Those household structures aren'tpopular, they're just common when women have no other options. I have nothing against those structures, they work great for some families. But the reality is that they often force the wife into becoming an unpaid caregiver for her in-laws (who constantly criticize how she runs the household).
I don't really understand this mindset that being at home and raising your kids is only something you do when forced to. For my family, if we had more options -- ie, more money -- then both of us would be stay-at-home parents. It's much more of a joy than going to work.
Your comment's framing makes no sense to me. My wife pushed for me to go into engineering instead of academia so she could stay home and we could be comfortable. We're married. We have kids. The entire point is we're not independent. That's what married literally means. Unioned. Joined. There is no her and me. There is us.
Why would you need or even want to be independent? Why would you plan to form a family while keeping your options open/having one foot out the door?
Plenty of women (and men) end up in relationships they hate, and if they have no independence they are pretty much fucked. They have no way to escape. Women having options makes a huge difference.
What you are describing is pretty much ideal for a lot of people, but it's not what everybody gets.
We don't have a trust fund, of course, which is why I'm working to earn an income.
My wife currently stays home with the kids, although that might change down the road. She doesn't have any trust fund or inheritance either, of course.
However, although I'm earning the money, it's 100% a shared resource. It goes into a shared account. I'm pretty sure that's a legal necessity since we're married, but it's how we'd choose to do it anyway. There's no division between my finances and hers.
We married each other to be a team together forever, but even if we separated, our finances would be divided in half between us. If we'd wanted to fend for ourselves, we wouldn't have gotten married, and certainly wouldn't have had kids.
She feels sorry for me having to go to work every day, but it's a logical division of labor because I have much higher earning prospects.
I say this because I want to understand your definition; are we a traditional household in your view?
In the context of the original comment by pkaler, and subsequent replies from basswood, mschuster91, purplerabbit, and nradov, I understood "trad household structures" to be one where the man in a husband/wife relationship sells his labor to someone else and the woman does not.
So yes, but, I would note that there is probably a difference (for the purposes of this conversation) between the following:
A couple that earns median income per year and still chooses to have only one income earning spouse specifically so the other spouse can spend more time with the kids, whilst making significant sacrifices in other aspects of life such as school district, kids' activities, vacations, material goods, etc.
And a couple where one earns significantly above median income and can afford to have only one income earning spouse without making significant sacrifices.
In the context of the entire chain of comments, I would assume purplerabbit was referring to the first type of couple, who choose to forego many of life's luxuries in favor of child rearing, and that is the type of "household structure" that nradov was saying is not popular, except "when women have no other options" (i.e. women's rights allowing them to be financially independent).
>However, although I'm earning the money, it's 100% a shared resource. It goes into a shared account. I'm pretty sure that's a legal necessity since we're married, but it's how we'd choose to do it anyway. There's no division between my finances and hers.
There isn't in my marriage either, but I would still advise my wife to maintain her ability to earn income in case I were to go crazy, lose my job, or some other risk. And I would advise my daughter of the same.
My wife self-reports as very happy and talks a lot about how proud she is of the decision. I'll acknowledge that we are privileged in terms of support -- 3 relative families within 30 minutes and most people in a 100 meter radius attend the same church. Even in our setup, however, we really wish we could swing a multi-generational setup and have grandparents around all the time.
Women are just as responsible for enforcing traditions as men are. You could just as easily argue that men are the ones with less choice; after all, it is much more socially acceptable for a woman to work than for a man to be a stay at home dad.
It's also false that a stay at home has essentially resigned themselves to ruin in the event of divorce/disagreement. Someone who has been a stay at home long enough to be unemployable, in the vast majority of states, will be rewarded with alimony and if applicable child support to the point they will easily be taking about 50% of the spouse's salary for long enough to retrain.
Of course the spouse has the risk the other ex-spouse will sabotage themselves and end their incomes to avoid paying the order, at which point they may be thrown into prison if they are found. But are they worse off than the employee who can be fired at a moment's notice and go broke by a boss who isn't sabotaging himself at all and bound by no such judicial order? Maybe so, but it's not by some gigantic long shot.
Severely missing the point here. It’s about being criticised and not recognised while doing so. It’s about lack of choice – and no, when you’re 25, you don’t know what this does to you over time. And when you finally do, it’s too late, you’re not going to run away with your kids and no job.
My comment was a response to its parent, beginning:
> Those household structures aren't popular, they're just common when women have no other options.
I agree with what yours, and point out that it applies equally to men. I was 25 when we decided to have our first child and while I would make the same decision knowing what I know now, I didn't have anything near an accurate idea of what the impact would be on my life as a whole.
Basically, I wasn't taking exception to the idea of an irrevocable decision made with incomplete context; I was taking exception to the idea that it's somehow unique to women - because it's not.
I would add though that while making bad choices is not unique to women, when it comes to mariage, lots of society used to make it so much easier on men. Men could/can escape home in work, hobbies, etc with much less judgement than women. It’s gotten better in some parts of the world, definitely not all, and last years the trend is rather backward I feel.
Except "trad" households (full time SAHM in a nuclear home) are not traditional. Tradition is not something only the upper-middle class in a post-war boom attained for a short period of time.
Throughout human history, it was rare for only two people to raise a child, let alone one. Or for women to not bring money into the home.
Like many "trad" trends, it's based more on advertising and television than history.
At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way. Otherwise it's just emulating an extremely narrow portion of the trad that didn't exactly exist in the first place.
> At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way.
"It takes a village to raise a child" was meant literally. However, the glory of capitalism required people to move to where the jobs were, turning that millennia-old principle upside down ever since industrialization. And car culture was the ultimate fatal blow, when children can't even walk their own neighborhood any more.
I remember when Hillary Clinton said "it takes a village to raise a child" and she was mocked by conservatives and accused of undermining parental rights and wanting governments to control families.
And when BLM made it part of their charter to encourage community support for children beyond the typical nuclear unit they were accused of a radical Marxist agenda to "destroy families."
For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans, and that's odd for a nation of immigrants considering how common the "whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins" is in the rest of the world.
> For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans
I think because excessive individualism plays into the hands of large companies. There is an individualist culture that has naturally grown over time in the US, but it has also been pushed by big corporations because if you can't depend on your neighbors and extended family, you need to spend money to fill the gaps.
But when leftists says things like community support, it doesn't bring up images of traditional villages and extended families. It brings up images of communists saying things like abolish the family. Naturally, due to their history.
It's not like leftists are known for their traditional family values now or then, so why should it be taken that way?
Yes, when you intentionally take what leftists say in bad faith and stereotype them negatively, then the bad faith interpretation and negative stereotypes make sense. But normal people don't hear "communism" when leftists say "community support."
Also given how many people espousing "traditional family values" among the right turn out to be abusers, pedophiles, rapists, deadbeats, etc, what you might consider "traditional" values don't actually mapped to the left-right political axis at all.
And I assume you didn't bother reading my comment or this thread very hard and just wanted to dunk on the left, but the American nuclear family isn't "traditional family values" to begin with.