The norm of both parents working full-time is a flaming disaster.

and we need to scrap it immediately.

Both parents working full-time while raising children: definitely one the of the worst ideas ever to spring from the human mind. Of course we didn’t develop this idea consciously - we just kind of sleep-walked into it, not realizing what we were doing, and now for some reason it is just sort of expected, to everyone’s massive detriment.

Both parents suffer enormously. On top of holding down full-time jobs, they have to cobble together childcare. They rush from home to school to work, to the sitter’s house, to home, then try to scrabble together a healthy meal while in a state of exhaustion from working and running around all day. There is rarely time to do anything properly - whether it be cooking, organizing, cleaning, fixing the garage door, tending the flowerbeds, or whatever. The house is usually in chaos, proper maintenance is usually deferred.

Kids suffer from it too. Instead of growing up at home, they grow up in childcare centers, sitters’ houses, and day camps. They absorb the frantic and exhausted energy of their parent’s lives. Often when they need attention, they are given a screen to look at instead. They don’t learn the basic and essential skills of civilized life - cooking, cleaning, organizing, and mending, because it is not systematically woven into the daily home life, because there simply isn’t time for it.

Society as a whole suffers as well, because full-time home-makers used to be the very fabric that held society together: The ones who held regular social events, or dropped in to check on a sick neighbor, or organized help for some family that had suffered a disaster, all while raising their children to have a firm grounding in civilized morals and values. I have to be careful not paint an unrealistically rosy picture, because that life had many problems of its own, but I do think it was much better that the life most of us have now.

The old norm was that the mother ran the household while the father worked outside of the home in order to meet household expenses. the conventional understanding is that we went away from this model because at some point one salary could no longer support the average American family. I don’t think this reason had much to do with it, which I’ll explain later. The truth is that I don’t actually know the real reasons, but I think a lot of it had to with a lack of appreciation, and that the old system was way too rigid.

By rigid I mean that women were excluded from most professions and from most higher learning and that being a wife and mother was basically the only role that was sanctioned for them. This led naturally to a sense of injustice, which was well founded. Eventually after much struggle the doors to the professions and to higher education were blown open. This was a good thing, but we took it so far that we fell off the other side, as we humans usually do. Somehow, a woman’s right to enter the professions turned into the expectation that a mother, even if her children are small, should work full time outside the home - a totally insane idea, in most cases.

But I think lack of appreciation was the biggest culprit to our current predicament. Somehow, the greatest art in all of human life, homemaking, was idiotically devalued. We started worshipping celebrities and sports heroes, and sneering at homemakers. How incredibly stupid of us. I stupidly fell for this attitude too, when I was younger, simply because I didn’t know any better, and because everyone else was doing it. Now that I have had a chance to live a little bit, my values have shifted radically. I can now see that one good homemaker is infinitely more valuable than every Super Bowl MVP, every World Series MVP, and every Academy Award winner who ever lived, combined. Every great sporting event that ever happened is worth total garbage next to a well-run and happy household. Every great Hollywood movie is worth garbage next to a friendly neighborhood tea party.

Somehow many of us came to the totally absurd conclusion that mothers who do choose to stay home and run the household are somehow lazy or less valuable than their job-holding counterparts. Homemaking and child raising is itself a full-time job, often more than that. That is why it is basically impossible to do it well and also work outside the home. Homemaking is the glue that keeps everything that is good from falling apart. I have a strong intuition that the slow motion collapse of civilization that we are currently experiencing is somehow linked to the decline in homemaking.

Now I want to debunk the idea that our present norms are there because one salary can’t support a family. Example Number one: I have a friend who was a union sheet metal worker. He bought a big house and raised three kids on that salary. His wife was a full-time home-maker; there was no second salary. Nowadays the trade unions have standing vacancies. Anyone who is able-bodied and reliable and relatively young can get a job that will support a family on a single salary. It just takes a bit more financial discipline, living in a cheaper neighborhood, and buying a house that needs work.

Example number two: My friend’s daughter had a baby recently. She and her husband are both lawyers. My friend mentioned that her daughter would be going back to work when the baby was a couple months old. Now her husband is a lawyer. If one sheet metal worker’s salary can support a family, I’m sure one lawyer’s salary can. So something other than financial necessity is at play in her decision to go back to her salary.

Example number three: Another friend. He is an electrician, his wife is a teacher. When they had their first baby a few years ago, I asked him if his wife was going to stay home to take care of the child. He said no, they having two incomes. He didn’t say they needed two incomes, (they didn’t) just that they liked having two incomes.

If we look around us, we can see these examples cropping up all over the place - both parents working full time, not out of necessity, but because it is the (deranged) norm.

Here’s a question for you: Do we go to work in order to support the household, or do we run the household in order to support the job? My point is that the job is merely the means to supporting the thing that we really want - the family. So why would we sacrifice the thing that we really want, the family, in order that both parents can do the thing that is secondary, the career? It totally makes no sense.

Or here is another way to look at it: What would hurt you more: If you lost your job, or if you lost your family? So why would we sacrifice the thing that would hurt most to lose, for the thing that would hurt a lot less?

In my several decades of experience, women are far superior home makers to men, 99% of the time. nine times out of ten the mom has a way better handle on the kid’s schedule, and has an infinitely superior gift for making birthdays special, and holidays magical. But things are complicated. Many women also have a calling to be a brilliant doctor, or musician, or something, and also help the world in that way.

So I am not advocating for some kind of return to a rigid past. I just saying that keeping house should needs to be re-recognized for the penultimate master link of civilization that it is.

Human working lives are very long. Our age range for holding a job lasts for about 57 years, say from about age 18 to about age 75. Suppose a mom takes a ten year break from her career, while her children are young. She can still have a solid forty-seven year period during which to find fulfillment and contribute to the world through a career, if she so chooses. Or she might choose to make full time house keeping a lifelong vocation - also great move.

Dads already help out around the house far more several generations ago. And this is very good, but a lot more needs to happen to bring home making to the top tier of society. Men should feel pride if they are capable of being a sole bread winner, and shame if they are not. Women should feel pride if they have developed their home keeping skills, shame if they haven’t.*

Somehow, any notion at all of gender roles became an incredibly taboo topic. But the genders do have divergent gifts (as well as many overlapping ones). There should be absolutely no shame at all in playing to the strengths our gender has given us, whether male or female. It is just plain sensible, really. This doesn’t mean we need to be locked into some kind of medieval social norm. We are not living in the Middle Ages anymore. Instead, our roles can be guided by reason, expediency, fairness, and basic common sense.

*Sidenote: we shouldn’t be afraid to feel shame, in the right amount. If we refuse to feel it, we stunt ourselves. It is a great teacher.