[mbiondi]

I've nothing against women in the workplace, but I do think it sucks that in most families both parents are forced to work in order to make ends meet. Universal childcare is the worst of both worlds - you miss out on all those special moments when your children are young and your kids get to be raised by a stranger. Plus the public gets to foot the bill.

I guess it works if you don't want those experiences and are happier working.

[Ericson2314]

The goal is both parents work, but work only part time. And we get there via better childcare.

[rpcope1]

Why is that the goal? Who decided that it is an appropriate goal? This whole argument is silly for a lot of reasons, but honestly it's a bait and switch amongst other things: "Oh we'll eventually get to reduced hours, you just need to both start working now and let someone else raise and watch your children." Sounds like a scam to me.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Sounds like a scam to me

It seems more scammy to me that universal childcare, pre-school, et cetera are twisted to mean mandating both parents work. It doesn't. Countries with universal childcare still have plenty of stay-at-home parents. What they don't have is parents, predominantly moms, forced to stay at home with their kids.

[Ericson2314]

Yup. People need to understand optionality. Markets are about adjacent hypotheticals.

Right now it's not like parent needing to do other things is some low-simmering quasi-strike disciplining labor markets. It's more like the expense of having kids disciplinarians would-be parents.

A post of post-work post-scarity stuff runs through more people working. It is counter intuitive, but that is how things work. So long as people who would like to work are not, it will hang over our heads and we won't be able to shrink the workweek.

If you need some real-world evidence, see right now, at this period of record low unemployment, the one of the UAW's demands is a shorter work-week.