Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds in awful lot like a cousin of the broken window fallacy. The fallacy being that when a careless kid breaks a window of a store, that we should celebrate because the glazier now has been paid to come out and do a job. Economic activity has increased by one measure! Should we go around breaking windows? Of course not.
It very much is a cousin of the broken window fallacy. Bastiat's original point of the Parable of the Broken Window could be summed up by the aphorism "not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts". It's a caution to society to avoid relying too much on metrics, and to realize that sometimes positive metrics obscure actual negative outcomes in society. It's very similar to…
This is addressed here: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/05/06/the-two-inco...
childcare is not usually a lifelong cost, so the advantage of working anyway is to develop a career that persists after children no longer need a full-time parent. And incomes usually go up over the course of a career, so if the income matches those costs when the parent goes to work, that is likely to change.
> the net real result is that the kids are raised by someone other than their parents
this is the genuine argument for staying home, but to counterpoint that, it still traps the homemaker with less work experience as a result, meaning they are potentially worse off in case of a divorce, though maybe that's an extension of the "welfare" argument i.e. divorce settlements.