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Restarting my career after motherhood

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Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not advocating for growth. I'm advocating for stability. The population pyramid is already over for us. Shrinking is now the default. We need more parents simply to stop the future shrinking. I know some advocate shrinking for sustainability reasons, but a policy of shrinking is a policy of irrelevance. Other cultures with a growth mindset will continue growing and ruin your sustainability plans. Let's have abund…

> Let's have abundance instead of austerity Others in this thread have, in so many words, said that being a parent should be paid by tax payers as a full time job. It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers. So that lessens abundance, creating a poorer world. It's like the conversation about UBI. If it's actually U and (as often st…

> It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers.

I think you should examine this statement a little more. If the time of economically successful people is too valuable to "waste" on childcare, what you are saying is that either economically successful people should not have children (with the obvious corollary being that only economically unsuccessful people should have children), or economically successful people should not spend time raising their children (meaning they should foist their children into the care of economically unsuccessful people instead). I hope you can see the clear issue with the former, and while the latter is pretty much status quo it has big issues as well.

If the children of doctors and lawyers do better when their parents care for them instead of other people, and become doctors and lawyers too, then society didn't lose after all. Childcare is an investment in the future, not pure waste to be avoided.

I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child. But I do think that parenthood deserves to be subsidized, and more than it is now, even for economically successful people, up to the point where the fertility rate stabilizes at the replacement rate.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for clarifying your perspective. Honestly it just seems very narrow and pedantic since even non-parents benefit from efforts to blunt the incredible costs of parenting. It leads to quality of life improvements, even if modest, for families. Non-parents themselves, and all their friends, love interests, and family have to come from parents somehow. If society does nothing to help then more parents will choose t…

A paid year away from work is not minuscule. The benefits of somebody else having kids is minuscule to me. > If society does nothing to help then more parents will choose to have fewer, or no, children. Fewer people is our best option (it is still a terrible option, don't get me wrong) for mitigating the effects of climate change.

> The benefits of somebody else having kids is minuscule to me.

Your parents having you is a miniscule benefit to you?

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#263
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMAO paid in love. I am not a parent but when's the last time you called a parent of yours and paid them with that love? I 100% have not done so recently. Parents aren't getting a handout, we're ensuring the continuation of our society and so many forces are attempting to shape it actively.

What I mean is that being paid to be a parent is like being paid to watch a movie, or doing something you love. What's the point of paying you for it, if the act actually is its own reward?

I think my counter is that being a parent honestly seems thankless.

It feels like you and I agree that maybe kids aren't for our lives and yet we're pretending its just a wildly rewarding activity like watching movies and not a situation of basically being worried or having to pay for or care for another human for the rest of your natural life.

Even for two people who (I am assuming) do not have kids that feels kind of insincere.

We know its not like watching a movie, or riding a bike or even going to the gym unless the gym costs you ~250k while simultaneously acting like the rude jerk I did when I was a teen.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one fully parenting, one fully working Fully working = 8-10 hours a day Still leaves a lot of time for parenting- and doesn’t seem so extreme, I’d say it’s one of the most common division of family life in the world

8-10 hours per day, plus another 1-3 hours for commute. Baby wakes up at 6:30, takes a bath and gets sleepy at 18:30 - so 12 hours of interactive time (not counting night-time feeding and crying) - and these 12 hours closely correspond to the fully-working parent's work and commute hours.

Yes, but then the working parent comes back and can parent

I didn’t say parenting only takes 8-10 hours. That’s the time the working parent works

That still leaves time to parent when off-work

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#265
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If monogamy is valuable, and I think it is, then most men should be parents as well. I can’t imagine a world with a few guys fathering most of the kids, that seems like it would cause lots of problems.

You can still be monogamous if some women have more children, not every woman needs to have 2 children to achieve that average. A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average. The whole idea that child bearing should be perfectly and equally distributed across the whole population is a construct of the social welfare state, enabled by sub…

> A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.

The median is close to the average in kids per women in the developed world. Having four kids is harsh on many women’s bodies; eg my grandma had 8 kids, but she died in her late 50s. While no doubt some couples will want to go for four kids or more, I don’t think it’s ethical to encourage it over a more standard 2 something for most couples.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's have abundance instead of austerity Others in this thread have, in so many words, said that being a parent should be paid by tax payers as a full time job. It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers. So that lessens abundance, creating a poorer world. It's like the conversation about UBI. If it's actually U and (as often st…

> It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers. I think you should examine this statement a little more. If the time of economically successful people is too valuable to "waste" on childcare, what you are saying is that either economically successful people should not have children (with the obvious corollary being that only economic…

> I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child

But we pretty much are already.

First with paid parental leave (sometimes over 400 days) and then forever after that, by pretending that this is not a gap in work experience and therefore calling anything short of bumping salary and seniority in line with people who were working as "discrimination".

Like people who are away for a year, and come back promoted.

And that's not even mentioning how much of the slack coworkers he to pick up from a parent needing to leave at 3pm every day from now on. We're all meant to pretend they work just as hard, and deserve to be paid just as much.

(Not every parent offloads work like this onto their coworkers, but a lot of them do. So it's a huge cost statistically not paid by the person who made the choice)

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers. I think you should examine this statement a little more. If the time of economically successful people is too valuable to "waste" on childcare, what you are saying is that either economically successful people should not have children (with the obvious corollary being that only economic…

> I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child But we pretty much are already. First with paid parental leave (sometimes over 400 days) and then forever after that, by pretending that this is not a gap in work experience and therefore calling anything short of bumping salary and seniority in line with people who were working as "discrimination". L…

> But we pretty much are already.

LOL sorry, not even close. But it doesn't matter whether we are or not, not in the slightest. What matters is whether we're subsidizing enough to stabilize the fertility rate. Which we're empirically not.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child But we pretty much are already. First with paid parental leave (sometimes over 400 days) and then forever after that, by pretending that this is not a gap in work experience and therefore calling anything short of bumping salary and seniority in line with people who were working as "discrimination". L…

> But we pretty much are already. LOL sorry, not even close. But it doesn't matter whether we are or not, not in the slightest. What matters is whether we're subsidizing enough to stabilize the fertility rate. Which we're empirically not.

The reduction isn't because of lack of subsidies, but simply a change in needs and wants.

People no longer want to have 4-5 kids, no matter if you 10x the paid time off or double the subsidies. This too empirically.

And no, actually. Your "LOL" aside, we actually are. Anyone who takes time off for child raising gets a bump literally forever.

So yes, actually.

I'm not saying fully compensated, obviously.

But people do it or don't do it based on if they want, not the money (given a basic level of comp, which we are waaaay beyond).

To increase birth rates we have to start paying people who DON'T want to have children, to do it.

Like wow, how much would you have to pay people who would only do it for money? One million in cash just day one?

Just the physical toll for the parent is huge.

And statistically rate of happiness goes down during thirties for people who have children.

And then on top of that your idea is to have people who don't want children raise them? I'm not betting on this improving quality of life for the child, if the child is just a paycheck.

So we really want people who have children no actually want to, too.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#269
post #119
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a silly assertion. Many developing countries have little to no subsidies in regards to children and yet their birth rates are higher. Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.

> Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies. Lower education and religion is probably the biggest cause for these higher birth rates. In the victorian era, people would simply not get married if they didn't have the means to raise children, and they would be childless, and there was nothing strange about that. To give subsidies for everyone to have children comes from the post ww2 politics.

I think the biggest cause is actually high rates of child mortality. Humans have more children when there is a higher chance those children might not survive.

Re: Restarting my career after motherhood

#270
post #137
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising kids is full time labor considering that even when you are off, you are on call.

The issue that I'm having with this, is that child care is still relatively unqualified work, so how can it ever be highly compensated? Parents who are highly educated doctors, pilots etc argue that they should be able to stay at home for 1-2 years with almost full salary, which the tax payers should subsidise, and at the same time they also pay an uneducated 16 year old 10 bucks an hour to babysit when they go to th…

Well, what you are saying doesn't add up because no one is really asking for 1-2 years of parental leave.
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