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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:35
The Mommy Wars | Is Stay-at-Home Parenting Worth It?
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Inn Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
I'd like to chat about really one of the three most important decisions that you will ever make in your life.
The first is what you're going to do with your life.
What's it going to stand for?
What do you want written on your tombstone?
Number two is who you're going to marry, assuming that you want to get married, who you're going to marry or who you're going to spend your life with, the company that you keep from a both romantic to a familial to a friendship standpoint, the second most important decisions.
And the third most important decision is if you have children, will you stay home with your children or Will you not?
Will you give them to other people to raise?
Full disclosure, I've been a stay-at-home father for six years, a little over six years now, and that's my choice.
I don't regret that choice in any way, shape, or form.
For those who don't know, before I was a stay-at-home dad, I had a high-powered career as a software entrepreneur and executive.
I co-founded and grew and sold a company and worked at a variety of software companies at uh... high management positions and uh... someone And then I quit to be a stay-at-home father.
So I gave up quite a lot but have received even more rewards in a variety of ways.
So an article was written by a woman named Fanoosh Torabi called, Why stay-at-home parenting just isn't worth it.
And I think she's got some very interesting points to make.
I may have some useful rebuttals and hopefully this will help to clear the air, for some people at least, about ways of making decisions about staying home with your children or not.
The article starts, she writes, with just three months left until we welcome our first child, my husband and I have naturally been discussing how to best manage our future family in terms of childcare.
As the breadwinner in my marriage, I've pondered what life might be like with a stay-at-home husband and dad.
Financially, we could afford to live off my income alone, eliminate the need to outsource childcare, and designate my husband as the primary caretaker.
And from an emotional standpoint, it's comforting to imagine our child being cared for by a parent rather than a hired caregiver.
But we've ultimately decided No matter how wide our income disparity and no matter who is bringing home the smaller paycheck, entirely opting out of the workforce to be a stay-at-home parent is far too risky.
The cons outweigh the pros.
So that I think is very interesting that The first thing that I want to say is I'm really quite entirely opposed to the argument that parenting can be outsourced.
I mean, if you imagine it's going to be your wedding anniversary, it's your 10th wedding anniversary, and your husband calls you And says, Oh, I'm sorry, I won't be available until tomorrow night.
So for our anniversary, I've hired someone for eight or $9 an hour, who's going to come and have dinner with you.
And that's pretty much the same, right?
Well, of course, you as a wife, or a husband would say, No, it's really not the same.
I want to spend time with you, not someone you've hired to replace you, particularly someone kind of unskilled and lowly paid.
And the reality is I myself, Steph, worked in a daycare for a number of years when I was younger and there were some people who were highly competent and qualified, hopefully I was one of them at least competent, but they were just passing through.
The people who were staying there were people who didn't really have many other options and couldn't make more than, I guess, somewhat above minimum wage.
So the idea that parenting can be outsourced to lower-skilled, lower-wage people with no loss in quality is really the same as saying that being a spouse can be outsourced to someone of lower pay and at least lower economic value.
That's really not the case.
Spouses are irreplaceable.
Parents are irreplaceable.
The idea that I could go back to earning massive amounts of money as a software executive, pay a small amount of it to a child care provider and it would be the same for my daughter is simply not the case.
So I think the idea that you can just outsource parenting to low, lowly paid people, I think is, is not, not true, not rational, particularly if you want to parent in a different way than you were parented.
I was parented very aggressively.
I'm parenting very peacefully.
Uh, no punishments, no raised voices, no name calling, no spanking, of course, no yelling.
And, um, that takes a lot of concentration, a lot of research and a lot of focus.
So, let's have a look at some of this lady's arguments.
So, one thing that she says is she says, if two parents are working, you'll have more financial stability and freedom.
She writes, while two incomes can certainly lead to more expenses, such as more vacations, nicer cars and outsourced help, when the money is managed properly and households save well and spend conservatively, it can result in increased financial stability for everyone.
If one partner gets laid off, not all is lost.
There is the financial support of the other spouse and hopefully some savings to help keep the lights on while a new job materializes.
As this academic summary from Hope College and Cornell University points out, she writes, Not only are two wage earners often necessary to adequately provide for the needs of most families, dual-earner couples are less economically vulnerable than single-earner families, for whom a layoff can mean financial collapse.
She also writes, But perhaps my biggest fear for any stay-at-home parent is the loss of one's individual financial independence.
Financial autonomy is critical to any marriage.
It reduces conflict over money matters and provides each partner with more freedom and flexibility to make choices, especially if the marriage fails and he or she needs to self-support.
You don't need to earn an equal amount or more money than your partner.
You just need to earn enough.
So if you had to solely support yourself one day, you could.
In practice, this could mean working part-time and caring for your children part-time.
But unless you have a major inheritance parked somewhere, it can't realistically mean departing from the workforce altogether.
So a few things to say about this.
So to take the last part first, This is going to sound simplistic but this is actually what has worked for me.
I never was particularly interested in getting married.
I grew up as part of the massive supernova of families that occurred in the late sixties and throughout the seventies and even into the eighties where divorce rates rose many many times over and I was raised by a single mother and so I had seen the amount of destruction that can happen when a marriage breaks up.
So when I met Uh, my future wife, you know, we sat down, we talked about it and I said, look, I mean, you're, you're a wonderful human being.
I completely could see spending my life with you.
We actually got married 11 months after we met.
Um, it was very irresistible to me, but I said, look, if we're going to get married, there is no possibility of divorce, right?
We simply can't, uh, we can't have that as an option in our back pocket because In my experience, nothing succeeds like commitment.
Nothing succeeds like commitment.
And if you are fully committed to a marriage, I really don't think it's going to fail.
I mean, if you both make that commitment and say, we're going to do whatever it takes to keep the marriage happy, you keep the lines of communication open and you work at the marriage.
And I have a pretty maintenance-free marriage, but unlike my wife.
I have a pretty maintenance free marriage and I actually wrote the vows for our ceremony and in it basically it was said until death do us part.
Now that is a very serious commitment.
That is to me the most serious commitment that I'm going to make in my life is twofold.
It's to my wife and to my daughter and of course to act with integrity and honesty and openness towards my listeners such as yourself.
So I don't like... I wouldn't have gotten married if she said, well, you know, I'd like to stay married, but you know, hey, if divorce comes along or if the marriage fails and that's what happens, I would not have gotten married in that situation.
And particularly, marriage is fundamentally there for children.
And of course, people can get married who don't want kids, who are gay, who are infertile and so on.
But the institution as a whole is generally there to create a stable bedrock for the raising of children.
And since I knew if I got married to my wife, I definitely would want to experience her as a mother and experience myself as a father.
So that was very important.
If you're going to have kids, then you need to have that commitment.
The great thing about having that commitment is if you have doubts, you don't get married.
And I never had any doubts before.
I've never had any doubts since.
We're now in our 12th year of marriage, and it's more wonderful now than it was when we first met.
And part of that is the commitment.
So the commitment is to stay, and because you know you can't leave, Then you really try to choose as wisely as possible.
Now this woman, of course, is in a marriage and she has some concerns about the marriage not working out, but my approach would be to simply take that off the table.
If you take that off the table, a divorce, then your life becomes immeasurably simpler.
Now, there is an interesting correlation between a variety of things to do with intelligence which i'll just in a shorthand form refer to as iq because that's generally the most tested one the higher the iq the more likely the marriages to succeed and the reasons for that i don't know if anyone's fully explained them some of them are fairly obvious you know the ability to defer gratification to anticipate and understand the long-term consequences of decisions and so on so
So the higher in general your IQ, the more likely your marriage is to succeed, which is why marrying someone very intelligent can be a very positive thing for you.
So what's also true is that when we're just talking about women who leave the workforce, I mean, I'm very much the anomaly.
I think they're like 30,000 stay-at-home dads out of like a 35 million population in Canada.
But if we just go with the standard and talk about women, then the more intelligent a woman in general, the higher her income is going to be.
What that means is that if she takes time out of the workforce, it's going to be more costly than if she was a person of lower intelligence.
Again, there are exceptions to every one of these general rules, but there is kind of like a bell curve.
And so if you're going to leave the workforce as a woman and you're more intelligent, then it's going to be more costly.
You know, quitting a job, working at a donut shop is different from taking time off from your job as a corporate lawyer or something like that.
So these are all important considerations to be aware of as we start to delve in to the complex matrix of decision-making about staying home.
The last thing I'd say is that having children is not an economic decision at least in the first world.
Like so throughout history children from the age of four or five would help out on the farm or help pick berries or help maybe even hunt when the boys got a little older.
So there was economic value in having children in the past and of course prior to the excess capital capacity to save for your old age either directly or through taxation and Social Security or other forms of retirement pensions from the government, you needed children to take care of you in your old age.
So in the past, yes, there were economic decision matrices when it came to having children.
In the present, it's really not that sensible an idea to do a cost-benefit calculation for kids.
They cost $200,000, $300,000 depending on where you live, $152,000, $300,000 to raise, and they're really not usually going to be chipping in a huge amount for your retirement and so on.
So it's really not, I think, productive or sensible to say, well, having a child is going to be a purely economic cost benefit decision, at least in the modern world.
I just want to mention that as well.
So let's start looking at in the United States about some of these statistics.
So foreign-born women skew the data quite a bit when it comes to stay-at-home moms.
So even though foreign-born women are only 13% of the US female population, they're almost 40% of stay-at-home mothers.
So foreign-born women are 53% more likely to be stay-at-home mothers than working mothers.
This matters because she quotes a lot of data in her article, but she doesn't talk about this discrepancy.
So married foreign-born couples are three times more likely to live in poverty compared to native ones.
Foreign-born women are also in America nearly nine times more likely to have less than a 9th grade educational level.
So this is really important for a variety of reasons.
Most importantly, if you have low education, then most likely you're going to have a low-paying job.
If you're going to have a low-paying job, it makes much less sense for you to go to that job and take virtually all of your earnings and hand them over to a daycare.
Because then, you're going to a job, not spending time with your children, and not really making any money from your job.
So as your income increases, then the economic sense of outsourcing child care also increases.
So this is important.
These are women who are much less educated on average than domestic and have low domestically born women and have much higher levels of poverty.
So when you look at studies that compare the financial stability of two parents working versus one parent working and one parent staying home, You are to a large degree looking at the difference between immigrant and native economic environments and this was not broken down and we've got tons and tons of links we'll put in the description of the video and also in the notes for the podcast so that you can look at that more clearly.
So, when she says, oh, you know, when one person stays home, they're a lot poorer.
The couple is a lot poorer.
Well, yeah, but that's because you're comparing apples to oranges to a large degree.
You're comparing immigrants to native-born Americans.
So, when it comes to financial stability, the lady's argument in the article is, if you have two people working, then you have more financial stability.
That is not as clear or obvious as it sounds.
Let's break that down a bit.
Let's think of two hypothetical families.
So the first is Mr. and Mrs. Richardson.
They both have high-paying jobs and earn $100,000 each annually.
On the other hand, Mr. and Mrs. Frugal have a different arrangement.
Mrs. Frugal stays home and runs the household, thus enabling Mr. Frugal to focus 100% on his job, which brings home $125,000 a year.
Now, when one person stays home, the other person can focus more on the career.
It's more available to work late, it's more available for travel and can have a greater focus and doesn't have as much to do when he or she gets home.
So there generally is an increase.
Men earn on average 6% more for every child they bring into the world for a variety of reasons.
And so it stands to reason that a man whose wife stays home can earn a little bit more.
So, let's say that it's like 2008 or 2009.
There's a volatile economy, so the probability of being fired or laid off or whatever is rather high.
Let's just say 25%.
So, Mr. Frugal thus has a 25% chance of being fired.
However, for the Richardsons, the risk of one of them getting fired is 50%, which is twice the risks that the Frugals are facing.
So when one person is working, and for every one person working there's a 25% chance of getting fired, then yeah, 25% chance Mr. Frugal is going to get fired.
With two people working, the chance that one of them is going to get fired is 50%, because they stack, right?
Both families have likely adjusted their lifestyles to match their incomes.
So the Richardson's have more money and therefore they're going to be spending more.
Brand new BMWs, a bigger house, more vacations, as the woman talks about.
And so you have income here and expenses kind of here for both families, but there's a 50% chance that one of the Richardsons is going to lose their job over some specific time period.
And there's only a 25% chance that one of the Frugals is going to do that.
So let's say that these two couples decide to have a baby.
So daycare and other related expenses cost $25,000 a year.
Now, the $125,000 that the Frugals make because the wife stays home and the husband works doesn't take a dip because Mrs. Frugal will take care of their newborn.
So Mr. and Mrs. Richardson, on the other hand, now have a combined income of $175,000 due to the aforementioned child care expenses.
So once you have kids, then the income gap between the two families drops from $75,000 down to $50,000.
Now Mrs. Richardson, in a way, is taking a 50% pay cut while working for the same number of hours.
Not only that, the Richardson's, unlike the Frugals, will have to adjust their lifestyles to accommodate a lower income because they're outsourcing now the childcare.
Now should one of the Richardson's get fired, remember there's twice the risk compared to the single breadwinner family, the income gap will be flipped and now the Frugals are $50,000 ahead, right?
Because they're making $125,000 whereas now the Richardson's are only making $75,000 because one of them got fired.
The $100,000 is reduced by $25,000 of childcare expenses and so they're not doing very well at all.
Now this is obviously quite simplified.
It's much more complicated to do real-world cost-benefit calculations.
When you factor in taxes and how they are structured, two income families in the US make even less sense.
And we're going to put a link below to Lillian Fellhaber's New York Times article entitled, How the IRS Hurts Mothers, for more on this subject.
subject.
So the other thing too is that your husband and yourself, if you work, are going to enter into a higher tax bracket, which means even a larger proportion of income gets taken away.
So again, there's lots of complications, but it's not as simple as, well, double the income is and so on, right?
Now, you could also argue that losing your only source of income is much worse than merely having your income cut in half if one of the Richardsons loses his job.
Yeah, that sort of makes sense on the surface.
However, families prior to the 1960s, were they going bankrupt left and right?
And prior to the 1950s, And 1960s, but particular prior to the 1950s, it was a single parent, single worker household and single mom staying at home, single worker household, but the wife staying at home.
But bankruptcy was much less frequent.
And of course, even if it did happen, there were social structures that offset the risk.
You had families, friends, and above all charities.
You can look up the history of what are called friendly societies, which have sadly diminished or almost vanished in the modern world, being displaced or elbowed aside by the welfare state.
And we'll put more links about these below.
So does it mean that having a single breadwinner household is always the better option?
Not necessarily, but having one parent stay at home when a child is born lowers both risks and expenses and also brings a host of course of other unquantifiable benefits.
It is far less stressful for a family when one person is staying home with the children and one person But perhaps my biggest fear for any stay-at-home parent is the loss of one's individual financial independence.
Financial autonomy is critical to any marriage.
take that bullet and roll with it rather than two people working.
So let's go back to the lady's article where she says, quote, but perhaps my biggest fear for any stay-at-home parent is the loss of one's individual financial independence.
Financial autonomy is critical to any marriage.
It reduces conflict over money matters and so on.
And I think that it does not make any sense to me to go into Marriage with your bank account like Gollum clutching his ring mine mine my precious my precious.
I think that if you're going to mingle bodily fluids and create a real-life human being and you're gonna live under the same roof and bubble fart in each other's presence and all the other fun stuff that goes along with marriage I think that you put the money into a pot and Everyone gets access to it and you know we're in or out of the money incomes can go up and down and in varying ways but I've personally never understood this two bank accounts for married couples and so on.
I mean, you breathe the same air and you eat the same food and you might as well mix up the money.
So this idea that you keep it close to yourself and so on, to me, if you don't trust the man enough or the woman enough to mingle your money together, that's a pretty good sign that it may not be the wisest marriage in the known universe.
Again, I think nothing succeeds like commitment.
There's nothing that produces progress more than being backed into a corner.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
And if you think that divorce is an option, it actually becomes an option in a way that doesn't happen otherwise.
Now, this is another interesting question that Women and men, of course, are talking a lot about and have been for some decades, which is the basic question of when to have kids.
So if you want to have kids, you could make the argument.
I think it's a pretty good argument to make.
You can make the argument and say, so have your kids when you're young.
You know, you get out of high school and you could maybe go to college or not, but have your kids in your early twenties.
You know, you've got more energy, you can stay up all night, you've got, you know, the metabolism and so on.
And of course, your eggs are fresher and healthier, right?
fertility and fertility problems begin to increase when a woman is in her late 20s and the risk of genetic abnormalities and so on rise considerably after the mid-30s for women and so on.
So have kids when you're young and you're healthy and so on.
And it really is the first five years that seems to be the most crucial for child development and bonding.
Of course, year six and so on, they're probably going into a school of some kind, hopefully not a government school.
That's my particular perspective, but they will be going into a school of some kind and therefore your time is less If you're going to have two kids, two years apart, you've got seven years of at-home time.
If you have kids when you're 20 or 21, you're 27 or 28, you can get a degree.
You can, of course, also get a degree part-time when your kids are young.
They do a lot of sleeping.
And then you can start your career in your late 20s, your early 30s and then you've got 35, 36, 37 years to work before you retire.
So this is one option.
You have the kids and then you go have your career.
And the other option, of course, is that you You get your degree, you get into the workforce, you work like mad to establish yourself as a professional.
I mean, when I was an entrepreneur, I was working like 60, 70, 80 hours a week and traveling a week or two a month.
And it was just crazy fun, exciting that I was single.
So there was no problem for that.
And then you have your kids, you know, early to mid 30s or whatever.
And then that is like the career sandwich.
It's like career, kids, career again.
And that is a problem.
You know, particularly if you're in something like medicine, where things can change a lot in the seven years, you can stay home or law or other kinds of professions.
So I don't have a huge amount of answers other than if I had a do-over and met the right person I would opt for having kids a lot younger.
Kids don't care if you're in a one-bedroom apartment.
They don't care at all.
They just want a parent or parents close by.
We save money to go to school and usually not earn any money for the most part for four years to get a college degree, to do it for a couple of years more, to be there for your kids when they're growing up.
I think it's a good investment.
I think it's a very, very good investment.
So these are the choices.
And she talks about this, the woman, when she says, quote, you'll enjoy greater career success if you go back to work.
When kids enter our lives, many of us will be at pivotal points in our careers, or at least we still have promising trajectories ahead.
A major and costly trade-off to becoming a stay-at-home parent is losing that momentum you've worked so hard to establish.
Can you really afford this in the long run?
Sure, the math may tell you it's more economical to quit your job and be the primary caregiver today.
But what about five or 10 years from now?
If you have hopes of ever returning to your old post and picking up where you left off once your children are in school, it may not be so easy.
And that is very true.
Children are a massive time sink.
And I think you have to throw yourself into that pit happily and merrily and enjoy the ride.
Until you... It's an old cliche, and I'm sorry for being cliched.
I try to avoid it, of course, but it is a true fact of nature that until you have kids, it's really hard to understand what it's like to have kids.
I mean I used to write like two books a year before I became a father and I've not written a book in six years.
It's just one of the many things that you have to do if you're going to commit to your children.
But to me, saying well I want the same economic strength after being a parent economic opportunities or income after being a parent is before being a parent it's kind of like being a guy and saying well I still want to I want to get married get all the benefits of marriage and a wife and the support and and I still want to be able to sleep around right like I still want to be the same as if I'm not married it's like no no you get married assuming monogamy is your brand of wood you get married
you're monogamous and And one thing you give up is you forswear all other naughty bits beside the one in the white dress or the black tux.
And so the idea is like, well, I want to have kids, but I want it to be like, I don't have kids when it comes to my career.
This is irrational to me as saying, well, I want to have a monogamous marriage, but I still want to be able to sleep around without any negative repercussions.
It's just not how, how it works.
So, whether you can afford it or not is kind of an interesting question, I think.
And this is where if you're going to have kids in your 30s, and if you know you want to have kids, then save your money up in your 20s so you can take the time off and not have as huge a hit to your income as would be otherwise.
Now here I think correlation and causation are always big challenges in social studies.
But here's what she wrote about divorce.
She said, your risk of divorce is lower.
Economists at Boston University found that dual income marriages are more secure and couples are less likely to split than those in marriages with only one working spouse.
Further, according to the book Getting 50-50 How Working Parents Can Have It All, marriages in which there is a sole breadwinner get divorced at a rate 14% above average, the highest of any income split.
And if income and housework is divided evenly, the risk of divorce is 48% lower than average.
Why?
The authors say it's got a lot to do with the fact that dual income marriages have more financial stability.
Being a sole breadwinner carries a tremendous amount of stress, and having a partner to share the weight can lead to more harmony and compatibility.
Okay, so this is a very significantly challenging statement to make.
So basically she's saying that if one person, like all other things being equal, if one person goes to work and one person stays home, the marriage is 14% more likely to break up.
I did a lot of looking into this, we did a lot of looking into this, and it's really hard to make that case.
So she mentions that dual income marriages, quote, are more secure and couples are less likely to split than those in marriages with only one working spouse.
So this evidence is in a study that compared the divorce rate of states with low to high female participation in the labor force.
This is a very crude comparison.
And of course, the US is a pretty large country and ignoring regional factors while comparing averages across large populations is likely to distort the results.
So she also, to her credit, she presents a much better divorce rate study that was referenced from the book called Getting to 50-50.
Tarabi, she writes, quote, marriages in which there is a sole breadwinner get divorced at a rate 14% above average, the highest of any income split.
What the author of this Getting to 5050 book didn't report was that the study compared divorce rate patterns in both West Germany and the United States and reached very different conclusions for both countries.
While dividing income and housework evenly resulted in a risk of divorce that was 48% below average in the United States, it was the exact opposite in Germany, where a 50-50 split corresponded to a divorce rate risk of 46% above average.
So when you split income and housework in the US, you have a 48% chance less of getting divorced.
In Germany, it's a 46% greater chance of getting divorced.
Moreover, the risk of divorce in West Germany grows for each percentage point increase in the wife's earnings as a proportion of the family income.
Suggesting that, at least there, the most stable environment for a married couple is to have a single male breadwinner and a wife that takes care of all the housework.
So the fact that there's such a stark contrast between the two countries suggests that either the ratio of household work and income is not a significant factor in divorce, or the results are a statistical anomaly.
And of course, unfortunately, it was a very small sample size, only 559 for West Germany and 506 for the United States.
The prevalence of certain more extreme feminist arguments about staying at home, you're exploited, you're a slave, you know, all the Hillary Clinton stuff, traditional marriage as a slave, slavery and so on, may be a factor as well.
Now, the study doesn't even explicitly compare couples with children and And, of course, when babies enter their lives, the work and household arrangements tend to change considerably, and birth rates are much lower in West Germany than they are in America.
So if you haven't even factored in children, this doesn't really make any sense.
Now, the other thing that is important as well, you remember earlier I talked about how the more intelligent you are, The less likely you are to divorce, in general, on average.
And the more intelligent you are, the less economic sense it makes for one partner to stay home, for the woman to stay home, because you give up significant income.
At least that's the perception.
And the more intelligent you are, the more you're going to see the value of doing things like splitting housework and splitting income and so on.
So this again, this may be correlation to high IQ rather than a causation.
Like if you take the same couple with the same IQ and one stays home, it doesn't necessarily change things.
It's just that the higher IQ couples both tend to work from a financial standpoint.
It makes more sense.
Let's look at education.
So I was, of course, reading through the article, trying not to be too critical.
And then I'm like, well, what about the kids?
What about the kids?
And to her extreme credit, she did get to this point.
She writes, Now you may be wondering, what about the children?
Let's not forget the most important people in our lives.
Aren't children better off when raised by a stay-at-home parent than a babysitter or daycare attendant?
Conventional wisdom may lead one to think so.
But from an academic standpoint, New research finds this to be false.
After evaluating the grade point averages of 135,000 Danish 15-year-olds whose mothers worked and whose mothers stayed home, a research team led by Cornell University concluded that, quote, maternal employment has a positive effect on children's academic performance, end quote.
The authors believe that when both parents work, a bigger pool of money provides parents the ability to spend more on education enrichment like tutoring, music, and sports.
The author states, A quick look at the reference study reveals that the quote comes from the abstract of the study and omits an important sentence, which is as follows, This is in contrast with the larger literature on maternal employment, much of which takes place in other contexts, and which finds no or a small negative effect of maternal employment on children's cognitive development and academic performance.
So let's, rather than taking a quote from the abstract and not comparing it to any wider body of literature, let's look at what's actually said in the paper.
In the U.S., let's examine the consequences of maternal employment for children.
Looking across these studies, results are somewhat varied, with some studies showing that maternal employment in the first months of life is associated with a small but significant decline in children's subsequent cognitive outcomes, particularly when mothers worked more than 30 hours per week.
Maternal employment in the first months of life is associated with a small but significant decline in children's subsequent cognitive outcomes.
Now the U.S.
isn't unique in this regard.
In 1998, the Norwegian government introduced a program called Cash for Care that promoted stay-at-home parenting through cash allowance for parents who didn't utilize public daycare programs.
Researchers studying the academic performance effects of this program found a 1.2 point GPA increase on a six-point scale for children with stay-at-home parents compared to those whose parents both worked.
That is extremely significant. 1.2 Increase on a six point scale, that is 20% give or take a 20% increase for the children of moms who stayed home.
Also, sorry, it's important to point out the Norwegian study examined families in which one of the parents quit his or her jobs much later in the child's life, suggesting the benefits accrue even if you don't stay at home with your children from the beginning.
Now, according to the Danish study that was referenced in this lady's article, how much higher was the GPA of children whose mothers worked?
Well, the study found that, quote, the child of a woman who worked 30 or more hours per week while her child was under the age of 4 is predicted to have a GPA that is 5.6% higher than an otherwise similar child whose mother worked between 10 and 19 hours per week.
So we have a 20% increase in one study for women who stay home and a 5.6% increase for mothers who worked more.
It doesn't mention anything, of course, about fathers.
We barely exist, so we don't know what percentage of this sample set included children raised by stay-at-home fathers.
So we did look through all the data.
We found something very interesting.
And in the last regression coefficient estimates table in particular, overall, the GPA of children born outside of Denmark was slightly lower than those native-borns.
But above all, the educational level of the mother has a significant impact on the child's GPA.
The higher the educational level of the mother, the higher the GPA of the child.
In fact, in terms of variance, the education of the mother was the best predictor of the child's GPA.
So, running the numbers, the statistical coefficient for mothers' highest education prior to birth, which affects the child's GPA at age 15, was minus 0.68 for mothers with no education, compared to a plus 0.49 GPA coefficient for mothers with a master's degree or higher.
We know that significant portions of IQ are transmitted genetically.
Nobody knows exactly how much.
Estimates have ranged from a third to a half to two thirds, but there is a proportion of IQ that appears to be transmitted genetically.
So, it's not that everyone you send to get a master's ends up with smarter children, it's just that women who have a higher IQ who get a master's degree, and a master's degree usually requires an IQ of 125 or more, which is significantly above the norm of 100, women who have higher IQs will go on to get master's and are more likely to have higher IQ children.
Now, women who have master's are also going to be more likely to be in the workforce.
So you see, it's not that any woman who goes to work is going to raise her child's IQ.
It's that more intelligent women tend to go to work more and have more intelligent children.
Whereas if they'd stayed home, their children might be even more intelligent.
Proportionately, we talked about foreign-born versus domestic-born people as well.
Denmark has half the immigration population compared to the U.S.
But if we assume that the Danish demographic dynamics are similar to those in America, that's a big if, but let's go with it anyway for the moment.
A large percentage of Danish stay-at-home mothers are foreign-born and have significantly lower-than-average education, which of course will affect the results of the study.
So, and again, we're going to put the links for this in my claim.
People with masters and doctoral degrees have an average IQ of 125, which is much higher than the average population.
So their children are also far more likely to have higher IQs, even when accounting for regression to the mean.
So regression to the mean is that two people with an IQ of 150 are not likely to produce a child with an IQ of 150.
There is a regression.
to the mean.
Otherwise, you know, people just get taller and taller and smarter and smarter.
There is a regression to the mean.
So children with higher IQs spend more years in the educational system.
They do better on standardized tests and have higher school grades.
So this is a very significant factor, which of course is, as IQ conversations generally are, not part of the article.
I mean, that's asking a lot.
I'm just sort of pointing out what we found from looking at the data.
So studies of the academic performance impact of stay-at-home parents that don't normalize their results based on socio-economic factors and biological factors and socio-economic slash biological like intelligence, they aren't comparing apples to apples.
They certainly aren't establishing causation, perhaps loosely correlation, so they don't really add much to the discussion.
Okay, so, article quote, she says, okay, but are kids happier with a parent at home?
As sociologist Kathleen Gerson, author of The Unfinished Revolution, told me, the most important thing for your children to witness is that you have a healthy relationship with your work and your money.
If they sense that you hate your job, it won't matter how much you're bringing in, they won't appreciate it.
Okay, I'm not sure why you would ask a sociologist about what makes children happy.
I mean, maybe a developmental psychologist or someone like that would be better.
Also, there's no study that's quoted.
It's just something that someone told her.
And the most important thing for your children to witness is that you have a healthy relationship with your work and your money.
I don't like this idea that work means work outside the home for money, not taking care of your children.
Being a parent is one of the most challenging and exciting and enriching jobs that I've ever had.
And I run the biggest philosophy show on the, uh, on the web.
So that's quite a high standard to have.
So having a healthy relationship with money.
Absolutely.
Of course, that's important for your children to understand.
But having a healthy relationship with your work doesn't mean you'll work outside the home.
How about having a healthy relationship with your job as a parent?
Well, that's very important as well.
So the most important thing for your children to witness is that you have a healthy relationship with your work and your money?
That is the most important... That seems like a pretty staggering claim to make without any particular proof.
So instead of looking at things like financial stability and job fulfillment, none of which really existed throughout our evolution as a species, why not research attachment theory, which is a very, very important aspect to understand.
Attachment theory is the security of the bond that the children have with their parents.
Infants who are put in daycare for 20 to 30 hours a week exhibit the same stress and trauma as children who are actually abandoned by their mothers.
Like maternal abandonment is the same because, of course, infants don't know time and understand passage and so on.
Infants exposed to more than 20 hours of daycare a week are much more likely to be classified as insecurely attached.
And what does that mean?
Insecurely attached children face a host of issues later in life.
Depression, anxiety disorders, impaired emotional regulation, and it really is a significant challenge to parent an insecurely attached child through puberty.
In examining the link between psychopathology and insecure attachment, researchers concluded, quote, attachment insecurities are associated with a wide variety of mental disorders, Ranging from mild negative affectivity to severe disorganizing and paralyzing personality disorders.
The evidence suggests that insecure attachment orientations, whether anxious or avoidant, are fairly general, pathogenic states.
So building a secure bond with your child is one of the best investments you can make in both your own and your child's or children's future happiness.
I mean, I think most mothers already understand this intuitively.
Surveys in the UK have found that upwards of 80% of working mothers feel guilty about leaving their children in the care of others.
I mean, I did my very best working in a daycare.
I had some wonderful kids to spend time with.
I remember telling them the whole story of the Silmarillion.
I was that geeky.
Well, still am for that matter.
I tell him the whole story of the Silmarillion, and I remember taking a bunch of little kids to go and see a movie called The Last Starfighter.
Oh, I didn't really get to see it at all.
This is back when those things mattered to me.
But, yeah, does anyone need to go to the bathroom?
No, no, no.
Five minutes into the movie, I have to go to the bathroom.
Does anyone else need to go to the bathroom?
No, no, no.
Ten minutes into the movie, I need to go to the bathroom.
Basically, The Last Starfighter appeared to be a urinal to my way of thinking, my experience.
So when, and, and we, there was myself and another, I was a teacher's assistant, not even really, but, but there was myself and another person in the room and we had like 25, five to 10 year olds.
And what children need, what I believe really helps them grow the best and mature the quickest is one-on-one time with adults.
I mean, your kids are in daycare.
It's Lord of the Flies.
It's horizontal focus.
They're peer-oriented because that's the vast majority of their interactions.
It's not with a harried teacher who's constantly trying to put out fires and figure out who pushed who and who took what from who and so on.
So having – if your children grow up in daycare, there are some studies on this, but this is conjecture.
experience on my part.
So take it with as much of a grain of salt as you want.
But I think it stands to reason that when children grow up in daycare, they focus horizontally on peer relationships, not so much on hierarchy to adult-child relationships.
And children cannot raise each other.
And what happens with peer-focused relationships is the most dysfunctional children often end up ruling the environment.
It's sort of a race to the bottom.
It's the lowest common denominator.
The most dysfunctional, the most aggressive, the most bullying, the most manipulative tend to end up in charge.
And so as far as do you, like, can you afford To stay home with your children, my argument would be, but can you afford not to?
This woman says, well, you're deferring losses perhaps down the road.
I say, well, yes, but you're also deferring difficulty with being a parent down the road.
And these challenges, these attachment disorder challenges They can last a lifetime and they can be significantly damaging.
Daycare, of course, is a cesspool of disease, particularly for infants.
As a U.S.
Center for Disease Control and Prevention report points out, children in daycare, quote, are at a substantially increased risk for enteric infections such as hepatitis A, gerodiasis, cryptosporidiasis, acute respiratory illnesses, middle ear infections, and so on.
So daycare is not a replacement for a parent who stays home.
And as a father who's devoted himself to his daughter's welfare for lowly six years, It's anecdotal it's a sample of one so again take it for what it's worth but we have maybe one conflict every three months and the rest of it is pretty easy peasy negotiation and we have a huge amount of fun and she's an only child and she plays extremely well with other children she's assertive without being aggressive and she's
Expressive without being manipulative and all these these wonderful characteristics and because of this investment a parenting has become a very easy and pleasurable experience for both of us and Again, the studies which will against reference below are worth looking up.
But this idea that you can basically punch your children to minimum wage people and have those people who often come and go.
And so that there's no particular strong attachment who have very little time to interact with your children, particularly in daycare, you know, grandmothers and so on.
It's a sort of a different matter.
But when you put your kids in institutions, They're not getting adult-to-child quality time, which means they're not being imprinted with adult maturity sensibilities, and they're not being guided and led by adults.
They're being pulled this way and that by the dysfunctionalities of the children around them.
And a lot of children, of course, are raised being spanked.
A lot of children are raised being yelled at.
A lot of children are raised even worse, with even worse parenting habits, and then you're throwing your child into that mix.
So even if you're raising your child well, When you throw your child into daycare, you're throwing the child into a group of children who've all been raised in the bell curve of good to terrible, and that's not a very good idea, I think.
There's a book, Daniel Crittenden is a writer, and she wrote a book called What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us.
This is some time ago, and it had a huge influence on me.
I actually read it with my Then girlfriend, before we even became engaged, we sort of read parts of it together.
And this is what she wrote.
And this is a book that's well, well worth reading for a variety of reasons.
She wrote, before you have a child, and even while you are pregnant, you anticipate a certain period of mayhem immediately following the baby's birth.
Nights without sleep, feedings, unstoppable crying, etc.
That much is familiar from Hollywood comedies.
But what isn't familiar, especially to women raised to believe in the importance of their work, is just how much a child will dominate a mother's mind.
For until you are holding your actual baby in your arms, The baby you think looks exactly like you, if you were a bald Martian, and marveling at the curve of his ear and his unearthly bright eyes that squint at you with astonishment and curiosity, you can't know how you're going to feel when you become a mother.
This surprise is motherhood's greatest joy and its darkest secret.
Suddenly you can't stop thinking about your child.
You don't stop even when you're doing something important like being president of a bank or something distracting like watching a movie.
All that happens is that a dimmer switch inside you turns down a little.
Enough for you to concentrate on something else but never goes out completely.
For more than 30 years the Women's Movement has told us that we would be happier, more fulfilled human beings if we left our homes and children and went to work.
To the degree that we might feel misgivings or guilt about leaving our babies to others to raise, we've been assured that such feelings are imposed upon us by society and sexist.
No more normal for a mother to experience than a father.
Instead, we've been taught to suppress these worries and to put our work ahead of our families.
Or, at the very least, to attempt to balance the demands of boss and baby.
Any strong rush of maternal feeling, any desire to surrender pieces of our professional selves, is viewed as a reversion to some stereotype of motherhood the women's movement was supposed to have emancipated us from.
So long as we insist upon defining our identities only in terms of our work, so long as we try to blind ourselves to the needs of our children and harden our hearts against them, We will continue to feel torn, dissatisfied, and exhausted.
Is this unfair?
Maybe.
But it is an issue to take up with nature, not politicians.
We are the most radically equal generation of women in human history, and we have collided with one of the oldest facts of our sex.
There may be ways to ease our situation, but we cannot change it.
nor should we want it to be changed.
The guilt we feel for neglecting our children is a byproduct of our love for them.
It keeps us from straying too far from them for too long.
Their cry should be more compelling than the call from the office.
That certainly has been my experience.
To be a stay-at-home father has been, outside of marriage, the greatest joy in my life and an experience I could not conceive of trading for anything in the world.
If somebody had said, I will pay you $10 million to go to work and not spend time with your daughter for five years or four years or a year, I would say no.
I I would say no.
I became a father to parents, just as I became a husband to love.
I became a father to love.
And we should not push away that which we love for money.
And if you are the kind of person who enjoys work and money more than children and attachments, then I think you should be honest about that and pursue That goal.
There's no reason why everyone has to have children any more than there's a reason why everyone has to go to work.
But if the unbelievably astonishing, astounding, literally mind-blowing process
of seeing a human personality emerge from the churning seas of infancy like Atlantis rising from the ocean with electricity tramways and helicopter landing pads if seeing a human being emerge from a tiny little pac-man tiny little pac-man
that can only be seen through sound waves to a human being with thoughts, ideas, disagreements, arguments, preferences, loves, joys, fears, and desires.
If being part of that incredibly intimate process of realizing that in molding the clay of another human being, you yourself change and grow fundamentally.
If that is what you want, Which is what I wanted and what I continue to want.
If knowing that you are the most important person with your partner, with your wife, with your husband in your child's life.
Knowing that they trust you implicitly, knowing that you worship and treasure them and would never hand them over to someone else in any permanent fashion.
If they understand that no amount of gold can take the place of the rainbow of their smile, I think that's what you should go for.
To hell with the money.
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