Why is there so little discussion about the loss of status of stay at home parenting?
When my grandmother quit being a nurse to become a stay at home mother, it was seen like a great thing. She gained status over her sisters, who stayed single and in their careers.
When my mother quit her office role to become a stay at home mother, it was accepted, but not celebrated. She likely loss status in society due to her decision.
I am a mid 30s millenial, and I don’t know a single woman who would leave her career to become a stay at home mother. They fear that their status in society would drop considerably.
Note how all my examples talk about stay at home motherhood. Stay at home fatherhood never had high status in society.
What can we do as a society to elevate the status of stay at home parenting?
My off-the-cuff guess is that if stay at home parenting was high-status in the US, there’d be a slight boost to average happiness/wellbeing/etc. and a significant boost to fertility rates, especially amongst high-powered couples.
Automating all the high status, fun jobs might help! 😅
Also, for what it’s worth, it seems to be ok status in Tallahassee. I know lots of women who do it, and the reaction seems to be “whoa, nice, impressive hubby makes enough to achieve this obviously desirable state of affairs.” Maybe just “concentrate ambition less” would do the trick.
There’s a difference between who plans to leave their career and who ends up leaving.
Some paths: - childcare is more expensive than one partner earns after taxes, and it’s cheaper for one parent to stay home. - managing work / commute / child appointments (especially if they have special needs) / child sickness / childcare is so overwhelming that a parent quits their job to have fewer things to manage. Or they feel they’re failing at the combination of work and parenting and must pick one. - the family is financially secure enough they feel they can do ok on one income, even though they’re not at their wits’ end.
Once you start looking at content in this direction, the algorithms will feed you pro-full-time-mom content. Start searching for things like “homeschool preschooler” and I bet you’ll get plenty of videos extolling full-time motherhood made by people hoping to become Ballerina Farm.
I wonder how much this differs between bubbles. For example, one parent staying at home seems to be pretty normal among homeschooling parents; it is hard to do otherwise. Here are some guesses:
Availability bias—it does not matter how successful or famous is the average person, but the most successful or famous people you know most likely have a career. Therefore, people associate career with success and fame.
The stay-at-home mom is only known to her neighbors, unless she also happens to be e.g. a popular blogger. So the number of such people you know is limited by your neighborhood, while the number of people with some kind of career you might know is practically unlimited.
Optimism—just like people who participate in a lottery imagine themselves winning, many people who choose a career imagine themselves succeeding wildly, and I suspect that for the vast majority of them the actual outcomes are quite underwhelming. Compared to these visions, staying at home seems… maybe kinda nice, but boring? (Similarly how investing a fraction of your salary in index funds feels boring compared to buying a lottery ticket.)
Signaling—when you have a career, your skills are evaluated by the market. If you stay at home, we don’t know much about your skills. Again, people associate skills with jobs.
If you have a job, and you conclude that it sucks, you can switch to another job. If you are a stay-at-home mom with five small children, and you change your mind, your options are more limited.
...and of course, the elephant in the room: gender politics.
As you noticed, fathers at home have always been considered losers. I think this goes beyond the obvious economic concerns—not sure how much this generalizes, but when a friend told me that she could never respect a man who doesn’t have a job, I asked: “What about a man who was very successful, already made tons of money, and then retired early?” as a model of a man who in my opinion clearly isn’t a loser, rather the opposite, she told me something like: “I know that it doesn’t make sense rationally, but emotionally I still couldn’t respect him.” I can only guess the underlying reasons, but my guess would be that a successful job also comes with some social power, which our intuition perceives more strongly than mere money. (I made a decision that if I somehow win a lottery and retire early, I would keep it secret from most people. I would even make up a fake job, something plausible with flexible work time, etc. Recently I have learned online that there are already many people who do exactly this.)
With regards to women, it was the goal of feminism to get them to jobs, and even under the charitable assumption that the original goal was to provide them freedom to choose rather than making the choice for them, clearly in practice it is much easier for a political movement to create a one-sided pressure than to achieve a balance. (Balance is boring, the activists full of energy want to push in one direction as strongly as possible.)
What can we do as a society to elevate the status of stay at home parenting?
I think the traditional way how the moms at home gained social status was for the neighbors to see that they were good at their work: that their children were well-behaved, smart, successful at life. This would probably work better for those women who want to have more children. -- I mean, if you have two smart, well-behaved children, what exactly is the big deal? So do many people in my bubble, and they usually have a job on top of that. On the other hand, if you have five smart and well-behaved children, then you get my deepest respect, because that is quite an achievement! You have simultaneously achieved a rare personal goal and also did something good for the society in long term. As long as it is clear that you have volunteered for the role and that it makes you happy, of course.
Another possible approach might be to connect staying at home with some public-oriented activity. Like, you don’t have a job to spend 8 hours a day at, but there are things you can do from home, such as blogging, writing books, having a small business. Shortly, it is a alternative career done from home, rather than no career, which should impress both the people who think it is better to have a career, and those who think it is better to stay at home.
Yeah, maybe this is a big difference—you don’t mention how many children your grandmother had; I suspect it was probably more than two—considering that today people raise a child or two while having a job, you probably can’t expect to get respect for doing the same without having a job. At best, people won’t actively disrespect you. One gets respect for doing things other people don’t. (Grandma got higher status than her childless sisters. If the sisters also had children and jobs, she would probably have lower status.) This is further complicated by the fact that these days many women have children at higher age, so basically no one is obviously childless, only “childless, yet”. For every childless person before 40 we may assume that they will still have a child or two at some later moment, so you won’t get higher status than them by having a child or two now.
I think the good news, if you want to have a large family, is to realize that heredity matters, so if you are a smart and healthy person, go ahead: taking care of five kids will be a lot of work… but it will not require much extra work to also make them smart and well-behaved—this part you will get almost for free… but all the people around who don’t believe in heredity will respect you for your superior parenting skills! (So I guess the proper approach to social engineering is to deliver the message of heredity to smart young women, but not to their neighbors.) Make a blog with lots of photos, talk about your children winning various competitions, you might become famous.
But there is also some risk involved. Your children may turn out to be sick, your partner can divorce you… and then all the nice plans will fail. Which is probably another reason why people choose the career, where they have feeling (whether justified or not) that it is more under their control.
Well, you could make it so the only plausible path to career advancement for women beyond, say, receptionist, is the provision of sexual favors. I expect that will lower the status of women in high-level positions sufficiently to elevate stay-at-home motherhood.
Of course, all strategies to achieve what you’re asking will by necessity lower the status of career-focused women, so I expect you’ll find them all unpleasant.
EDIT: From the downvotes, I gather people want magical thinking instead of actual implementable solutions.
What… is going on in this comment? It has so much snark, and so my guess is downstream of some culture war gremlins. Please don’t leave comments like this.
The basic observation that status might be a kind of conserved quality and as such in order to advocate for status-raising of one thing you also need to be transparent about which things you would feel comfortably lowering in status is a fine one, but this isn’t the way to communicate that observation.
The only thing that will raise fertility rates is to make it more affordable to have a child. Most people are simply too poor to both have a child and ensure that it is consistently as happy or happier than they were as a child. People in developed countries do not want to have children who they know will have poor childhoods from not being able to afford things they need, such as school, rent in a place with a room for them, childcare while working (as it is very difficult to survive on just a single person’s income, practically impossible for 3!!!! people to do so) and other necessities.
The problem isn’t culture (unless you think blindly producing children who will suffer is a good thing) or status or any of these made up problems, people literally just cannot afford to start families.
This comment too is not fit for this site. What is going on with y’all? Why is fertility such a weirdly mindkilling issue? Please don’t presume your theory to be true, try to highlight cruxes, try to summon up at least a bit of curiosity about your interlocutors, all the usual things.
Like, it’s fine to have a personally confident take on the causes of low fertility in western countries, but man, you can’t just treat your personal confidence as shared and obvious with everyone else, at least in this way.
Why is fertility such a weirdly mindkilling issue?
I guess because it touches so many hot issues in culture wars: feminism, economy (salaries, demographic crisis), immigration (if you compare fertility of different groups), race, iq… everything seems related.
The assumption of your argument (that many can’t afford to support children) is debated at least, and a crux for many. Nor is it so obvious as to be assumed to be true in this discussion. Since you did not argue for this, and instead made the trivial observation that if most people can’t afford to support children, then most people won’t have children regardless of how high status it is, your argument is worthless.
As worthless as you think it is, it’s quite literally the thing that is happening in the real world. Theory is cool and all but reality is the way it is.
Also, yeah, people not being able to afford to support their kids is obvious. It’s literally happening. I know this site leans heavily middle-upper/upper class SF/CA, but the majority of (the US) lives paycheck to paycheck and cannot support a child without serious compromised to QOL, both for themselves and the child.
In order to convince people and make your comments worthwhile to read, you need a better argument than “it is literally happening” (I don’t think anyone misinterpreted you and thought your comment was a metaphor and this was only figuratively happening). You may think people are foolish for not believing you, but nevertheless, they don’t believe you, and you need to make some argument to convince them.
Why is there so little discussion about the loss of status of stay at home parenting?
When my grandmother quit being a nurse to become a stay at home mother, it was seen like a great thing. She gained status over her sisters, who stayed single and in their careers.
When my mother quit her office role to become a stay at home mother, it was accepted, but not celebrated. She likely loss status in society due to her decision.
I am a mid 30s millenial, and I don’t know a single woman who would leave her career to become a stay at home mother. They fear that their status in society would drop considerably.
Note how all my examples talk about stay at home motherhood. Stay at home fatherhood never had high status in society.
What can we do as a society to elevate the status of stay at home parenting?
“What can we do as a society to elevate the status of stay at home parenting?”
Can you explain why this would be desirable?
My off-the-cuff guess is that if stay at home parenting was high-status in the US, there’d be a slight boost to average happiness/wellbeing/etc. and a significant boost to fertility rates, especially amongst high-powered couples.
Automating all the high status, fun jobs might help! 😅
Also, for what it’s worth, it seems to be ok status in Tallahassee. I know lots of women who do it, and the reaction seems to be “whoa, nice, impressive hubby makes enough to achieve this obviously desirable state of affairs.” Maybe just “concentrate ambition less” would do the trick.
There’s a difference between who plans to leave their career and who ends up leaving.
Some paths:
- childcare is more expensive than one partner earns after taxes, and it’s cheaper for one parent to stay home.
- managing work / commute / child appointments (especially if they have special needs) / child sickness / childcare is so overwhelming that a parent quits their job to have fewer things to manage. Or they feel they’re failing at the combination of work and parenting and must pick one.
- the family is financially secure enough they feel they can do ok on one income, even though they’re not at their wits’ end.
Once you start looking at content in this direction, the algorithms will feed you pro-full-time-mom content. Start searching for things like “homeschool preschooler” and I bet you’ll get plenty of videos extolling full-time motherhood made by people hoping to become Ballerina Farm.
I wonder how much this differs between bubbles. For example, one parent staying at home seems to be pretty normal among homeschooling parents; it is hard to do otherwise. Here are some guesses:
Availability bias—it does not matter how successful or famous is the average person, but the most successful or famous people you know most likely have a career. Therefore, people associate career with success and fame.
The stay-at-home mom is only known to her neighbors, unless she also happens to be e.g. a popular blogger. So the number of such people you know is limited by your neighborhood, while the number of people with some kind of career you might know is practically unlimited.
Optimism—just like people who participate in a lottery imagine themselves winning, many people who choose a career imagine themselves succeeding wildly, and I suspect that for the vast majority of them the actual outcomes are quite underwhelming. Compared to these visions, staying at home seems… maybe kinda nice, but boring? (Similarly how investing a fraction of your salary in index funds feels boring compared to buying a lottery ticket.)
Signaling—when you have a career, your skills are evaluated by the market. If you stay at home, we don’t know much about your skills. Again, people associate skills with jobs.
If you have a job, and you conclude that it sucks, you can switch to another job. If you are a stay-at-home mom with five small children, and you change your mind, your options are more limited.
...and of course, the elephant in the room: gender politics.
As you noticed, fathers at home have always been considered losers. I think this goes beyond the obvious economic concerns—not sure how much this generalizes, but when a friend told me that she could never respect a man who doesn’t have a job, I asked: “What about a man who was very successful, already made tons of money, and then retired early?” as a model of a man who in my opinion clearly isn’t a loser, rather the opposite, she told me something like: “I know that it doesn’t make sense rationally, but emotionally I still couldn’t respect him.” I can only guess the underlying reasons, but my guess would be that a successful job also comes with some social power, which our intuition perceives more strongly than mere money. (I made a decision that if I somehow win a lottery and retire early, I would keep it secret from most people. I would even make up a fake job, something plausible with flexible work time, etc. Recently I have learned online that there are already many people who do exactly this.)
With regards to women, it was the goal of feminism to get them to jobs, and even under the charitable assumption that the original goal was to provide them freedom to choose rather than making the choice for them, clearly in practice it is much easier for a political movement to create a one-sided pressure than to achieve a balance. (Balance is boring, the activists full of energy want to push in one direction as strongly as possible.)
I think the traditional way how the moms at home gained social status was for the neighbors to see that they were good at their work: that their children were well-behaved, smart, successful at life. This would probably work better for those women who want to have more children. -- I mean, if you have two smart, well-behaved children, what exactly is the big deal? So do many people in my bubble, and they usually have a job on top of that. On the other hand, if you have five smart and well-behaved children, then you get my deepest respect, because that is quite an achievement! You have simultaneously achieved a rare personal goal and also did something good for the society in long term. As long as it is clear that you have volunteered for the role and that it makes you happy, of course.
Another possible approach might be to connect staying at home with some public-oriented activity. Like, you don’t have a job to spend 8 hours a day at, but there are things you can do from home, such as blogging, writing books, having a small business. Shortly, it is a alternative career done from home, rather than no career, which should impress both the people who think it is better to have a career, and those who think it is better to stay at home.
Yeah, maybe this is a big difference—you don’t mention how many children your grandmother had; I suspect it was probably more than two—considering that today people raise a child or two while having a job, you probably can’t expect to get respect for doing the same without having a job. At best, people won’t actively disrespect you. One gets respect for doing things other people don’t. (Grandma got higher status than her childless sisters. If the sisters also had children and jobs, she would probably have lower status.) This is further complicated by the fact that these days many women have children at higher age, so basically no one is obviously childless, only “childless, yet”. For every childless person before 40 we may assume that they will still have a child or two at some later moment, so you won’t get higher status than them by having a child or two now.
I think the good news, if you want to have a large family, is to realize that heredity matters, so if you are a smart and healthy person, go ahead: taking care of five kids will be a lot of work… but it will not require much extra work to also make them smart and well-behaved—this part you will get almost for free… but all the people around who don’t believe in heredity will respect you for your superior parenting skills! (So I guess the proper approach to social engineering is to deliver the message of heredity to smart young women, but not to their neighbors.) Make a blog with lots of photos, talk about your children winning various competitions, you might become famous.
But there is also some risk involved. Your children may turn out to be sick, your partner can divorce you… and then all the nice plans will fail. Which is probably another reason why people choose the career, where they have feeling (whether justified or not) that it is more under their control.
Well, you could make it so the only plausible path to career advancement for women beyond, say, receptionist, is the provision of sexual favors. I expect that will lower the status of women in high-level positions sufficiently to elevate stay-at-home motherhood.
Of course, all strategies to achieve what you’re asking will by necessity lower the status of career-focused women, so I expect you’ll find them all unpleasant.
EDIT: From the downvotes, I gather people want magical thinking instead of actual implementable solutions.
What… is going on in this comment? It has so much snark, and so my guess is downstream of some culture war gremlins. Please don’t leave comments like this.
The basic observation that status might be a kind of conserved quality and as such in order to advocate for status-raising of one thing you also need to be transparent about which things you would feel comfortably lowering in status is a fine one, but this isn’t the way to communicate that observation.
I don’t want to elevate just stay at home motherhood. I want to elevate stay at home parenting.
I hope we can make it cool to be a stay at home father or mother. I think this will raise fertility rates.
The only thing that will raise fertility rates is to make it more affordable to have a child. Most people are simply too poor to both have a child and ensure that it is consistently as happy or happier than they were as a child. People in developed countries do not want to have children who they know will have poor childhoods from not being able to afford things they need, such as school, rent in a place with a room for them, childcare while working (as it is very difficult to survive on just a single person’s income, practically impossible for 3!!!! people to do so) and other necessities.
The problem isn’t culture (unless you think blindly producing children who will suffer is a good thing) or status or any of these made up problems, people literally just cannot afford to start families.
This comment too is not fit for this site. What is going on with y’all? Why is fertility such a weirdly mindkilling issue? Please don’t presume your theory to be true, try to highlight cruxes, try to summon up at least a bit of curiosity about your interlocutors, all the usual things.
Like, it’s fine to have a personally confident take on the causes of low fertility in western countries, but man, you can’t just treat your personal confidence as shared and obvious with everyone else, at least in this way.
I guess because it touches so many hot issues in culture wars: feminism, economy (salaries, demographic crisis), immigration (if you compare fertility of different groups), race, iq… everything seems related.
The assumption of your argument (that many can’t afford to support children) is debated at least, and a crux for many. Nor is it so obvious as to be assumed to be true in this discussion. Since you did not argue for this, and instead made the trivial observation that if most people can’t afford to support children, then most people won’t have children regardless of how high status it is, your argument is worthless.
As worthless as you think it is, it’s quite literally the thing that is happening in the real world. Theory is cool and all but reality is the way it is.
Also, yeah, people not being able to afford to support their kids is obvious. It’s literally happening. I know this site leans heavily middle-upper/upper class SF/CA, but the majority of (the US) lives paycheck to paycheck and cannot support a child without serious compromised to QOL, both for themselves and the child.
In order to convince people and make your comments worthwhile to read, you need a better argument than “it is literally happening” (I don’t think anyone misinterpreted you and thought your comment was a metaphor and this was only figuratively happening). You may think people are foolish for not believing you, but nevertheless, they don’t believe you, and you need to make some argument to convince them.