There's a debate that's been going back and forth forever about stay at home parenting. Is it good? Is it bad? Is the influx of women into the workforce feminism's best accomplishment or the family's worst nightmare? Or both?
Back in the day the norm, or at least the ideal, was for the woman to stay home and cook and clean and care for the family; the man went out and earned the money outside the home. Now the norm is for the man and the woman to work... and the woman to cook and clean and care for the family. Elizabeth Warren even wrote a book, The Two Income Trap, about how middle class dual-income families aren't getting their fair shake. Do we (as a society - not individually) really need two incomes per family?
This graph shows how productivity has skyrocketed while wages have stagnated. This increase in productivity has caused an overabundance of labor
(why we're always trying to “create jobs”): there is more supply
than demand. If the workforce shrunk significantly it would likely
help the economy, as in many way's we're now too productive. As
productivity increases you either have to increase demand or decrease
the number of workers. (Note: part of this is that Americans work too much... or at least, they work more than everyone else)
Let's
take all that information and sit with it for a moment. What if we
all saw that and decided it would be better NOT to have so many folks
working (or at least not the crazy hours most of us do). That perhaps having a stay-at-home parent is a good idea,
because caring for your kids yourself is good and also because the
labor-market is oversupplied and it's contributing to how difficult
it is to find work. A lot of crazy conservatives have written about how women/feminism/"misandry"/selfish mothers have destroyed the economy, and they use many of these points (but they're jerks, so I'm not going to link to them... google it if you wish).
Stay
with me here, because I'm not ready for that plan. While I think
people who genuinely want to be stay-at-home parents should enjoy
their stay-at-home lives, I don't think we as a society should
pressure one parent into staying home... 'cause it's going to end up
being the women. And besides, some people like
their jobs.
That
brings us to my plan. Why don't both parents work part time? It
seems so simple, really. Instead of the old one-income model or the
current two-income model, we switch to a two-part-time model?
Imagine a world where people split their time... part time being
caretakers, part time being breadwinners, part time doing whatever it
is in life they love. Women wouldn't be forced back into the
kitchen, men would get to spend time with their kids, and queer folk
might get a little less of that awful “who's the man” question.
There
are a lot of problems that we need to address first: a broken tax
system, a lack of quality free education, getting ourselves a first
world healthcare system, and ending penalties for part
timers. Without these things the model I've just laid out won't
work.
But
what if we could do it? Quality time with kids, less stress on the
workforce, more home-cooked meals, and happier workers all without
blaming women or telling them it's all their fault just because they
wanted to be treated like people. A gender-neutral "American Dream". As someone who comes from a generation that seeks work life balance, I see a big appeal to this.
Through
all this, it is worth mentioning that I don't think everyone should
get married and/or have kids. But given that our society is built
around a two-parent with children model we should consider ways to
make that model better.
What
do you think? Is it worth moving to a model where both partners are
part-time-homemakers & part-time-breadwinners?
