Sure. But times are changing. Off the top of my head, I know 2 stay at home moms (one of which is my wife) and 2 stay at home dads (one of which is my brother). We all have our own biases.
Well, maybe. Here are some rough numbers.
9 hour work day (8 + 1 for lunch with no overtime)
10 hour daycare day (to allow for commute)
14 hours/day awake * 7 days = 98 waking hours/week
10 hour/day daycare * 5 = 50 hours/week
With a rough estimate, you both are, perhaps equally. Certainly, you are sharing responsibility.
Look, I’m not saying anyone is punting on the responsibility for their children by putting them in daycare. I spent a lot of time in daycare myself and, in today’s society, they are almost a financial requirement. Two working parents is almost a must.
I am saying, however, that if the costs even out, handing your kids to strangers for 1/2 of their young life and calling it an improvement is an interesting choice for a parent to make.
Amen to that. If you wait to have kids until you can afford it, you never will.**
** If you don’t have kids, you have no idea how expensive they really are and, really, you don’t want to know. There isn’t a spreadsheet that big and complicated. Besides, they are completely worth it. :)
Now pardon me while my youngest son queries me about his testicles.
Yeah, you can always make another justification to put it off, there’s always one more thing to buy, promotion to get, trip to take. At some point you just go shove those to the side.
This is a really interesting point of discussion because it’s been my experience that most of my friends who have had children have done so, well, let’s just say ‘unexpectedly.’ And had they waited until they believed they had all the i’s dotted and so forth they would likely be 40 before starting to raise kids.
I’ll add that I mention this from the perspective of an upper 30’s married fellow. I think my wife and I are financially able to raise kids, but she is convinced that our townhouse is entirely too small to consider raising a family in and that we’ll need to upgrade our home before thinking about kids. But it’s always something.
Rimbo
1985
Good luck with that, “everybody”…
If you have an issue with what I said, take it up with the people who research this for a living. (Incidentally, the above article demonstrates a correlation between female orgasm quality and the male partner’s wealth. And both the authors and I are aware that correlation is not causation.)
Meanwhile…
You won’t be ready until the minute the child is born. Then, all the hormones switch to “on” and suddenly, you’re ready. That said, the first two weeks of the first baby are filled with a lot of “He’s crying, WTF do we do?” moments. Then, sometime around the third month, you find your response to various messes isn’t to gag any more, but to nonchalantly reach for the rags and cleaning materials. And then they stop pooping and vomiting all over the place and it just gets more awesome from that point on as this helpless little munchkin quickly grows more and more capable and independent.
The title of what you just posted is “Partner wealth predicts self-reported orgasm frequency in a sample of Chinese women”. What you said was all women everywhere are hard-wired to marry rich men because they’ll be able to afford children.
I know, I know. Reading is hard. Now we can start the part where you backpedal the original stupid thing you said because obviously you really meant blah blah blah…
You assumed that daycare was 100% waking time. Kids nap at daycare, or at least mine do.
Fair point on the commute though, I’m not used to factoring in that time since I don’t live in a big city and drive times are therefore negligible for this kind of calculation.
My wife isn’t working and I have two children in daycare. She’s a student so it’s not like she’s just sitting around the house, but it was an option that was financially feasible for us and we decided against it.
Why? You seem to be treating it as axiomatic that a stay at home parent is automatically superior and I just don’t see it.
Rimbo
1988
That fits in perfectly with our experience; our son seems to be his happiest and seems to develop (mentally and emotionally) faster when he’s both attending preschool and getting a lot of time at home from us.
fire
1989
There’s never the right time to have kids. But it’s (nearly) always a good time. If it’s something you’re committed to, you can make it work. Priorities seamlessly shift when you’re expecting.
Largely, because I hope it is true for most parents. I also hope that parents have a strong desire to spend time with their kids, particularly at such a young age. It is one of the reasons to have them. I’m trying to think of a better reason.
I find the distinction between age 1-4 years and the entire rest of your child’s life to be an odd line to draw. Until they’re teenagers, they’re going to spend more than half of their time away from you anyway, and afterward that number only gets higher. That’s how the world works. Why is two, three, or four a worse a worse age to start that pattern than five?
Leah_C
1993
There’s an insane amount of development happening between birth and four. It builds the foundation for all future development. Then there’s the whole issue of bonding with parents, particularly with dad, as the whole pregnancy, labor, and breast feeding things give mom a huge jump start.
These aren’t necessarily rock solid reasons to keep a young child at home with mom and dad, but I do think that it’s a lot more important at a young age to really weigh the pros and cons and to choose childcare VERY carefully. That time is very different developmentally and careful consideration has to be made.
Is it age 1-4 that’s very different developmentally? What’s the science there? Because I honestly don’t know. I know that that’s a big factor very early on, but… I dunno, I spend a lot of time around preschool-aged kids, and I wouldn’t say that any of them seem to have had trouble bonding with their parents.
I’d be genuinely interested in reading any science you know of on this, though.
So wait, mom AND dad have to quit work to stay home now? I don’t have kids, but color me unconvinced. Common sense tells me that the guy that was on the Daily Show the other night is closer to the truth: kids aren’t as fragile as we like to believe. If they were really as corruptible and delicate as concerned parents often believe, the human race never would have survived as a species.
I didn’t see the guy on the Daily Show but clearly a lot of kids in the US today are just way too coddled and the result is predictable… most of them are narcissistic, extremely self-absorbed twat-waffles. I know that’s the sort of thing the previous generation ALWAYS says about the next one, but I really believe it is particularly true these days.
Leah_C
1997
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that. I have a raging fever and am full of stupid today. Reading back, it does sound like that. Some of those “ands” should be replaced with “or” or something. Or I should stay off the internet when I have the plague.
I do think both parents should spent as much time with their kids as is reasonably possible, though, at that young age. I see a lot of dads (and some moms) that are back at work almost as quickly as they’re out of the hospital.
Leah_C
1998
…and I also said that those aren’t reasons to stay at home as much as they are reasons to choose care carefully.
WARNING: This has nothing to do with daycare, children or early age development. It is also only marginally interesting.
Tonight I completed my first full week of my new exercise regimen. On Sun, Tues and Thurs I do an 11-step workout with dumbbells (and recently moved to the next weight) and on Mon, Wed and Fri I am following the Couch to 5K running plan. Saturday I take off and eat brownies. Okay, imaginary brownies. The first night of jogging I accidentally mixed up the times for walking and jogging so it was a bit more exertion than I expected, but the next two nights were fine. Easing into it is definitely the way to go.
I’m running along a bark-covered path at a city park a dozen blocks from my place. It’s way better than jogging around on the streets and sidewalks and this time of year there’s tons of activity at the park with other joggers, people walking dogs, baseball games, exercise groups and so on. Just being around so many others being active is a nice bit of positive reinforcement.
Anyway, I feel pretty good at the end of Week 1, so here’s hoping it keeps going smoothly over the rest of the summer. I am probably in the best shape of my life right now, something that was unthinkable a year ago when I was guzzling chocolate milk and scarfing bags of chips everyday.
I now return you to your childcare discussion already in progress.
Jakub
2000
That’s a great link, Creole!
