Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

People take stock of their lives in many different ways: using happiness as the unit of measurement is called hedonism. Pursuing hedonism is a defensible position to take but I'm alarmed by its rise as the default system of value in the educated/cosmopolitan world that most HN readers presumably inhabit.

Things like raising children well, championing unfashionable but important positions, fighting injustice and poverty - the really worthwhile things in life - are often extraordinarily difficult and can cause more despair than pleasure. But I choose to believe that they are nonetheless important, and not only because there is the promise of the glow of contentment in the case of a possible future triumph.

Many in the tech industry achieve extraordinary success in modern society. But when someone rises to that position, the single-minded pursuit of stimulating one's own reward circuits can look quite callous in the eyes of those who haven't been able to rise to wealth and power. In the days of the hereditary aristocracy, there existed the idea of "noblesse oblige", or the obligation of the upper classes to be a positive force for all those who lived in their society. It might do us some good to revive that idea.

That is not guilt tripping. I am programmer. The flexible work is seen as a right and company that does not provide it as overly controlling and bad place for work - that is quite universal in both real life and online. And it is not just that, occasional work from home is also seen as basic perk you totally expect. And my colleges are using that right - and that is not blame, just a statement of fact.

The fact is, majority of female dominated jobs are on the opposite of the spectrum. And those jobs are even thrown into every damm discussion about men/women differences while also the very same discussion talk about women having more flexibility. Because women are supposed to be primary care giver and primary care giver is supposed to want flexibility.

It just so happen that wanting something does not necessary gives you that.

My point is not that programmer should feel guilty. My point is that arguing that women=flexible hours is wrong, faulty argument based on some romantic idealized dream. The argument completely ignores the kind of work women do.

Dont know why you're being downvoted. Chore gap is a big issue in hetero-couple households (the majority), and chores and household caring/tending work _is_ a big support for capitalism which capitalism refuses to acknowledge (by refusing to remunerate it). But, capitalism still benefits from it. Guess who usually does this work? Clue: not men.

Most probably downvoted by men who refuse to acknowledge the value provided by unremunerated work to society.

> unrenumerated - you mean unremunerated, right?

(I'm what traditional/conservative society would call a "man")

For this type of task, I find it best to go to Google Scholar. If you put in the title of the paper behind the first link you'll find the 1991 paper available from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nazli_Baydar/publicatio... .

You'll also see that it's been cited by 611 papers. It's usually a bit odd to reference a 27 year old paper as a source because additional research since then has likely given more insight into the problem.

Pulling one out at semi-random, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cch.12238/full argues "more hours in non-parental child care were associated with better language abilities. However, more hours in care in the first year of life were associated with less language proficiency at ages 1 to 1.5. At later ages, this effect disappeared and language proficiency increased. Furthermore, children who spent more hours in centre-based care had better language scores than children in home-based care."

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.704... summarizes a number of related reports:

> O’Brien Caughy et al. (1994) report that entrance into daycare before the first birthday was associated with higher test scores (Peabody Individual Achievement Tests) for lower income children and lower test scores for higher income children. For the U.K. Gregg et al. (2005) find that children who receive informal care from friends and relatives in the first 18 months of life combined with full time maternal employment have lower cognitive outcomes. ... Finally, Loeb et al. (2007) find that entry into non-parental center based care before the age of one can lead to problem behavior. Magnuson et al. (2007), Baker et al. (2008), Datta Gupta and Simonsen (2010), and the research summarized in Belsky (2006) provide further evidence that non-parental care can have negative behavioral effects in some contexts.

Or there's https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11016559 which says:

> After adjusting for child care quality, cumulative experience in center-based care was associated with better outcomes than was participation in other types of care. The amount of time children spent in care was not related to outcomes. Children in exclusive maternal care did not differ systematically from children in child care. Tests for lagged relations of earlier child care experiences to later performance (adjusting for current child care) showed that language stimulation predicted subsequent cognitive and language performance 9 to 12 months later. Although children in center care at age 3 performed better than children in other types of care, earlier experience in child care homes was associated with better performance at age 3 than was experience in other types of care.

These would appear to be counter to your statement that "Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has been shown to be highly detrimental to their development." More specifically, once the child is about 18 months old, there appears to be positive effects of daycare and non-parental care.

That "Family Facts" link is from The Heritage Foundation, which has a mission to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense."

I can't help but think there is a bias in which topics to report and which evidence to present.

One way to assuage my doubts would be if the reports had a link to the primary research literature. However, the only citation is to "a FamilyFacts.org Report by Jenet Jacob Erickson, researcher specializing in maternal and child wellbeing and former assistant professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. Her report reviewed key findings from 30 years of research on child care and children’s social– emotional development."

This does not appear to be a peer-reviewed report. While peer-review has its problems, I again can't help but wonder about any possible cherry picking.

Given the editorials by the author, at https://www.deseretnews.com/author/23012/Jenet-Jacob-Erickso... , I know that we have very different biases.

The last link is to Stefan Molyneux, who is often characterized as "alt-right" or "far-right". As an anti-feminist, I suspect he is biased towards research which keeps middle-class women at home to raise children.

In any case, unlike Erickson, he is (like both you and me) also not an expert on this subject.