You make great points. Personally, after 2 years of living in Japan, I believe in shared burdens.

It’s why pension plans are better than individual 401ks – young people pay in even when the market is low, which allows retirees to maintain their SOL. It just makes sense to share risk!

So yeah, I think things work better when governments and employers distribute the burdens among all of us. And – to tie it back to PF – larger safety nets allow everyone to take more calculated risks!

* Having heterosexual sex which may lead to pregnancy is a choice.
* Using/not using/forgetting birth control is a choice.
* Carrying a child to term is a choice.
* Keeping said child is a choice.

This isn’t the 17th century. Having a kid is a choice, and it’s a choice made up of multiple steps. As much as some parents want to claim it’s this deep “need,” it’s still a *choice* they actively selected.

I don’t think anybody here is arguing that work-life balance is impossible. Slaughter went back to her academic job to regain this balance. Sarah left AOL to become a writer and look after her children. And many people are able to find some sort of work-life balance in their lives.

What I think they are saying and I agree is that you can’t be world champion at everything, that some high-pressure jobs require total commitment, and that ideology can’t trump tradeoffs. She even mentions Chris Christie refusing to run for president due to the toll it would take on his family. Every decision we make has a cost, and so we must choose.

Workplace policies can be more friendly to parents of course (I won’t say to women because that would imply that only women raise or should raise children), but workplace policies mean that we shift the burden of parenthood from parents alone to employers and/or the government.

Which again is fine if that’s what we consciously choose to negotiate as a society, but it’s not cost-free, it’s never cost-free.

And I’m not saying that if there’s a cost something shouldn’t be done. I’m only saying that there are no free lunches, costs are real, and shouldn’t be ignored ignored in the name of utopian ideals, because that’s the surest path to rude awakenings.

Now if this was a policy site I might offer a different take on this question (I am for family-friendly workplaces), but from the PF perspective it’s up to the individual to recognize the reality of their surroundings and choose wisely– and that includes quitting a job that doesn’t allow you to have a life.

The last third either have excellent self esteem or (like me) just gave up on anyone else thinking they’re succeeding in life. Screw the alumni magazine, really.

But he was the ONLY man in his office taking days off for a sick kid. Because the office ethos is such that every other family man had either quit and found another job, or had a stay at home wife (what I am doing now.) 60 hour work weeks are not sustainable for parents without a person whose job is to take care of everything that’s not your job – a nanny and a cleaning service, or a stay at home partner, or a grandparent or older child who takes over.

That said, I still don’t think the title is representative of her whole piece! She does offer advice to women on dealing with the realities of the working world, and on not trying to have everything all at once.

However, I think the CRUX of her argument is that, if the US had better working policies, people could come much, much closer to ‘having it all.’ You’re right that she spends 3/4 of the article explaining why women don’t have it all right now.

However, she does not present those reasons as absolute truths – instead, she details all the ways that those realities can and should change, and how that would both help individuals be happier, and benefit society as a whole.

(therefore, I think she would take issue with your assertion that scarcity inherently prevents us from having work-life balance. She believes that balance IS achievable, and CAN be had, if our work culture is changed in the ways she outlines)

It is a deeply gendered way of looking at things. When men argue they are supposedly discussing – when women do it, they are warring. We roll our eyes and make fun it.

The decisions women make and the passion with which they discuss them continue precisely because the world of employment and motherhood is still a difficult place to navigate. This article was just another exploration of that tension, and I would hate for personal reactions to a thought provoking post to be marginalized by a dismissive term.

Regarding the France study I don’t have first-hand knowledge of the subject but I know if my wife and I had guaranteed child care and government subsidies we’d start making babies immediately after lunch time today, instead of doing what we do now, endlessly waiting for “the right time,” which at this rate might never arrive, so we are under pressure in this front.

And I’m not demanding subsidies for our potential progeny, by the way– I’m just saying that a different environment would get a different outcome from yours truly. Which of course is purely anecdotal and hypothetical and cannot be realistically extrapolated (e.g., if we had subsidies but lived in a 10% unemployment economy, we might still hesitate).

I think that makes a difference.

Even after I pay for daycare, my financial contribution is quite substantial…plus I carry our health insurance. If my pay equaled more or less what I pay for daycare, then I’m sure that would lead to less job satisfaction. Who wants to work for free? I don’t.

In my particular situation, I love working and what I get out of it. I also feel that the money is definitely worth me working out of the home.

On both of my maternity leaves, I tore my house apart cleaning and organizing. Of course, my husband loved it that our house was spotless and he would come home from lunch to a meal already made for him. I actually think he would like it if I stayed home.

I just have no desire to!

It seems that you are arguing against someone else entirely here. I certainly never said such a thing. Moreover, I said MULTIPLE times that children at home OR in other scenarios end up just as well-adjusted and healthy.

But you clearly stated that working parents interact with their children as much as stay at home parents. This is impossible. Do you think I lock my children in a dark closet while I clean the house and do the dishes? No. Oftentimes we are interacting while I do these somewhat mundane tasks.

At the end of the day, this isn’t a competition as to who sees their child the most. Every family is different. But when working parents (as illustrated ad nauseum by a recent 200+ comment stream on the NYT Motherlode blog after the Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney debacle) say that they do what a stay at home parent does AND work a full-time job, yeah, I’m going to call them on it. It’s not true.

Thank god school is an equalizer in this debate. Then we all see our kids equally less, except, as you pointed out, if we home school, which, to me, sounds like torture.

I am skeptical of that France study as the majority of studies do not find any positive effect of government intervention on birth rates. It would have to be a much better study than others for it to outweigh the rest. (And if it were true, then Italy and Japan would totally follow suit.) http://nicoleandmaggie.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/good-vs-bad-research/

And what about all those horrible SAHM who allow their kids to go to public or private schools instead of homeschooling them on their family compounds? They must be doing terrible things to their children as well.

Mommy wars are BS. SAHM vs WOHM doesn’t make a lick of difference in how “well” a kid turns out. My kid is perfect and me giving up my career to stay at home would not result in my kid being any more perfect. It would just result in an unfulfilled and stressed out me.

My kid would not have the wild variety of experiences he’s gotten from other care providers– he wouldn’t have had Holly, the pediatric nursing student who taught him how to play with water in the sink, or Helen the childhood development student who helped his speech explode, or learned mediation skills from his excellent Montessori (whose director teaches child development at the local community college). But he would probably be doing calculus by now (age 5) instead of just triple-digit subtraction. Personally I think it’s a fair trade-off.

Have you ever tried to interact with a child constantly? That’s not even good for a child.

Not at all! It was the author’s idea to call it that. She was dissuaded from it temporarily and went back to it. Here’s a quote:

…I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’”

She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet.

Her main complaint is that feminism has presented women with the idea of attainable utopias– if you fail to get there then it must be your fault. She spends about 3/4 of the article talking about it and refuting “the half-truths we hold dear”.

So no, I don’t think I’m making too much of the title– the title is the core of her argument.

Re: unions– I like unions too (some of them anyway), but they don’t change the competitive nature of the marketplace, which penalizes labor costs. Compare Toyota vs. GM before the bailout!

I support equal pay for equal work legislation actually, but I think the changing social climate will do more for equal pay.

And I’d love to hear more about other kinds of structural changes and read that paper. Maybe email JD and he can email me? Haa haaa haa. JD the spy courier. But anyway, maybe I’ll contact via your blog.

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@ Laundry Lady & Nicole:

France!

“France’s High Birth Rate Partly Due To Government Incentives”

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/52654.php

Let me quote a bit of it:

Europe’s second-highest birth rate in part because of incentives offered by the government. Such incentives include:

Juliette LaFont, spokesperson for the French Ministry of Family Affairs, said that what distinguishes France from other European countries is its “policy of giving women the choice to work or not by giving them all of the services and financial means.”

According to that article, France spends 15% of their national budget in child and family services though. I’m not sure America is ready for that kind of commitment. And I’m not sure how pay equality works in France, but at least it seems more family-friendly. (BTW, my wife and I would love to have kids but currently don’t have the means to undertake such adventures. We however exist in a different environment, i.e., “not France”, and must choose accordingly.)

Anyway, I was just saying that just like there’s a cost to child-rearing there are also rewards that come with it–France’s birth rate is 1.8 children per women vs. 1.3 among their neighbors.