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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Saying that millennial men pitched this whole concept is a little disingenuous. They're responding to the culture the same that women do. Just because we stopped teaching girls how to manage households doesn't mean we started teaching men how to do it. It just means that now both men and women don't know how to do it and we're all reinventing the wheel in our nuclear bubbles. Hence why household management and and childrearing is experienced as burdensome even though childhood mortality has been statistically eradicated. Unless we go back to valuing the family unit and valorizing care of children as a societal good, birth rates will continue to plummet.[/quote]

You've got to be kidding. Childrearing is experienced as burdensome because parenting has become vastly more intensive. My childhood, including that I was babysitting multiple toddlers/babies in middle school, would be considered abusive now for both me and the kids I was sitting for. Adding to that, the returns to having an all-consuming job have gone up, too. The issue is not that I don't know how to "manage a household", it's that it's objectively difficult to both provide the kind of parenting that's now expected and to work, particularly if you want to want to have a career, aren't independently wealthy, and want to get started on having kids young enough that you're unlikely to experience age -related fertility challenges. [/quote]

I agree with everything you've said  but I dont think it contradicts the point I made about household management. Many people really dont know how to manage a household -- it's not taught. And it's a source of marital tension for many even if it's not for you. And while you babysat, as you've pointed out kids today don't experience that and are totally segregated from the various stages of childhood and how to care for them. So it's not like today's kids will have it any easier in that regard.

The uncomfortable reality is that intensive childrearing arises out of two correlated conditions: late-in life parents and 1-2 kids. If you have kids when you're old (relatively speaking) and only have 1-2, they become precious in a way that is exhausting for the parents and detrimental to the process of individuation in the child. I'm facing this too.

The obvious elephant in the room is the early educational and professional tracks we have our kids on--particularly girls bc their window of maximal physical desirability and fertility is both earlier and shorter than males. It sucks, but I don't make the rules. Putting them on the same paced career track in order to compete for jobs with males was always just going to result in a different set of trade offs.

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But the issue is not knowledge for 'managing a household', it's very real constraints around hours in a day and how you can raise your kids. If I let my kids be independent the way I know they can handle, we'd be getting the cops called on us. [/quote]

I don't disagree with you! How did we get here? I've put forth one explanation that, while not the entire answer, is a big part of it. Unless and until women start having kids earlier and stop outsourcing the care of babies and children, this is the kind of culture we can expect to live in--one in which the ever shifting nat'l zeitgeist has larger say. It very well could be that one of the trade offs to women establishing careers before having families is that our kids can't have the kind of childhoods we want for them bc even if our families are nuclear, we can't exit the realities of the larger culture. To that end, I don't think millennials realize that they are on the tail end of a radical sociological shift and that taking a stock of the results would be pragmatic.[/quote]

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