Millennial women are saying no thanks to parenthood

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why have a family when you can dedicate your life to a corporation/boss? ......

Nobody says this to/about men.

+1

Twist: a lot of men who do this are trying to maximize income because they have families.

Love this. Yep.

[Anonymous]

Amen! I am a SAHM and I am tired of other working women looking condescendingly down on me like I am chump for staying home and tying my future to my husband. No, madam, you are in fact the chump because you have signed yourself up for two full time jobs! No thank you. I like a life balance and if I have to be a SAHM to get it, so be it. I’d be doing the work at home either way even though my spouse is incredibly sweet and supportive, he just cannot do what I can.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Probably a lot of reasons, including costs. However, I think there some less flattering reasons as well. First, I think millenials and younger cohorts have bought into a “forever young” mentality where they don’t fully appreciate that some doors close permanently. The same mentality causes them to over prioritize going to the latest restaurants or bars well past the age where they should be. Finally, I think a lot of them have bought into the idea that career success is the primary thing to achieve. I am sure that is rewarding, but on the other hand, who is there with you when you are old and retired?

This may be true for some. I know a few couples that dated for years, lived together for years, set a wedding date two years in the future so they could plan leisurely, waited to have kids after getting married, and then boom, struck by infertility. I kept wanting to tell them to hurry up, time is ticking!! (I didn’t of course)

However, I think the bigger thing is the prevalence of so many ways to amuse yourself without a spouse or kids. Back in the day, people used to couple up because they were lonely and it was the expected thing to do, so they just found someone. Now there are so many things to do online and so unless you are really passionate about a significant other or about having kids, it is easiest to default to online activities to fill your time.

Women weren’t even allowed to have their own credit card until 1974.

weren’t even allowed to have their own credit card until 1974.

Women used to couple up because they had no rights.

But isn’t this more like one of those chicken and egg questions?
I mean, credit cards as we know them weren’t “in use” until the very early 60s so very few people had them at all until late into the 60s. And you do know that most women didn’t actually work in 1974, right?
(At least not after they were married, because socially, that would have been very embarrassing/emasculating for the men, as it implied that he could not support his own family…which was not something men OR women would have been excited to advertise!)

Lots of things apart from “the evil patriarchy” were at okay surrounding why women didn’t have jobs…including that “family planning” didn’t exist (no
Birth control pill and no abortion on demand) so you could get pregnant at any time—-and social norms/expectations were that women raised their own babies. There wasn’t a daycare in every corner back then! So all these factors played into the idea that hiring women in your workplace wasn’t exactly a stable workforce strategy.

Years later, we have many different societal structures in place to support women working outside the home and earning their own steady income (that would give banks the confidence to issue a credit card as a “safe bet”—which wouldn’t have been so back in the day)

Anyway, the point being, it has not always been about “rights” and “oppression”….sometimes it was just “that’s the way things were as a societal norm”
Roles were divided by sex in large part due to some limitations biologically imposed by menses that society had not yet found a widespread “workaround” for.
The introduction of the bc pill changed a LOT of those norms.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Amen! I am a SAHM and I am tired of other working women looking condescendingly down on me like I am chump for staying home and tying my future to my husband. No, madam, you are in fact the chump because you have signed yourself up for two full time jobs! No thank you. I like a life balance and if I have to be a SAHM to get it, so be it. I’d be doing the work at home either way even though my spouse is incredibly sweet and supportive, he just cannot do what I can.

The bolded does not compute.

It's one thing to stay at home because you want to and your spouse appreciates having a parent at home. It's another to stay at home because your spouse is a selfish ahole. From what you describe, yours is the latter. There is nothing " sweet and supportive" about a man who cannot do household chores and take care of his children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Amen! I am a SAHM and I am tired of other working women looking condescendingly down on me like I am chump for staying home and tying my future to my husband. No, madam, you are in fact the chump because you have signed yourself up for two full time jobs! No thank you. I like a life balance and if I have to be a SAHM to get it, so be it. I’d be doing the work at home either way even though my spouse is incredibly sweet and supportive, he just cannot do what I can.

The bolded does not compute.

It's one thing to stay at home because you want to and your spouse appreciates having a parent at home. It's another to stay at home because your spouse is a selfish ahole. From what you describe, yours is the latter. There is nothing " sweet and supportive" about a man who cannot do household chores and take care of his children.

Sounds like PP have specialized in their household and each does what they are better at rather than having two generalists muddling along just trying to survive, arguing over who is doing a larger share of the work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Amen! I am a SAHM and I am tired of other working women looking condescendingly down on me like I am chump for staying home and tying my future to my husband. No, madam, you are in fact the chump because you have signed yourself up for two full time jobs! No thank you. I like a life balance and if I have to be a SAHM to get it, so be it. I’d be doing the work at home either way even though my spouse is incredibly sweet and supportive, he just cannot do what I can.

+1.

Same

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t want to derail this thread so let’s please not get into Ali Wong and her marriage, but I just wanted to mention that I started thinking seriously about this after watching I think it was her Baby Cobra set? Where she talks about wanting to be a SAHM mom because she thinks being a working woman is a scam. The current configuration where women continue to be expected to be beautiful by misogynistic standards, sexually available at all times, do all the childrearing, all of the mental load of running a household, AND get a degree and work full time is NOT what feminism fought for or is about. It is a scam.

Dating in my late twenties was illuminating to me because I found that misogyny and sexism were as prevalent as ever but look different now. Highly educated and high achieving Millennial dudes all wanted a woman who earned more than them and wanted to freeze her eggs and wait until her late 30s to have kids so they could maximize their own time to travel and party and focus solely on themselves. They openly looked down on women who wanted to have children or who didn’t prioritize high earning careers. They claimed it’s because they were feminists but really they just wanted women to take care of them and wanted zero family responsibilities. They also had zero regard for how hard it is for women physically and emotionally to battle infertility in their late 30s and 40s in order to buy their manchildren husbands a few extra years of party time.

This is one take on it.

I experienced something different. My husband values my career and success. He doesn’t think I need to give it up because I had children. He thinks women are capable and wanted a spouse or girlfriend who is his equal intellectually. He also thinks parenting is hard work and that an office job is easier than watching young kids all day. I can’t imagine dating in the 50s or even 60s where marriage automatically meant giving up a career and staying home with kids.

I assume you don’t have kids yet and may change your tune after they arrive. Working and an income = freedom.

NP - I think you and I found wonderful husbands who got the message. But I also think that we still live in a misogynistic society, and too many men have taken the rhetoric of feminism and twisted it to give themselves excuses to be lazy, unengaged, etc while saying that their reason for so being is because they believe in “equality” or that “women are just better at these things”. It can be subtle and pernicious. Meanwhile we haven’t seen major structural societal overhaul. Just more burden being pushed onto women by those who control the messaging.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most liberal women under 40 have a mental illness / mental disease, according to Pew.

This fact may help explain their reluctance to have children.

Link, please.

Is it that we’ve finally acknowledged that in this country especially, we are diverse enough that “normal” only applies to a very tiny group of homogenous, privileged people?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Probably a lot of reasons, including costs. However, I think there some less flattering reasons as well. First, I think millenials and younger cohorts have bought into a “forever young” mentality where they don’t fully appreciate that some doors close permanently. The same mentality causes them to over prioritize going to the latest restaurants or bars well past the age where they should be. Finally, I think a lot of them have bought into the idea that career success is the primary thing to achieve. I am sure that is rewarding, but on the other hand, who is there with you when you are old and retired?

This may be true for some. I know a few couples that dated for years, lived together for years, set a wedding date two years in the future so they could plan leisurely, waited to have kids after getting married, and then boom, struck by infertility. I kept wanting to tell them to hurry up, time is ticking!! (I didn’t of course)

However, I think the bigger thing is the prevalence of so many ways to amuse yourself without a spouse or kids. Back in the day, people used to couple up because they were lonely and it was the expected thing to do, so they just found someone. Now there are so many things to do online and so unless you are really passionate about a significant other or about having kids, it is easiest to default to online activities to fill your time.

Women weren’t even allowed to have their own credit card until 1974.

weren’t even allowed to have their own credit card until 1974.

Women used to couple up because they had no rights.

But isn’t this more like one of those chicken and egg questions?
I mean, credit cards as we know them weren’t “in use” until the very early 60s so very few people had them at all until late into the 60s. And you do know that most women didn’t actually work in 1974, right?
(At least not after they were married, because socially, that would have been very embarrassing/emasculating for the men, as it implied that he could not support his own family…which was not something men OR women would have been excited to advertise!)

Lots of things apart from “the evil patriarchy” were at okay surrounding why women didn’t have jobs…including that “family planning” didn’t exist (no
Birth control pill and no abortion on demand) so you could get pregnant at any time—-and social norms/expectations were that women raised their own babies. There wasn’t a daycare in every corner back then! So all these factors played into the idea that hiring women in your workplace wasn’t exactly a stable workforce strategy.

Years later, we have many different societal structures in place to support women working outside the home and earning their own steady income (that would give banks the confidence to issue a credit card as a “safe bet”—which wouldn’t have been so back in the day)

Anyway, the point being, it has not always been about “rights” and “oppression”….sometimes it was just “that’s the way things were as a societal norm”
Roles were divided by sex in large part due to some limitations biologically imposed by menses that society had not yet found a widespread “workaround” for.
The introduction of the bc pill changed a LOT of those norms.

Too much common sense for this forum.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Amen! I am a SAHM and I am tired of other working women looking condescendingly down on me like I am chump for staying home and tying my future to my husband. No, madam, you are in fact the chump because you have signed yourself up for two full time jobs! No thank you. I like a life balance and if I have to be a SAHM to get it, so be it. I’d be doing the work at home either way even though my spouse is incredibly sweet and supportive, he just cannot do what I can.

But it’s not like this is an ideal solution. You don’t earn a paycheck and aren’t contributing to retirement accounts in your name. You also have to watch and tend to kids all day. Your husband will increasingly rely on your for domestic tasks so you can never fully return to the workforce without truly having 2 jobs. You’ll beard the burden of household chores until you die. Also don’t discount that some of us married to men who do 50/50.

Now if you dislike working, there’s a good chance you’ll stay married for life and don’t care you aren’t earning a paycheck then being a SAHM is a good gig.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We'll see what they think of their decision in 40 years when they end up in a nursing home with no kids or family to visit.

That can happen even if you do have kids.

But a helluva lot less likely if you do have kids. Also you could end up like this! https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/04/florida-guardianship-investigation-safeguards/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it's really about the expectations for parenting. You can't have kids and keep living your pre-kids life without being branded a bad parent. As soon as you have kids, your life becomes kid-centric with playgroups, music classes, sports practices, and on and on. If you aren't interested in this shift, then you don't have kids. In prior generations, people just ignored their kids and went on with their adult lives.

I have an only child by choice, spent most of my life not wanting any kids, and make intentional choices not to have my life be like this, and I think this PP is spot on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Amen! I am a SAHM and I am tired of other working women looking condescendingly down on me like I am chump for staying home and tying my future to my husband. No, madam, you are in fact the chump because you have signed yourself up for two full time jobs! No thank you. I like a life balance and if I have to be a SAHM to get it, so be it. I’d be doing the work at home either way even though my spouse is incredibly sweet and supportive, he just cannot do what I can.

Sounds like you are a chump. Some of us found husbands who are truly equal at home. Mine earns close to a million, 3x my salary and more hours than me, and we are 50-50 at home (with plenty of help) and happy with it. Even when I offer to give him more free time, he says no he wants to spend the time with us.

[Anonymous]

37 with one. had her young so i'm kind of making up for lost time here in my career but i can't fathom having another (i originally wanted 4-6). the cost and time of activities is a lot. i don't know what i'm going to do about college. we are stuck in a small condo i can't sell. yea, team no more kids over here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Amen! I am a SAHM and I am tired of other working women looking condescendingly down on me like I am chump for staying home and tying my future to my husband. No, madam, you are in fact the chump because you have signed yourself up for two full time jobs! No thank you. I like a life balance and if I have to be a SAHM to get it, so be it. I’d be doing the work at home either way even though my spouse is incredibly sweet and supportive, he just cannot do what I can.

The bolded does not compute.

It's one thing to stay at home because you want to and your spouse appreciates having a parent at home. It's another to stay at home because your spouse is a selfish ahole. From what you describe, yours is the latter. There is nothing " sweet and supportive" about a man who cannot do household chores and take care of his children.

Sounds like PP have specialized in their household and each does what they are better at rather than having two generalists muddling along just trying to survive, arguing over who is doing a larger share of the work.

+1

I absolutely think men can be terrific primary parents and homemakers -- I know a number of men who do this and are good at it. There's nothing about being a man that prevents you from developing these skills and putting in the effort.

The problem is that many men (I'd venture to say most) are socialized out of taking an interest in these tasks, taught to believe they are not good at them, and witness the "learned helplessness" of their own fathers in their childhood homes. As a result, many men arrive at parenthood with very few of the skills or interests needed to do these jobs well. They aren't aren't necessarily bad people and their misogynist beliefs about this stuff is mostly unconscious and fully internalized. But it's who they are.

So if you find yourself in a marriage with one of these men (and the truth of the matter is that many heterosexual women will, because this is what the pool of heterosexual men looks like) you have to make choices about what makes sense for you. You might choose to forgo motherhood altogether and just have an egalitarian marriage where you both work, you hire someone else to clean your house, and then you travel and enjoy each other. Total reasonable solution.

But some women really do want to be moms. And if you want to be a mom and you are in a marriage with someone who simply WILL NOT split the responsibilities of parenthood equally, there is a strong argument that the more empowering choice for some women is to be a SAHM, than to be a working mom who does the vast majority of the childcare and household duties.

Some women split the difference and work part time. This is actually me. It's better than being full time in terms of workload given what is probably an 80-20 or 90-10 split on parenting/household stuff with my well-meaning DH. It still means I have a much fuller plate than he does and especially that the weight of family life weighs on me in a way it doesn't on him. But it's worth it to me because I like earning money and actually do like my job, plus I do worry a bit that if I just was a SAHM, where does that leave me once kids are older and don't need me as much.

But the broader point is that we often hold out the full time working mom with the baller career and the perfect kids and home as the epitome of feminism. But is it? Because the epitome of the patriarchy is the husband of one of these super women, who has a middling career, doesn't do f***-all at home, but still makes time for golf on Saturday and brags about his kids and his wife and his home like he put the effort in, when it was all her.

Supermom is a scam. A SAHM is more empowered because she at least actually shares the responsibility of the family with her husband.