybe it's nobody? Maybe your husband isn't assertive or maybe you know that divorce is too high a cost and you brinkmanship him.
Maybe its you, and that's a good thing. Maybe it's you and that's a bad thing.
Maybe you are a lazy SAHM. Maybe you are a Type A SAHM that causes people trouble with pointless nonsense. Maybe your porridge is just right.
I feel like I've seen all the variations, and experienced many myself.
Overall I think two things are true:
1) SAHM are under compensated relative to the market from a societal POV, but any change needs to be some way to linked it to productive family earnings and not just giveaways to welfare mamas.
2) Being a SAHM is like being an entrepreneur versus an employee. You have a lot more control and as a result you get a lot more of whatever you are deep down, for good or ill.
While I think it’s good to highlight that some women prefer to spend more time with their children over spending time in the workforce, this in itself does not tell you much about the size of the opportunity cost. Just because some women consider not being a primary caregiver even worse than losing career capital, this doesn’t mean the loss of career capital is minor emotionally.
I also find it cheapens the desire to participate in the workforce if you consider this to be all about status (or money). Getting really good at something is rewarding in itself and lets you engage with others who are really good at it. If you spend two decades focusing on excelling in caregiving, you are unlikely to reach the top skill level in a different field.
Statistics aside, I can only comment on my own personal situation and the situations of people I know. The second shift is alive and well in my household, and it’s not due to my preference. When we had kids, my husband and I both worked full time. Me quitting was not an option (I was the higher earner), and it was my expectation (and he agreed in theory) that we would share household and child raising work equally. That’s not what happened. The next eleven years were a blur of no sleep and never ending work and growing resentment. We finally decided my husband should quit and be a stay at home dad. I still do far more of the household work than I should, given that I work and he doesn’t, but our kids are teens and young adults now and at least my life is sane now - I sleep more than four hours most nights and I have some leisure time. For most of the career women I know, it’s similar. Division of labor is a struggle. It’s certainly possible that there are other groups of couples (stay at home moms or moms with less demanding jobs) where the division of labor goes the other direction and that’s resulting in the stats you showed. I also don’t know how those stats were gathered and I have to wonder if men tend to overestimate the amount of household work they do. I only know that your assertion that it’s not an issue is certainly not correct for me and the women in my circle.
As far as I can tell, these are almost always surveys. I have often wondered the same but in the opposite direction: women over-counting their hours and under-counting their husband's. Also, what the definition of "housework" being counted. Is fixing the house, mowing the lawn, and changing the car oil "housework?"
I would love to hear your husband's version of events.
It is possible that people over or undercount hours, and all work is not created equal. Physically difficult yard work is much harder than something like washing dishes or folding laundry. Watching the kids by sitting on the couch and watching TV and letting them run around and do whatever they want is not the same level of difficulty as wrangling homework while cooking dinner. None of that will be captured by simple surveys. As for me, I’m more likely to mow the lawn than my husband is, and I’m perfectly capable of minor home repairs although there are certain things he has expertise in that I don’t (if it involves woodworking it’s all his!). My husband once told me that I couldn’t expect him to work as hard as I do because it just wasn’t reasonable. And he’s right that it’s an unreasonable amount of work but that’s kind of what he signed up for through the choices we/he made.
The problem is that when I married my husband I bought into traditional gender roles.
It was only the experience of trying to do laundry 2 days after being cut open on an operating table because women are supposed to do all the house work and men are supposed to do all the work outside the home that I realised how wrong I was. I needed help I wasn’t expecting to get.
If I could do it all over again, I absolutely would not have subjected myself to that.
Women who are warning what it could be like for you are doing a public service for us all.
One explanation is that anybody can do the work associated with being a stay at home parent. (Of course, not all.) Not anyone can do the work associated with a high status job. Why should generic labor be allotted the same status as a high status job?
Saying anyone can do the work of being a stay at home parent is like saying anyone can be a painter. Why yes, absolutely anyone can be a shitty painter, indeed.
The bell curve for good parenting is much more condensed overall with very long tails at each end. That makes the potential for truly great performance incredibly rare, and explains the lack of status allotted to stay at home parents. It’s also much harder to determine who is a good and bad parent from the outside compared to who makes the most money or has the most prestigious career.
> It’s also much harder to determine who is a good and bad parent from the outside compared to who makes the most money or has the most prestigious career.
I agree with this.
> The bell curve for good parenting is much more condensed overall with very long tails at each end. That makes the potential for truly great performance incredibly rare, and explains the lack of status allotted to stay at home parents.
I have no idea where you're getting this from. Is it just a pet theory or do you have sources?
The leading economic theory on marriage & family patterns (“Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing”) argues the total opposite and it’s what explains the (unexpected & unintentional) data trend of high rates of marriage/SAHMs among college graduate women.
“””An alternative explanation for the uneven retreat from marriage that offers a better rationale for the decoupling of marriage and childbearing by parents who are not college graduates focuses on differing strategies for investments in children.
We suggest that, for college graduates, marriage has become a commitment device that supports intensive joint investments in children. Marriage, because it is more costly to exit than cohabitation, can act as a commitment device for the cooperative joint project of raising economically successful children (Lundberg and Pollak 2014, 2015).
Increased returns to human capital and, hence, to intense child investments, may have kept marital surplus high for college graduates, who are more likely to make these investments. Because long-term commitment facilitates this joint investment, college graduates marry late and delay having children until marriage.
Intensive investments in children, signaled by higher childcare time and by growing expenditures on children, are concentrated among college graduates. As with marital and childbearing patterns, in terms of investment patterns, Americans with some college look more similar to high school graduates than to four-year college graduates. Mothers with some college who have children under age 13 spend 30 minutes less per day in primary childcare than mothers with college degrees, and there is no difference in primary childcare time between the some college and high school groups (based on our calculations from the American Time Use Survey, 2003–2014).
High- and low-educated parents may also make different types of investments in their children. Ethnographic evidence indicates that the parental aspirations and goals of poor and working class parents tend to be focused on safety and survival, rather than achievement (Lareau 2003; Edin and Kefalas 2005). Because the ethnographic literature has focused on poor and working class families, the extent to which these parental aspirations extend to the some college group is an open question.
Why might the incentives to invest in children have diverged across education groups? Rising returns to human capital have been a hallmark of the recent increases in income inequality, but an upward shift in the returns to human capital should increase investment by all parents. Indeed, parents in all education groups have increased time with children.
Parents differ, however, in their resources and their capabilities. Parental academic skills will increase the productivity of their time with children. College graduate parents also appear to possess better information about how children learn and to engage with them in more developmentally appropriate ways (Kalil, Ryan, and Corey 2012). While the effect of parental productivity on time allocated to child investments is theoretically indeterminate, abundant empirical evidence indicates that childcare time increases with education (in this journal, see Guryan, Hurst, and Kearney 2008).
These advantages will be reinforced by dynamic complementarities in the production of children’s skills (Heckman 2000; Todd and Wolpin 2007; Aizer and Cunha 2012). If “skill begets skill,” then later parental investments and formal schooling will be more productive for children who have early cognitive and health advantages.
This implies that the expected returns to child investments by parents with limited resources and uncertain futures may be lower than for more educated parents with greater and more secure investment capabilities.”””
I know that’s just spamming a section of a paper and convoluted but it being data & structurally focused and published in 2016 (before the gender wars kicked off) makes it the least biased & most rigorous “lay of the land.” It talks about the declining economic prospects of “marriageable men”, single mothers, and disproves that it’s women BEING college educated but being a college GRADUATE that paradoxically drives the parental investments to children/SAHM. Wild!!
Mostly pet theory, but I think I can substantiate it.
In a free market, salaries are distributed efficiently. Assuming for simplicity that prestige tracks salary, we can say prestige is distributed approximately efficiently. Salary correlates closely with IQ. So let’s say that prestige distribution is about the same as IQ distribution.
Very few people have high status in their jobs. About 13% make six figures or more according to the US Census Bureau. So 87% are not noteworthy.
Behavioral geneticists like Robert Plomin and others, using twin studies and other evidence, argue that parenting has little effect on child outcomes. That suggests a huge cluster around average parenting, assuming we measure parental quality by outcome. Perhaps we shouldn’t, but I can imagine no other workable way for prestige to be allocated than by observable outcomes. Whatever benefits parents are giving their kids mostly derives from genetics, which can be predicted decently well by the working parent’s salary, since IQ is heritable and correlates so closely with salary.
A lot would need to be filled out here, but I think that’s enough for a substack comment. I hope you found that reasonably useful.
In a rational world, upper middle class men would marry lower middle class women and vice versa. But alas we don't live in a rational world. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants.
"But again, very few women have to stay home or have to be the primary caregiver, so don’t do it if you don’t want to."
This is doubtless racist, sexist and homophobic, but I have noticed a lot of college-educated human females develop an interest in taking the Mommy Track at about the time they discover that, not only is office life a lot of long. unglamorous and fundamentally bullshit work (think "The Office" and not "SATC"), they also are not going to be rocketing up the corporate ladder.
Since they have options, they can take them.
Anyway, its very different for cats. Every cat I ever knew or heard of was raised by a single mom.
I'm a single dad who inherited sole-responsibility for a grumpy elderly cat, thank you very much. She's constantly puking on the floor and yet she doesn't feel responsible for any of the housework...
Take good care of her.
"Fathers who do relatively more financially rewarded external work typically share the financial gains equally with the whole family but keep the associated status mostly for themselves." They don't share this because, for almost al! of us, there just ain't any. There is no status associated from being some nameless worker or low to mid level manager. Public status wise, there is more status in being a mother. And this is all before we even start talking about the unstated part of status: status according to *whom*? A nameless worker will be remembered by nobody after he is gone. A mother will be remembered several generations of her family.
Totally agree with this. But I think that the women most worried about this are often high income earners themselves, or in high status low earning careers and are excessively concerned with external status (and marry men who are as well). I think many middle class women would love to work less, they simply don’t feel that they can afford it as a family.
I have beenthinking about it There is actually a lot of sharing status from husbands to wives, if the man has status to share. Women definitely gain status, amongst other women but also within society, by her husband. She also loses status with him. "Marrying up" is very much a thing for women, and it is not just having more money. I do not believe, however, that the man gains status via his wife. I also think you underestimate just how little most men care about social status. Mainly it's the men with status that care, possibly because of self-selection.
Depends on what you mean by status. I don’t think anybody really respects a doctor’s wife unless she has a high powered title of her own. People kind of assume she’s rich, hot and pampered. So yes, you can share financial status. But not necessarily social status. In fact “doctors wife’s car” is a meme and not a positive one. It’s seen as kind of frivolous. Other women may want to social climb through her (maybe the doctor’s wife can set her up with other doctors she knows through his work?) but it’s definitely not respect the same way a doctor has respect and is assumed to be inherently competent, hardworking, virtuous, etc. it’s not like you can really become a countess or princess anymore, where it’s status for status’s sake. Most royalty and aristocracy are kind of sssimed to be frivolous, politicking socialites anyway, in which case looking hot is their countess’s JOB. A doctor’s wife confers very little respect, IMO.
All else held constant, a man is higher status if he has a hot wife.
One's beauty, and to varyingly lesser extents, the beauty of those you have relationships with, convey higher status. I'm not sure having a hot wife imbues particularly higher status except perhaps to other women?
See for instance military wives.
Around 1974, U.S. federal banking regulations (FDIC and OCC) were amended to allow banks to take two spouses' incomes into account when making a credit decision to give mortgage loans and on what terms. Before, banks were permitted only to take one spouse's income into account; the other income was considered "temporary".
The upshot of this change was that, if you wanted to own a home in a semi decent exurban neighborhood with adequate schools and you weren't also a hedge fund billionaire or a feral cat, both spouses had to work. Otherwise you were competing against two income families, the equivalent of bringing a water pistol to a gunfight.
This also was partly responsible for the upward surge in residential real estate prices in the later 1970's. More money was chasing a relatively constant number of properties. It was great if you were a seller or holder of residential real estate.
This seemingly minor change in an obscure regulation probably had more real world impact on families and on the way most people live today than almost any Supreme Court decision or presidential election ever, not to mention all the trannies ever to draw breath, yet it went almost unremarked at the time, and has not become more notorious since then.
We can also discuss later whether this change in regulations was justified or a good idea, but at this point, good luck getting that particular genie back into the bottle.
Best comment of the month!
Thank you.
Two spouses with kids working is a Red Queen Race of deadweight loss.
You can also add no-fault divorce to that as well. If one Marriage does not work out financially, just marry into another until you get the house (not the spouse) you want.
I think closing the gold window probably had a bigger effect.
Not sure how that affected families as much, but go on.
I'm serious, not being snarky.
There would be no reason for you to be snarky.
When the US dollar was no longer redeemable for gold, this removed the main constraint from the Federal Reserve being able to create more dollars and expand credit. The massive transfer of wealth this creates and encouragement of debt financing was probably the single biggest factor in making housing prices what they are today.
Correct me if I am wrong, but by the time the gold window closed, gold reserves were nowhere near the number of dollars in circulation?
> Before, banks were permitted only to take one spouse's income into account; the other income was considered "temporary".
And yet people still see government as the *solution* to gender inequality, not the cause of it...
A possible complicating factor here is the "greedy work" that Claudia Goldin researches. If returns to white-collar work were more linear, then its unlikely that the trade-offs with domestic work would be so frustrating, but those extra hours of focusing on careerism rather than household responsibilities can have disproportionate returns.
Yes this is a good point. Looking at my own career options I realized that to make the money that was actually worth grinding for I’d have to work really hard at least until 40, in which case I’d be missing time with young kids and this was part of what made me decide it’s not worth it.
It depends. One thing I think women are more likely to do is overestimate how much they have to put into their careers to advance. There is a lot of useless makework at the office, and you really don’t need to do it (or worse create more of it) to advance your career. I’ve found men are better at making this distinction.
In the work from home era especially there is a very low reputation cost to just not wasting time, people don’t even see you at your desk.
The "People I Mostly Admire" podcast episode with Nobel Prize-winner Claudia Goldin, is absolutely enlightening...
Thought provoking piece. I am a simple thinker: It seems much of the issue with marriages and children has to do with the perception that one of the parents is giving up something in the new roles that are demanded by being a parent, something that is not given up by the other, and which seems unfair.
But I think this perception is ego, and unwillingness to grow. It is a type of provincialism.
Of course being a parent means giving up something, in fact it means giving up a lot. But a career isn’t everything—and even if your career is something you are passionate about and brings you meaning, soon you will learn that no one will love your child more than you and your partner. If you are the main earner with a dream career, you have to “bring home the bacon” (i.e. other people are dependent on you financially). Choices and sacrifices have to be made—even if you are “lucky” to outsource much of the “parenting” to someone else. It is just that for women (but I also think ultimately men) of a certain status/culture, being a partner, lover, parent, etc have not been emphasized in formal education nor in their own cultural milieu. What has been emphasized is career/education as a way to self-fulfillment/life meaning. Private domestic life is not seen as rich or rewarding.
In other words, living in the world as the best version of yourself with all the strengths and weaknesses you have as an individual isn’t emphasized or discussed, when what you most want and desire is a family and home full of love.
And it ends up that men and women do have differences in how we want to live in the world, and that gets glossed over. Having children with a partner and what it means for secular elite urban America isn’t much discussed apart from it being a problem of money. Wanting a family and being a domestic partner with primary focus on your family and friends is not a weakness or a sign that you are less important, less interesting, or less sophisticated; in fact it may allow you to witness and experience insights into yourself and others that enrich your understanding of the world. It is about the ego- letting yourself live the best life you can and forgetting what others outside your world demand of you.
I live in rural America, where people are more aware of what family means, even if imperfect with all its warts.
After all, no one dies wishing they worked more—it is the missed opportunities for time with their loved ones they wished they treasured more.
Men do what women reward. If the best looking women rewarded the tiniest guys, guys would start doing that. If women want men to do more housework, mate select for that trait - move it ahead of other things in your mate trait priority list. I do all the homework in my family-it isn't hard to tell in the dating phase if a guy does housework or not...just check out his own single living habits. My wife, when we were in the hookup and dating phase, noted immediately how tidy my place was, that my sheets and towels always smelled fresh, my place always vacuumed, dishes always put away. If the guy is a slob, he isn't going to change.
I think men will compromise a little bit yes, broadly agree. Whoever has higher standards (usually the woman) will end up doing more than 50% of the work to achieve them
In my household, my husband expects me to do 100% of the cleaning. I hate cleaning, and furthermore, I'm the type that just doesn't "see" mess. He's always pointing out things I don't even notice.
He doesn't even hate cleaning that much, it's just that he refuses to do it whatsoever because he makes so much more money than me.
“Since mothers tend to do more of the childcare and household tasks, a larger portion of their efforts are spent on things that benefit everyone in the family. Fathers who do relatively more financially rewarded external work typically share the financial gains equally with the whole family but keep the associated status mostly for themselves.”
In general, there’s no reason to assume that *any* type of labor, paid or unpaid, will benefit both partners equally unless they just happen to have identical preferences. To take my own example, my wife arguably benefits more than I do from our collective paid labor because she has much more expensive hobbies and tastes than I do, and she probably also benefits more from our collective unpaid labor because, for example, she’s much more invested in having a house that looks nice. (Examples: The 10,000 hours she once spent choosing the right pattern and color for throw pillows that served no functional purpose whatsoever didn’t improve my life very much, but hopefully it improved hers some. Ditto for the day I once spent rehanging all the curtains in our house at the “proper” height, which was about four inches above where the previous resident had hung them.) Once you notice that the *benefits* of a couple’s collective labor may not be split 50/50—the split is probably different for every couple—it seems less obvious that 50/50 is the uniquely fair, universally correct way of splitting up the *burden* for every couple.
Great piece, Regan. Just restacked it!
Thanks so much, Evan!
Good article. I am a SAHM and I think it does help that my husband and I are extremely aligned about what I have “sacrificed”. Yes, in general I would psychologically do better being the SAHM than working full time like him, nit we are psychologically similar enough that he actually MISSES the kids even though he works from home with a flexible schedule, so he’s able to take a lot of free time when the kids are awake.
Our sex is really the biggest difference between us, I think. And that helps him empathize with me and appreciate what I do. Otherwise, we have the same degree from the same school. Enjoy the same hobbies. Even have mostly the same speech patterns. Worked in the same field. He can imagine exactly how I feel doing some of the things I do, and admits that some of it would be really unpleasant (cleaning, taxes, etc). Likewise, I can imagine how stressed I would feel being the SOLE income provider. He also does a lot of physical work I don’t want to do.
He is the main playground parent and I am SO grateful I don’t have to do it 😅 I simply cannot tolerate being outside in this heat. But he and the kids go crazy if they don’t go out.
Thank you! I think it’s so great you’re both able to appreciate what the other does and work to each of your strengths, even if they aren’t all that different! And your point about being able to relate to one another well making that easier is a good one - it does feel like a lot of people don’t know all that their partner is actually doing for them
Full disclosure, SAHM whose husband both works hard at his 9-to-5 and does a large portion of the meal planning and cooking and most of the household maintenance, while I do daily cleaning tasks, laundry, bills, etc. and support the children 90% of the time. I got my PhD and was on track to do very well in higher ed administration, and I did indeed choose to leave that because I preferred to care for my kids.
Generally I feel like couples are too fixated on marriage/partnership being egalitarian as opposed to complementarian. When I embraced this distinction, it transformed my relationship with my husband and made us a much better team. We can look at this all in terms of concrete elements like time and money, but at the end of the day I absolutely do not give a s*** that I'm doing a majority of the "unpaid labor," and I resent it when people say being a SAHM is a "full time job." Minding one's children is not a "job:" it's an honor in a category far loftier than a job or career. I wish that as a culture we would stop pitting career and caregiving antagonistically against each other, both between fathers and mothers and within a woman's life experience.
Caregiving is sometimes tedious and tiring and hard, but I truly can't imagine spending my children's early years in a cinderblock office climbing after ephemeral achievements or money. And my husband personally feels far more suited to managing the stress of working out of the home, and it makes him feel proud to support his family in that way.
Tl;dr these stats track pretty much identically with my experience.
Thanks for the comment, Emmie! It sounds like you and your husband share the responsibility in a way that highlights what you both want to do, I hope to find a similarly complementary balance once I have kids. I think I’d also ideally like to do most of the childcare when I have young kids, but will have to see once I get there!
Good luck!! Its very possible to figure out a comfortable way forward, but can be a hard balance to strike at first, especially if you're planning to do something like exclusively breastfeed, for example.
Two of several issues with your proposed solutions are that A. Outsourcing childcare has a hard limit if you want emotionally healthy kids and/or kids that are being raised in accordance with your desires. B. Agreements made regarding housework and parenting prior to marriage and children very very often don’t materialize. In fact so often I’d say it’s almost useless to make them to begin with. (My husband fed me homemade matzo ball soup on our second date… ten years later we had serious issues because he really wanted me to cook and though it certainly gave me ammunition in some sense it was also totally useless and irrelevant that I could say “but I told you I didn’t cook and had no interest in doing so when we were dating!”)
I think this is a much more realistic description of what happens. The book "How Not to Hate Your Husband After Having Kids" goes into this a bit, but I was struck by:
1. What the author describes of how her husband seemed to feel much more entitled to his leisure time, whereas she felt she could always be doing something more for the household rather than herself
2. The extent to which there is "maternal gatekeeping", where for example, the mom is more effective at soothing a newborn than a dad, or more quickly figures out how to diaper for minimizing blowouts, so in the short-term it just "makes sense" for her to do more of it and get up in the night, but it compounds (and also gets mixed up with weaponized incompetence) such that what was workable on a short-term basis calcifies into much larger resentment later on.
I also think this piece underestimates the extent to which men have lower standards for their household's emotional state and cleanliness, so there's an optimizers vs satisficers going on here too. There's a kernel of truth that people have revealed preferences and make their own choices, but many, many moms do not feel "I pack my kids' lunches because I want to" but rather, "I want to be a good mom and a good mom cares about their kids' nutrition but also without spending too much money, but because I'm the one that cares the most about this goal, I have to pack lunches, otherwise their dad will send them to school with processed food or spend too much money." Definitions of "good mom" and "good dad" are VERY different. But if you had a free way for your kids to have everything that you want for them and you only do the fun parts, everyone would take that deal!
I feel lucky in that I happen to have a temperament where I'm pretty clear about holding boundaries and communicating/negotiating goals, and it turned out that my husband is 99%ile giving towards his family vs. his own needs. But I wasn't necessarily consciously thinking about selecting for that when I was dating.
Fundamentally, being a SAHM is a job like any other. You can be good at it or bad at it.
At work you've got a boss and if you don't pull your weight you get fired. Also, someone is telling you what to do.
As a SAHM who's your boss? If your husband, that has plusses and minuses.
Maybe it's nobody? Maybe your husband isn't assertive or maybe you know that divorce is too high a cost and you brinkmanship him.
Maybe its you, and that's a good thing. Maybe it's you and that's a bad thing.
Maybe you are a lazy SAHM. Maybe you are a Type A SAHM that causes people trouble with pointless nonsense. Maybe your porridge is just right.
I feel like I've seen all the variations, and experienced many myself.
Overall I think two things are true:
1) SAHM are under compensated relative to the market from a societal POV, but any change needs to be some way to linked it to productive family earnings and not just giveaways to welfare mamas.
2) Being a SAHM is like being an entrepreneur versus an employee. You have a lot more control and as a result you get a lot more of whatever you are deep down, for good or ill.
While I think it’s good to highlight that some women prefer to spend more time with their children over spending time in the workforce, this in itself does not tell you much about the size of the opportunity cost. Just because some women consider not being a primary caregiver even worse than losing career capital, this doesn’t mean the loss of career capital is minor emotionally.
I also find it cheapens the desire to participate in the workforce if you consider this to be all about status (or money). Getting really good at something is rewarding in itself and lets you engage with others who are really good at it. If you spend two decades focusing on excelling in caregiving, you are unlikely to reach the top skill level in a different field.
Statistics aside, I can only comment on my own personal situation and the situations of people I know. The second shift is alive and well in my household, and it’s not due to my preference. When we had kids, my husband and I both worked full time. Me quitting was not an option (I was the higher earner), and it was my expectation (and he agreed in theory) that we would share household and child raising work equally. That’s not what happened. The next eleven years were a blur of no sleep and never ending work and growing resentment. We finally decided my husband should quit and be a stay at home dad. I still do far more of the household work than I should, given that I work and he doesn’t, but our kids are teens and young adults now and at least my life is sane now - I sleep more than four hours most nights and I have some leisure time. For most of the career women I know, it’s similar. Division of labor is a struggle. It’s certainly possible that there are other groups of couples (stay at home moms or moms with less demanding jobs) where the division of labor goes the other direction and that’s resulting in the stats you showed. I also don’t know how those stats were gathered and I have to wonder if men tend to overestimate the amount of household work they do. I only know that your assertion that it’s not an issue is certainly not correct for me and the women in my circle.
As far as I can tell, these are almost always surveys. I have often wondered the same but in the opposite direction: women over-counting their hours and under-counting their husband's. Also, what the definition of "housework" being counted. Is fixing the house, mowing the lawn, and changing the car oil "housework?"
I would love to hear your husband's version of events.
Women often undercount outside work.
It is possible that people over or undercount hours, and all work is not created equal. Physically difficult yard work is much harder than something like washing dishes or folding laundry. Watching the kids by sitting on the couch and watching TV and letting them run around and do whatever they want is not the same level of difficulty as wrangling homework while cooking dinner. None of that will be captured by simple surveys. As for me, I’m more likely to mow the lawn than my husband is, and I’m perfectly capable of minor home repairs although there are certain things he has expertise in that I don’t (if it involves woodworking it’s all his!). My husband once told me that I couldn’t expect him to work as hard as I do because it just wasn’t reasonable. And he’s right that it’s an unreasonable amount of work but that’s kind of what he signed up for through the choices we/he made.
The problem is that when I married my husband I bought into traditional gender roles.
It was only the experience of trying to do laundry 2 days after being cut open on an operating table because women are supposed to do all the house work and men are supposed to do all the work outside the home that I realised how wrong I was. I needed help I wasn’t expecting to get.
If I could do it all over again, I absolutely would not have subjected myself to that.
Women who are warning what it could be like for you are doing a public service for us all.
One explanation is that anybody can do the work associated with being a stay at home parent. (Of course, not all.) Not anyone can do the work associated with a high status job. Why should generic labor be allotted the same status as a high status job?
Saying anyone can do the work of being a stay at home parent is like saying anyone can be a painter. Why yes, absolutely anyone can be a shitty painter, indeed.
The bell curve for good parenting is much more condensed overall with very long tails at each end. That makes the potential for truly great performance incredibly rare, and explains the lack of status allotted to stay at home parents. It’s also much harder to determine who is a good and bad parent from the outside compared to who makes the most money or has the most prestigious career.
> It’s also much harder to determine who is a good and bad parent from the outside compared to who makes the most money or has the most prestigious career.
I agree with this.
> The bell curve for good parenting is much more condensed overall with very long tails at each end. That makes the potential for truly great performance incredibly rare, and explains the lack of status allotted to stay at home parents.
I have no idea where you're getting this from. Is it just a pet theory or do you have sources?
The leading economic theory on marriage & family patterns (“Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing”) argues the total opposite and it’s what explains the (unexpected & unintentional) data trend of high rates of marriage/SAHMs among college graduate women.
“””An alternative explanation for the uneven retreat from marriage that offers a better rationale for the decoupling of marriage and childbearing by parents who are not college graduates focuses on differing strategies for investments in children.
We suggest that, for college graduates, marriage has become a commitment device that supports intensive joint investments in children. Marriage, because it is more costly to exit than cohabitation, can act as a commitment device for the cooperative joint project of raising economically successful children (Lundberg and Pollak 2014, 2015).
Increased returns to human capital and, hence, to intense child investments, may have kept marital surplus high for college graduates, who are more likely to make these investments. Because long-term commitment facilitates this joint investment, college graduates marry late and delay having children until marriage.
Intensive investments in children, signaled by higher childcare time and by growing expenditures on children, are concentrated among college graduates. As with marital and childbearing patterns, in terms of investment patterns, Americans with some college look more similar to high school graduates than to four-year college graduates. Mothers with some college who have children under age 13 spend 30 minutes less per day in primary childcare than mothers with college degrees, and there is no difference in primary childcare time between the some college and high school groups (based on our calculations from the American Time Use Survey, 2003–2014).
High- and low-educated parents may also make different types of investments in their children. Ethnographic evidence indicates that the parental aspirations and goals of poor and working class parents tend to be focused on safety and survival, rather than achievement (Lareau 2003; Edin and Kefalas 2005). Because the ethnographic literature has focused on poor and working class families, the extent to which these parental aspirations extend to the some college group is an open question.
Why might the incentives to invest in children have diverged across education groups? Rising returns to human capital have been a hallmark of the recent increases in income inequality, but an upward shift in the returns to human capital should increase investment by all parents. Indeed, parents in all education groups have increased time with children.
Parents differ, however, in their resources and their capabilities. Parental academic skills will increase the productivity of their time with children. College graduate parents also appear to possess better information about how children learn and to engage with them in more developmentally appropriate ways (Kalil, Ryan, and Corey 2012). While the effect of parental productivity on time allocated to child investments is theoretically indeterminate, abundant empirical evidence indicates that childcare time increases with education (in this journal, see Guryan, Hurst, and Kearney 2008).
These advantages will be reinforced by dynamic complementarities in the production of children’s skills (Heckman 2000; Todd and Wolpin 2007; Aizer and Cunha 2012). If “skill begets skill,” then later parental investments and formal schooling will be more productive for children who have early cognitive and health advantages.
This implies that the expected returns to child investments by parents with limited resources and uncertain futures may be lower than for more educated parents with greater and more secure investment capabilities.”””
https://web.archive.org/web/20201107163543id_/https://escholarship.org/content/qt0jd8k9j5/qt0jd8k9j5.pdf?t=qh0p0t
I know that’s just spamming a section of a paper and convoluted but it being data & structurally focused and published in 2016 (before the gender wars kicked off) makes it the least biased & most rigorous “lay of the land.” It talks about the declining economic prospects of “marriageable men”, single mothers, and disproves that it’s women BEING college educated but being a college GRADUATE that paradoxically drives the parental investments to children/SAHM. Wild!!
Mostly pet theory, but I think I can substantiate it.
In a free market, salaries are distributed efficiently. Assuming for simplicity that prestige tracks salary, we can say prestige is distributed approximately efficiently. Salary correlates closely with IQ. So let’s say that prestige distribution is about the same as IQ distribution.
Very few people have high status in their jobs. About 13% make six figures or more according to the US Census Bureau. So 87% are not noteworthy.
Behavioral geneticists like Robert Plomin and others, using twin studies and other evidence, argue that parenting has little effect on child outcomes. That suggests a huge cluster around average parenting, assuming we measure parental quality by outcome. Perhaps we shouldn’t, but I can imagine no other workable way for prestige to be allocated than by observable outcomes. Whatever benefits parents are giving their kids mostly derives from genetics, which can be predicted decently well by the working parent’s salary, since IQ is heritable and correlates so closely with salary.
A lot would need to be filled out here, but I think that’s enough for a substack comment. I hope you found that reasonably useful.
In a rational world, upper middle class men would marry lower middle class women and vice versa. But alas we don't live in a rational world. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants.