>College-educated women in particular underestimate the demands of parenthood and the difficulties of combining working and parenting, new research shows.
>An economic mystery of the last few decades has been why more women aren’t working. A new paper offers one answer: Most plan to, but are increasingly caught off guard by the time and effort it takes to raise children.
>The new analysis suggests something else also began happening during the 1990s: Motherhood became more demanding. Parents now spend more time and money on child care. They feel more pressure to breast-feed, to do enriching activities with their children and to provide close supervision.
>A result is that women underestimate the costs of motherhood. The mismatch is biggest for those with college degrees, who invest in an education and expect to maintain a career, wrote the authors, Ilyana Kuziemko and Jenny Shen of Princeton, Jessica Pan of the National University of Singapore and Ebonya Washington of Yale.
>The study — a working paper, meaning it has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal — tries to quantify what many parents feel as they struggle with the stress of long, inflexible work hours combined with the demands of STEM classes, screen time rules, college prep, family dinners and children’s sick days.
>The researchers documented a sharp decline in employment for women after their first children were born, in both the United States and Britain, even though about 90 percent of women worked before having children. They used data from the Labor Department’s National Longitudinal Surveys, the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the British Household Panel Survey. Each covers several decades, but the study focused mostly on women born between 1965 and 1975, who were in their 30s in the 2000s.
>For many women, the researchers show, stopping work was unplanned. Since about 1985, no more than 2 percent of female high school seniors said they planned to be “homemakers” at age 30, even though most planned to be mothers. The surveys also found no decline in overall job satisfaction post-baby. Yet consistently, between 15 percent and 18 percent of women have stayed home.
Aaron Bell
>One key to understanding why women have diverged from their plans, the economists found, is that their beliefs about gender roles change after their first baby. The surveys ask questions like whether work inhibits a woman’s ability to be a good mother and whether both parents should contribute financially to a family. Women tend to give more traditional answers after becoming mothers.
>The people most surprised by the demands of motherhood were those the researchers least expected: women with college degrees, or those who had babies later, those who had working mothers and those who had assumed they would have careers. Even though highly educated mothers were less likely to quit working than less educated mothers, they were more likely to express anti-work beliefs, and to say that being a parent was harder than they expected.
>Though the study did not analyze fathers’ role in depth, it found that their beliefs did not change significantly before and after having a baby. They were less likely than women to say that parenthood was harder than they expected. (Women still do the bulk of child care, even in two-earner families.)
Gavin Collins
>Women got it so wrong, the researchers argue, because it has become harder to work and have children.
(HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH )
>The cost of motherhood fell for most of the 20th century because of inventions like dishwashers, formula and the birth control pill. But that’s no longer the case, according to data cited in the paper. The cost of child care has increased by 65 percent since the early 1980s. Eighty percent of women breast-feed, up from about half. The number of hours that parents spend on child care has risen, especially for college-educated parents, for whom it has doubled.
>Over all, women have had great success in entering the labor force. Seventy percent of mothers with children under 18 work. Women are more likely to work than previous generations at almost every age, found Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist. They’re slightly more likely to stop in their late 30s and early 40s, around the time many are taking care of young children — but they usually return to the labor force, particularly if they have degrees.
>Still, the new paper raises questions about why the work-family juggle seems to be getting harder. “It is deeply puzzling that at a moment when women are more prepared than ever for long careers in the labor market, norms would change in a manner that encourages them to spend more time at home,” the researchers wrote.
>One possible reason is that increasingly, people who work long, inflexible hours are paid disproportionately more, Ms. Goldin’s research has found. More women with degrees and these kinds of demanding jobs are having children, and they’re likely to be married to men with similar jobs, as Marianne Bertrand, an economist at the University of Chicago, has described. A result is that dual-earning couples may feel the best choice is for one member, usually the mother, to step back from work so the other parent can maximize the family’s earnings.
Jonathan Rodriguez
>To try to set their children on the best path amid increased competition for college admission, parents, especially college-educated ones, invest significantly more time than they used to in child care, found Valerie Ramey and Garey Ramey, economists at the University of California, San Diego. They described it as the “rug rat race” for top colleges.
>The lack of family-friendly policies in the United States — such as paid family leave and subsidized child care — most likely plays a role, too. Although policies have improved somewhat since the early 1990s, women’s labor force participation in countries that have more generous policies has continued to increase, unlike in the United States.
>As women do more paid work, men have not increased their child care and housekeeping tasks to the same extent — another surprise for young women who, research has shown, expected more egalitarian partnerships.
>Generations of girls have been told they can achieve anything they aspire to, including having both a career and children — and many women have done so. But at the same time, both work and parenting have become more demanding. The result is that women’s expectations seem to be outpacing the realities of public policy, workplace culture and family life.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Jow Forums WAS RIGHT YET AGAIN ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Benjamin Stewart
This will fix itself
Eventually the cost of living will rise until women close there legs, since the cost of food and living expenses will be too much for a pregnant woman, much less 18 years of upbringing
Just a few more billion before we get there
Benjamin Ortiz
Maybe the next economic crash will help.
Jace Gray
you know if you use reusable diapers and feed your baby breastmilk you can significantly bring down the costs of childrearing.
Cameron Myers
Death to feminism. They think it is oppression when woman decides to stay home and take care of child. Fuck these termites destroying society from the inside.
Cameron Turner
Oh no who could have seen this coming, guess we'll need to import immigrants.
If only there was some system in place where a father would help pay for costs of upbringing the child more than a monthly check and help take care of the child too...
Wyatt Smith
joke's on you
women will vote for bigger government and since expecting women to raise kids is sexist, ALL men will have to subsidize child care costs so women can fuck Chad and just get the state to raise the kids
this is what you get for allowing women to vote
Asher Morgan
"women will trade freedom for security, every time."
-some user on Jow Forums
Dylan Hernandez
>Wahh! Working a full time job that I spent years studying for while raising the next generation of workers is HARD! Suck it up, buttercup. It isn't hard, you just suck.
Ethan Perry
>Subsidized child care Pay more taxes to spend on free nannys so I can work more and make more money. Wow, literally asking for single people to pay for taking care of other people's kids.
Adrian Stewart
ha ha fuck them stupid roasties
David Barnes
That's absolutely retarded. It's not the children that are expensive, it's the laziness and materialistic tendencies from these mothers. You *should* breastfeed, but mothers are too impatient to try until it works and end up feeding chemical formula. As a mother, you have *all* the time in the world to dedicate to your child. As they grow older, they can help with cooking and chores. Obviously it's time consuming and takes efforts, you're raising a child. Of course you're going to care for them and supervise them, because that's your job. This whole article is portraying a whiny type of woman who can't manage their budget smartly and lack character strength. Children aren't expensive at all if you're smart, selfles, resourceful and live simply. Obviously it's ridiculous to raise a family in a big city. There's no excuses to work as a woman, the man should budget and find a smart job. The woman should waste time getting education and suffer from debt, they should start working (ideally a feminine job that will be useful for the family) immediately and prepare for motherhood when they're out of high school until they meet the right man, if they didn't already.
If they didn't mess up with the gender roles, women would have the easiest job in the world if they just dropped the victim complex. Let the men do their job, and be useful while he's leading and providing. All you need to do is care for the house, be useful and raise his kids.
Leo Cook
We had a perfect system, refined through thousands of years, where men worked and women took care of the home and the kids, more at 11.
Somehow, someone (((())), inceptioned the idea that work is fun and liberating to women and it has all gone to shit since. Because a man working in the coal mines is doing that shit for fun and not for his family.
Jose Watson
I don't know if anything else can be done. The era of land expansion/aggressive wars are done. Came to an end when nuclear bombs were invented. The most destructive weapon brought on the longest period of peace.
It's stupid to think this is all because of how amazing USA is, when there has never been such a period of peace in history without countries rising to oppose them. I don't see government's role reverting back at all.
> Somehow, someone (((())), inceptioned the idea that work is fun and liberating to women and it has all gone to shit since. Because a man working in the coal mines is doing that shit for fun and not for his family. This so much. My wife was in school two years longer than me and when she graduated there was a six month span where all she did was complain that she didn't have a job and I already had a job. Then once she got a job all she did was complain it was hard work and she wanted to quit. They've been sold the idea that men go to work, sit around all day and gossip and read about celebrities (because what else would you do?) and then they get there are are surprised they're expected to work.
Connor Cox
Not surprised in the least. My wife didn't go to college and recently quit her full time job to raise our daughter. Money's tight, but it's the best decision we ever made because our daughter is being raised traditionally and my wife doesn't have time to get "crazy" ideas. She is starting a part-time job this month, but we have a good schedule going where it will pay some of our bills and the baby will never be away from one of us -- and she will still do like 80% of the parenting during the week. She never leaves the house except to run errands, she spends most of her days cleaning or reading, and when she sees her friends it's a big deal (and usually pretty tame) since she doesn't go out to drink "with the girls" at all, like other moms we know
Now when we get free time, it's a treat. I have been forced to step up even more as a man and I'm enjoying it, because my wife treats me like one. I earn the bread, I make the big decisions, I talk to the neighbors, banks, and marketers... she just gets to sit at home and take care of the baby while she cleans, reads, and knits.
It's nice. I'm glad I dated "career-minded college-educated women" throughout my 20's so I could see what a fucking mistake that was. They were selfish, surprisingly ignorant, and could never commit to anything. Quite a few of them had complete and utter mental breakdowns on a monthly basis all revolving around the "conflict" between our relationship and their life goals. Almost every single one has (since breaking up with me) moved across the country, changed their career, or gone through some sort of public quarter-life-crisis. One lives out of her van in Hollywood now, and two had to move to England to "find themselves" -- one even becoming a lesbian while she was there, apparently. And that's just the really crazy ones. Oh, and of course, all of them are still single as we dive into our 30's. Every single one. Can't wait to find out which one commits seppoku first, desu senpai.
