Independence is the most important value in Norway. So probably one reason I mention it ;-) We value the independence of everyone. Independence of young people to make their own choices. Independence of women to marry or divorce regardless of what she wants.
> What is so wrong with being dependent on your spouse when raising children together that it should even come up as a consideration?
Seems obviously bad to me. Should your spouse leave you or die, and you are totally dependent on him, that would suck. But that was not really what I was thinking of but rather the ability to be financially independent later in life because you actually had a career.
> Raising children well is hard enough and time consuming enough as it is. Why try to make it harder by also trying to make sure neither parent is dependent on the other?
I think you misunderstand what I said, or thing about this in a very different way from me.
With the system we have in Norway with leave for both parents and both parents having a career, we are able help each other out MORE! Child raising is LESS work for my wife because I can help her out. Meanwhile I would have less stressful work life because my wife also has a job and can help out the family financially.
It seems to me like we are making life easier for both of us. It is hard for me to grasp how you conclude that this will make things harder.
Your logic seems to be that depriving my wife of any career or financial security she is forced to stay with me. That is some pretty screwed up logic. I want my wife to be with me because she wants to not because she cannot survive without me.
And for children it is better. I know what Norway was like in the old days where the mom stayed home and the dad worked. By not involving the dad, and only have him provide financial security, a lot of men back in old Norway were big assholes. They ran away from their family responsibilities.
You don't see modern Norwegian dads do this. Families may be divorced but dads still participate in child raring. They have been their from the start and child raring is seen as a shared responsibility. There are a lot more divorced families in modern Norway but there are a lot more dads taking responsibility and looking after their kids.
They take turns through the week picking up kids at school. They stay part of the week with their dad. It means mom gets more spare time to live her life. And ultimately you get happier families because people live together because they want to, not because they have to.
>Should your spouse leave you or die, and you are totally dependent on him, that would suck.
A) Don't have children with someone that is going to leave you, B) life insurance.
>But that was not really what I was thinking of but rather the ability to be financially independent later in life because you actually had a career.
Why is that desirable? Would society not be a better place if many more people were dedicated to helping their communities rather than making money for corporations?
>With the system we have in Norway with leave for both parents
To be clear, I'm not opposed to the idea of family leave for fathers.
>Your logic seems to be that depriving my wife of any career or financial security she is forced to stay with me.
Choosing to marry someone and have children with them is a permanent choice, and one that should not be done flippantly if you want what is best for your children. I don't understand why you think it is beneficial to optimize for enabling spouses to divorce. It seems to me that it would be a better idea to optimize for having people marry and have children with someone that they are very unlikely to want to divorce later.
>I want my wife to be with me because she wants to not because she cannot survive without me.
If you want what is best for your children, you should pick a spouse that would not consider divorce except in the most extreme circumstances, and you yourself should not consider divorce except in the most extreme circumstances.
>And for children it is better.
It sounds like what really changed in Norway is that fathers have changed their attitude toward child rearing. That, I think, is unambiguously positive for children, but seems to me to be entirely orthogonal to having both parents be independent. Parents can be sole financial providers and still take a very active role in raising the children. That is more about the attitude of the parent than anything. If you believe it is not your job to rear children, you are going to do it poorly whether you work 60 hours per week or 0.
A society where fathers are used to and expected to participate more actively in child raring will also care more about their children IMHO. Such a society is hard to build without gender equality and independence for women.
I don’t see low divorce numbers as a direct goal. I view happy families as the goal. Lower divorce numbers will follow from that.
If you optimize for low divorce numbers you simply force women to stay in unhappy marriages.
You seem to advocate a sort of 1950s style family life. I don’t think that is good for anyone.
>A society where fathers are used to and expected to participate more actively in child raring will also care more about their children IMHO. Such a society is hard to build without gender equality and independence for women.
I don't see why that should be so. Men need to think that it's important for their children's growth for them to be heavily involved in raising them, but I don't see why that should necessitate women being financially independent or achieving "gender equality", whatever that means. For example, if men believe that there are some critical aspects of child raising that simply cannot be done correctly by women, I think men would take a more active role in order to make sure they're able to provide their needed input, but I would guess those sorts of beliefs are contrary to "gender equality". I could actually see it making things worse to tell men that women are as capable of all aspects of child rearing as are men, because then why can't the woman just do it all?
>I don’t see low divorce numbers as a direct goal.
I don't either. The goal is a stable and happy society full of adults who were raised in stable and happy homes. Low divorce numbers are an essential element of achieving that.
>If you optimize for low divorce numbers you simply force women to stay in unhappy marriages.
That depends on how you try to lower the divorce rate, I suppose. If you make divorce a crime punishable by death and change nothing else, ya that's what you're going to end up with. If on the other hand you encourage people to avoid lifestyle choices that are associated with divorce, you will end up with fewer divorces and happier marriages.
>You seem to advocate a sort of 1950s style family life. I don’t think that is good for anyone.
Women reported being happier back then, so it seems like it was good for them at least. Who do you think that wasn't good for, and why?
I agree, I was wondering what kind of incentives governments could create to motivate parents to stay together...
The current systems are not just suboptimal, but actively harmful - they make parents enemies, in case of divorce often one "wins" and the other "loses" (depending on the legal system, either the higher-earning parent wins by not really having to pay any child support, or the lower-earning parent wins by earning huge child support + alimony on top). A better system would penalize both parents, thus motivate them to cooperate to maintain the family unit.
The other issue is, this would have to be balanced out by the fact that sometimes, it's likely better for parents to split/divorce... obviously in case one of them is violent, but even in other cases, they might just not be a good fit, in terms of interests, lifestyle, personality, ... and splitting gives each of them the opportunity to find someone better fitting, and lead happier lives (which should likely carry over to a more positive influence on their kids).
I think shared custody by default does part of this, it keeps both parents in the kids' lives.
Edit: I'm not a lawyer, so my comment "depending on the legal system" above is only based on anecdotal evidence from friends and/or media... the "not having to pay child support" is an example from Slovenia, the "huge child support + alimony" is based on some examples from the US.
I really do not understand the premise of your question. Yes, there is nothing wrong with one of the spouses being a home maker that is dependent on the monetary support of the professional spouse if this is what they want. But to turn your question around, what is so wrong with having other options!?
Of course at the end being in a relationship and having kids is a partnership and people should rely on one another, nobody ever argues against that. But when people want, they should have the option to do it in a new way, especially if that leads to more opportunities and happiness.
I agree that nothing's wrong with making the choice to be a stay at home mother (or father), especially when children are very young and not at school. But as a society we have organised ourselves in such a way that this choice is economically and socially much harder to make than it used to be and in my view much harder to make than it should be.
One of the problems in particular is that it is far too hard for people to come back to the workplace after taking a 5 or 6 year career break to look after children while they're young. People know this and it too often forces them into one of two paths - give up on their career entirely, or go back to work much sooner than they wanted to.
>But as a society we have organised ourselves in such a way that this choice is economically and socially much harder to make than it used to be and in my view much harder to make than it should be.
Sounds to me like we should make a conscious effort to reverse the changes that have been made lately, then, and also take a hard look at the motives of the people that have pushed us in that direction.
>One of the problems in particular is that it is far too hard for people to come back to the workplace after taking a 5 or 6 year career break to look after children while they're young.
I don't see how that is a problem. It takes a lot of work to maintain a desirable society, and I would guess most of it is not done at the behest of a corporation.
The difficulty of coming back from a career break is a problem because it turns something which needn't be a binary or one off choice (stay at home with children vs work) into a binary and irreversible choice. And I'd bet that those who feel forced into that choice choose career over staying at home with their children more often than the other way around as a result.
>And I'd bet that those who feel forced into that choice choose career over staying at home with their children more often than the other way around as a result.
Perhaps, I don't know the numbers, but either way, that is not the way it's always been, and it's clear that many people for a long time have been actively trying to increase the number that pick that option. We should carefully look in to who those people are and what motivates them, and then ask ourselves if we want our people taking their lead.
What is wrong with having other options is that there is a cost associated with maintaining those other options, and the children will be paying it one way or another.
Raising children well is enormously time consuming and difficult. Parents who want to do a good job don't have the luxury of abundant time and energy. Any effort spent maintaining these other options is done at the expense of the children.
This is a generic defeatist premise. Yes, if we do not try to make the world a more pleasant place to live in, the world indeed will not be a more pleasant place. And yes, poor people (and right now even middle class people) do not have the luxury to have the choice I depicted, or many other choices. But it is worthwhile to have our institutions try to change work culture for the better, exactly so that these options become feasible, both for the middle class and for the even less lucky.
Or to rephrase it in your way: there are costs to maintaining these other options, and I am happy to see that there are governments trying (and occasionally succeeding) to pay these costs.
The government can't pay those costs unless you are suggesting some kind of communal child raising situation rather than having children raised by their parents. Raising children well requires a lot of time and effort. I don't think it's defeatist to acknowledge that. If you want to try to improve that, find some way to raise children without needing so much of their parents' time and energy and without sacrificing quality.
- daycare (including fancy stuff like daycare on your work's campus where you can join your kid in between work activitie)s is a great idea that has already been tested
- it is perfectly reasonable for the extended family to help with child-rearing, especially in location where there is a history of that
- It seems crazy to me to suggest we change the ways we raise children, without suggesting changes to the ways careers progress. Even without my hippy suggestions about idealistic version of childcare, a comparatively trivial thing to do is to realign employee and employer incentives. And there are governments that do that successfully. This is why I am calling your comments "defeatist".
Stop projecting your view of the world on everyone: yes, your view is consistent and reasonable, if the homemaker is happy with the arangement, but it is not the only possible way to have a healthy family.
Daycare, the act of handing your infants and toddlers over to minimum wage workers who do not care about your children on an individual basis and who are also supposed to be taking care of several other children, is not a great idea, or even a good idea. It's a bad idea. For any decent parent, it would be a last resort before giving the children up for adoption.
Yes of course it's great when the extended family can help. That doesn't happen much in the modern world. It would be great if it did though.
>a comparatively trivial thing to do is to realign employee and employer incentives. And there are governments that do that successfully.
What does that mean? I think it's defeatist to want so many people slaving away for corporate masters rather than spending time with their families.
>Stop projecting your view of the world on everyone
I don't know what that means. I'm not going to stop advocating that people make lifestyle choices that I think are best, because as a father of a young child, my child is going to grow up in a world populated by the children that are the result of the lifestyle choices people are making today, and I would prefer for him to be surrounded by people that have been raised as well as possible.
>but it is not the only possible way to have a healthy family.
It is by far the best way to ensure you have a healthy family that we know of.
I do not know where you are coming from, but our surroundings must be extremely different. This is why I am saying you should not project your assumptions on everyone.
Why do you assume that daycare staff are minimal wage workers as opposed to well paid professionals that know more about intellectual enrichment and child psychology than the average parent?
Why are you assuming a career means "slaving away for corporate masters" as opposed to a myriad of ways one can work to enrich the world around them while at the same time being paid (academia, small business, art/design work, community work, the vast majority of lifestyle business, social purpose work, solving intellectually interesting technical problems, etc)? There are people that love their creative jobs, and we should not pretend they are unicorns or that they have to sacrifice their child's upbringing.
What you describe sounds borderline selfish to me. I get you are trying to suggest something good, but a person can make the world better (and even be paid for it) without compromising how much they care for their child.
Maybe I am talking like that because I am privileged and have an easy life. But then why not advocate that our communities try to make more people's lives easier?
>Why do you assume that daycare staff are minimal wage workers as opposed to well paid professionals that know more about intellectual enrichment and child psychology than the average parent?
I didn't assume it, I looked up what they tend to get paid and what qualifications are typically required to have that job. They tend to get paid around minimum wage, and they typically only need a high school diploma.
>Why are you assuming a career means "slaving away for corporate masters" as opposed to a myriad of ways one can work to enrich the world around them while at the same time being paid (academia, small business, art/design work, community work, the vast majority of lifestyle business, social purpose work, solving intellectually interesting technical problems, etc)?
Because that's what most people do.
>There are people that love their creative jobs, and we should not pretend they are unicorns or that they have to sacrifice their child's upbringing.
I'm sure there are some people like that, but the vast majority of children do not have two parents that fit in that category.
>What you describe sounds borderline selfish to me.
It is explicitly so.
>I get you are trying to suggest something good, but a person can make the world better (and even be paid for it) without compromising how much they care for their child.
Maybe some can. Most people aren't going to make the world better through their corporate job, and are going to compromise on how much care they give their children in order to do it. It doesn't make much sense to set society's expectations so that they only really work for exceptional people. They will do fine. They need to work for regular people.
>But then why not advocate that our communities try to make more people's lives easier?
I do advocate that. Raising children well so that they are not a problem for other people later in life is part of it. Encouraging stay at home parents to work to build their community once their children are old enough not to need full time care, rather than going back to being a corporate drone, is another thing I advocate.
If you want both parents to be independent, then (for the vast majority of people who are not very wealthy) of course both need to be employed or able to quickly become employed. Do you need a source for that?
Both of those take time, and that's time taken away from the children, which parents do not have in abundance. Do you need a source for that?
> both need to be employed or able to quickly become employed
Not particularly 'quickly', really.
Keeping it so both parents are able to be employed only requires corporate culture changes, and minor ones at that. The cost is very small and does not hurt children.
Most people don't have enough in savings to last more than half of a year without a job. I'd call that "quickly".
You could try to stop corporations from preferentially hiring people who have recent relevant experience, but I am not going to hold my breath on that.
A preference is fine, if it's in proportion to how much experience from the last couple years is actually worth over experience from 7 years ago. So maybe $5k less in initial salary.
The preference for someone having zero gaps in employment is extremely overrated, and giving many more people gaps in employment to disrupt that idea is great.
