The inferences they’re drawing assume that the populations of “millenial men without kids” and “millenial men with kids” are part of an otherwise uniform group of millenial men, with attitudes changing as men go from one population into the other showing that pre-kid egalitarian attitudes couldn’t stand up to reality.
But this seems like an oversimplified model. There is a big selection bias when passing to the “men with children” group. It’s likely that men who get married and have children at a younger age probably tend to be from more religious backgrounds, for example.
To reliably make the kind of inferences the paper is making, you would need to survey men without children, wait a few years, then survey the same men after they had had children, and ignore the original interviews of men who still haven’t had children by the time of the second set of surveys.
Edit: I’m trying to track down the sources for this story, and it’s even more confusing, as from what I can tell they’re comparing numbers from different studies with different samples and methodologies. I really wish they would more concretely quote exactly which numbers were coming from which source.
I am shocked - a published social science study with poor methodology and dubious analysis that fits the authors political biases. It is a good thing that this almost never happens.
I haven’t read the cited studies in detail, and I wouldn’t say the studies themselves have poor methodology or dubious analysis until I’ve looked at them.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the original studies made limited, well-qualified claims which were then exaggerated or taken out of context by the journalist.
The second of those seems to mostly just report the data they found, without much editorializing. I’m slightly skeptical about the multiple regression at the end, but the rest of the findings are straight-forward to interpret.
Other studies central to the article’s title argument are cited but not directly linked by the NYT as far as I can tell. I can’t find the mentioned surveys by the Center for Talent Innovation online anywhere; perhaps it’s pre-published data they discussed with the NYT journalist.
I am even more shocked - you are telling me that journalists exaggerate! Next you will be telling me that they just make up stuff and pass it off as accurate and unbiased reporting.
More seriously I have been an eyewitness to a number of events reported on by journalists over the years. Not a single one of these reports had any resemblance to what actually happened - I guess that is why they are called news stories and reporters hacks.
Edit. Thanks for taking the time to track down the original papers.
I should not be so harsh on social scientists as it is incredible hard to do any real science in this area. I could not design and run a social science study that had any scientific robustness or validity. There are just too many confounding variables and biases.
> Yet those who had children had different attitudes. Of millennial men who were already fathers, 53 percent said it was better for mothers and fathers to take on traditional roles.
Is this because (by definition) those millennials who've already had children must then have had them at a relatively young age? That might be indicative of a more traditional attitude towards adulthood and, by extension, towards gender roles.
I'm 32 and technically right on the oldest edge of the "millenial" generation, and have 3 kids (7, 4, and 1); it doesn't necessarily mean "people born in the mid-90s".
You're at the oldest edge, and you were 25 when you had your first child.
If the oldest of the group had to have children under the median, then only those who had children young have them already.
Looking at millenials with children is a huge selection bias:
> Mothers of newborns are older now than their counterparts were two decades ago. In 1990, teens had a higher share of all births (13%) than did women ages 35 and older (9%). In 2008, the reverse was true — 10% of births were to teens, compared with 14% to women ages 35 and older. Each race and ethnic group had a higher share of mothers of newborns in 2008 who are ages 35 and older, and a lower share who are teens, than in 1990.
TL;DR: Article says we're not as good/egalitarian as we'd like to be. Sure, but the data shows that we've come a long way. And things are getting better even faster, because technology increases productivity.
I recently saw a more current version of the graph from this NYTimes article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/us/17kids.html), but the data indicates that both mothers and fathers in the U.S. are actually spending more time on childcare than they used to. Both. The biggest difference was in housework, which I believe has dropped quite a bit further in the past decade.
What seems relevant here (and not addressed in this article) is the extent to which technology powers social change like this. Social attitudes (the 'ideals') change because productivity gains due to technology means that household chores no longer take 40 hours+ per week.
I'm pretty sure the data from the 2010's doesn't take Instacart and other on-demand-everything into account because it has yet to be everywhere, but just think how awesome everything will be in this coming decade!
Millennial families also have to deal with the stigma of 24/7 supervision of their children. A few generations ago, kids roamed the streets until supper time. Now if you let your kid walk to the park, you get arrested for negligence. We're obsessed with work, we're obsessed with being over-protective, and we're entitled to everything.
And let's be honest - men are in no hurry to pick up a second job when they can reluctantly blame the office's policies for why they can't pitch in more.
And how exactly is family leave or flexible work hours explained to single workers? Assuming married couples got policies changed so they could somehow both split their time between child-rearing and office work, single people will probably have to make up whatever time is lost. Because the question isn't "Do I have time to both work and raise this child", it's "How can I be at the office and dropping Timmy off at soccer practice at the same time?"
To make everything fair between single workers and working families you'd have to allow a workforce-wide reduction in hours, possibly accompanied by hiring more. Why do I get the feeling that might not happen?
The compromise here that would keep workplaces fair, is to not compromise for families, and force everyone to work the same hours. Which would require either that families get part-time jobs, or that one of them be 'the breadwinner'.
This also assumes the 2-parent model will remain the exclusive model this century. The next big fight might be over polycules for the right to co-parent if they're not a biological parent. Which would actually make time-sharing much easier, as it splits the work up amongst more people. But that's probably a good 50 years out.
> "How can I be at the office and dropping Timmy off at soccer practice at the same time?"
Palo Alto resident here. I was walking my dog the other day, and I saw a vehicle drop a kid off, with the tagline "Uber for Kids" on the side. Got really curious b/c, well, how is that not just regular Uber/Lyft? And found out that they solve this exact problem. Parents can have kids picked up and dropped off at various locations by people who have been pre-screened by the company.
Edit: it's called Shuddle. Maybe companies can offer Shuddle credit as a perk to employees.
You make good points and I agree with your reluctance to assume that employers will do much that doesn't suit them, but I think you'd obviously see a change in pay for any reduced work.
Of course, whether a breadwinning parent can resist $x for 5 days over $0.8x for 4 days equivalent to spend more time with their family is another issue. The rat race means people constantly want more, usually at any cost. If you work fewer 9-5 hours, I imagine you have to endure more time resisting out of office work, rogue calls, etc.
Perhaps once AR/VR offices are more common and companies are more comfortable with teleworkers, we could see people do full-time equivalent but with a couple of hours from 8-10pm to make up for being home from 3-5pm for after-school family time.
We also currently waste a significant amount of time commuting...
If the 'making up work later' example weren't exclusive to white collar workers who already have the flexibility to take their work home it might make sense, but i'm fairly certain that's a small percentage. The public sector, blue collar jobs, service jobs... these would be difficult to impossible to do remote, and on one's own time. We are the very lucky small minority who are not location- or shift-constrained.
The article is addressing millennials at large who all want to share the responsibilities of child-rearing and bread-winning. I think this is an incredibly difficult change to make for the majority of millennials and their employers - without screwing somebody over, that is. I'm pretty sure if it does get implemented it'll be at the expense of singles.
I'll also add that I have minimal problems with being asked to work on my day off. Sometimes I'll change which days I'm in the office, but I don't think I've yet given up that day off outright, the worst that'll happen is a quick phone call to talk someone through dealing with an outage on one of my systems.
Some of it is that parenting isn't always as much fun as you dream it will be. It's easy to idealize before you have kids. I love mine and am as dedicated a dad as I can be, but I'm also glad I get to go to work every day.
I've always found that piece to be interesting in that it spends the majority of the article citing studies and illustrating examples for how difficult child rearing is and how unhappy parents are. In the process the author raises the disconnect between that reality versus the contradictory feelings parents espouse... How they can be so much less happy yet will claim the opposite.
And then right at the end the author makes an about face and goes out of their way to defend parenthood... Seeming to inadvertently demonstrate that very delusion.
Have you ever been obsessed with a hobby, past the point that it is really fun? Spent all night debugging a program? Kids are like that. How we find meaning and what we find fun aren't always the same.
Taking no position on the topic, what I find fascinating is how the author seems to inadvertently be displaying the very behaviour the article is describing, even though with all their research you'd expect they'd be best equipped not to.
There's something very... Meta... About that, I think.
> what I find fascinating is how the author seems to inadvertently be displaying the very behaviour the article is describing, even though with all their research you'd expect they'd be best equipped not to.
The article is about how parenting is stressful but (ultimately) rewarding, and you're surprised that the author of it finds parenting stressful but (ultimately) rewarding? Did you expect she'd find it not stressful, or that she'd find it not rewarding?
The article is almost entirely about the fact that parenting is terribly stressfulamd parents are actually far less happy than they seem to be able to admit to themselves.
The only bit that attempts to redeem parenting is right near the end, in a way that always to me felt like rationalization, in the way a parent might rationalize their choice just as previously described in the article.
This meta nature to me, given it was written by a parent, seems to highlight that very conflict: its a written embodiment of the mental contradiction parents experience.
I guess I don't see the contradiction you see. Parenting is stressful, and definitely can cause unhappiness. But it is rewarding. That's not a contradiction; they're separate axes. (The author discusses this when making the square of rewarding-vs-enjoyable).
I guess you can claim that the feeling that it's rewarding is a false rationalization, but... I'm not really sure how you'd argue that. "You only think it's rewarding, but it's not!". I'm not sure how you could demonstrate something like that.
I can very much relate to this. I'm 31 years old and have two kids, and my attitude was and is quite egalitarian.
Yet it's my wife who works part time, and I do full time. Mostly because my baseline salary is much higher than hers, and doing it the other way around would hurt our financial situation severely. And kids are expensive too.
I try to make it up by not working crazy hours, playing with / taking care of the kids (and laundry) when I get home etc., but it's tough. There's only so much energy left after an intense day of work (even if it's "just" eight hours), and between that and the kids, time and energy for anything else is very scarce. It leaves me with the feeling of living only for work and the family, not much left for myself.
Short-term waves ride on top of long-term waves, but if we want an accurate picture of reality, we need to simultaneously remember the short-term and long-term waves. The trough of one wave can mitigate the peak of another wave, should their frequency be off in such a way that they interfere with each other. Likewise, with social trends. Any article about what men think about marriage and fatherhood should be juxtaposed with the facts about the rise of single-parenting (and the fact that the majority of single parents are women).
There are a variety of sources that can be quoted on this issue, and depending which source you look at, you will see different numbers. However, my point is not about any particular set of numbers, but only about the need to remember the underlying trend. Just for the sake of having an example, I'll post one set of numbers, but no one should treat these numbers as being especially accurate:
"About 4 out 10 children were born to unwed mothers. Nearly two-thirds are born to mothers under the age of 30. ...According to U.S. Census Bureau, out of about 12 million single parent families in 2014, more than 80% were headed by single mothers."
Although any particular set of numbers can be questioned, the trend is beyond all doubt: the number of single-parents in the USA (and much of Europe) is increasing.
This trend overlaps with another trend, which is the big increase in divorce in the USA, which occurred between 1900 and 1970. The book by Carter and Glick (1976) looked at this data in great detail. In 1900 the USA had a divorce rate of 5%, whereas by 1970 the rate was close to 50%.
Since 1980 the divorce rate in the USA has declined slightly, but it remains high compared to earlier eras. More than 35% of all marriages end before their 20th anniversary.
When you combine the 40% single-parenthood statistic with the 35% divorce rate of 20 years, you end up with a figure of almost 75% of all children being born into unions that do not last during the years the child is growing up. However, it is worth noting, the 40% and the 35% are not mutually exclusive groups, so the rate is not actually 75%. Some people become parents while they are single, but they later get married. But this number doesn't dramatically shift the reality: the vast majority of kids come from romantic unions which are over before the child reaches their 18th birthday.
The people most likely to remain single while parenting fall into 2 groups: the very poor and those who are culturally non-conformists. A side-effect of the above trends is that the men who do get married tend to be more traditional than the average. Whereas 50 years ago there was no political division regarding marriage, in the future we can expect considerable political differences between those who have kids inside of marriage, versus those who have kids outside of marriage.
Some people regard the advent of single parenting as a radically modern phenomenon but it is worth considering it in light of the Grandmother Hypothesis, which explains menopause in women partly as a way of funneling needed resources to grandchildren. This theory is highly controversial. An early study concluded that in the Hazda tribe, the majority of all calories going to children came from the child's grandmother, although recent studies have disputed that, and it seems clear that the majority of protein comes from men who go hunting:
"On the whole, [men] contribute 43% of all daily kilocalories arriving in camp, but 50% among married couples, and 69% among those with nursing infants (Marlowe 2003a)"
That evidence can be read either way, but if you are traditionalist, and you believe women with young children are typically dependent on men, I think the surprising thing about this research was how many calories are brought in by the grandmothers. Whether that figure is 40% or 60% seems to me a minor point, the larger point is that is an important percentage. More so, I would guess that if a man went missing (died in war, died of disease, etc) the grandmother might then step up her efforts to bring in more calories for the children. So at least some aspects of single-parenthood have ancient roots (indeed, men have always died in war).
Those are the long-term trends.
There are medium-term trends, such as the decline of male wages since 1973, which forces men to work longer hours. Whereas in 1973 the typical American worker had more vacation time than the typical European worker, the situation has now dramatically reversed. The German worker regards 8 weeks of vacation as their sacred right, whereas most American workers can hardly dream of getting so much vacation time. This reality limits the amount of time that men can spend with their kids.
Then there are the short-term trends, such as the high levels of unemployment brought about by the Great Recession of 2008. Whatever ideals a young man might have about marriage and child rearing, the economic environment has been challenging for all but a privileged few.
I don't mean to imply that any of these trends are necessarily The Absolute Truth about fatherhood circa 2015, I only mean that to have an accurate read on the situation, one has to remember all of the trends, and how they happen to conjunct at the current moment.
Extremely summarised (and cynical) form of the story: twentysomething idealism meets life experience :)
In order to meet the requirements to fulfill the lifestyle desired in the article, it's more than just "workplaces must modernise". It's a societal shift. People have to be prepared for 'work hours' to shorten or move around... from a customer point of view, for example. It's not as simple as waggling a finger at employers - expectations have to be managed at all points in the chain.
I'm 25 (and planning to marry and have children) but I'm realistic about what child-raising will be like, and don't entertain egalitarian fantasies. This is partly because I went through two divorces in my childhood (mum & dad, then mum & stepfather); and also because my parents were quite liberal.
People who've had traditional upbringings can daydream about bringing up their own children in a more liberal way, but having lived it from the inside -- it does have advantages but there are also glaring flaws.
The problem is that you can't be both the bread winner and give equal time to your kids. One will always suffer over the other.
It's much better to have one bread winner and one care giver. It's been like this for most of human history and it has worked very well. I'm not sure why these new-age articles and psychologists think that they can somehow change it.
Because logistical barriers often became lazy justification for distant/absent parenting?
Sure, 'millennials' father may not be the kind of dads they want to be - but, hell, at least they WANT to be active parents to their kids. That falls on the positive side of the line for me as it will add emphasis on normalizing paternity leave (for one example) as a legitimate work/life demand.
Are we sure older fathers didn’t want to be active parents? In the past there was a lot of social pressure on men to be a breadwinner which effectively locked out fathers who wanted to be more involved in their children’s upbringing.
We are all only a few generations from being peasants. Being a peasant is not the greatest job in the world, but peasant fathers are actively involved in their children’s upbring as they are working alongside them from sunrise to sunset.
There's data that shows that's not true. Check out the number of hours of paid work by mothers over time in the past 50 years, and the corresponding decrease in housework. [1] The world is not changed by "new-age articles and psychologists." It's changed by technology that reduces the hours required for housework.
Actually, it is a pretty sound argument when it comes to describing human behaviour.
Things are often they way they are because it works on a macro and micro level. Sure, some things get into weird feedback loops and drift to silliness, but for the most part, if you see something working for a lot of people, they're not doing it just because of tradition.
The OP is absolutely correct in that many people will find it better to specialise in child-rearing and income-generation for a two-parent family. That doesn't mean one doesn't do child rearing and the other never works, but the primary responsibilities will fall down that way.
That's how it has been for a millennia or three, and that's likely how it will stay. Behaviours like this are all about reproductive success so that's why they the way they are.
Have you not noticed that a few centuries ago society and technology made evolutionary instincts for reproductive success mostly obsolete? Do you think that a boy with a stay at home dad will fail to impregnate a woman before be dies?
Having kids re-prioritizes things sure and careers can languish because a parent might not stay in the office till 7pm to socialize, or be available at any hour and respond to emails till you hit the bed as the childless or (single or paired up) can do but if you don't mind not keeping with the joneses careerwise, it's doable.
Not everyone has to be the superachieving career minded semi-absent parent.
Honestly, as someone who kinda grew up with two super-achieving career minded parents (on the scale of "majorly influenced their respective academic fields"), it's possible to keep a top tier career going strong and raise kids.
By their example, you have to be pretty ruthless about work/housework/childraising division, though: my parents split weekends and weekdays, so when I was young it was either the day we spent with mom or the day we spent with dad, with a few evenings and dinners together, and as we got older we had a lot of unsupervised freedom (not really a bad thing, imo, but it might mean not living in a crowded suburb or a city). However, it's certainly possible to be on the forefront of the /field/ you are in and still raise reasonably well adjusted kids evenly, it just takes a lot of effort from /both/ parents and a lot of conscious organization and division of tasks. They did have very flexible work schedules (including being completely able to work on weekends), though, which probably made it a lot easier than the (traditional) "You will work from 9am-5pm on Monday through Friday" most corporations (still) expect.
You're right, some people can pull it off and successfully. It's great for those who want to and can. I think my implicit point is not everyone _should_ want to. Career is not an end goal. Career affords us a path to a life we desire. Some people actually enjoy and want a real livable work-life balance --not just the HR PR diluted version.
However, yes, it's great that some people are single minded and discover new drugs and treatments for disease and contribute to accelerated human progress.
I'd say that career is a path to afford us what we find satisfying in life. For some people, that's more time with family and friends, hiking, knitting, or social dance. For some, it might be watching netflix. If that's what satisfies, that's what you should do.
For some folks, though, it is their career activities that they find satisfying (i.e. it is the end goal, because it's what they'd be doing with their time anyways, so it's nice that somebody is paying them to do it full time). My parents were genuinely in the last category, but not everyone is or needs to be.
at the very least, if you don't try to clean away the accumulated societal dead wood, you will end up with not just one bread winner and one care giver, but with women almost exclusively being pushed into the caregiver role and men almost exclusively being pushed into the breadwinner role.
Which is ideal, as men and women are both ideally biologically and psychologically equipped for their respective traditional role. This generation is strongly committed to spitting in the face of biology, evolution, and common sense, but they'll find out these realities are quite stubborn, for better or worse. The only question is how much of the generational consequences they'll live to see.
It must be late, because I looked in the comments section on the article and to my surprise I found interesting ideas and view points. I'll look again tomorrow.
The inferences they’re drawing assume that the populations of “millenial men without kids” and “millenial men with kids” are part of an otherwise uniform group of millenial men, with attitudes changing as men go from one population into the other showing that pre-kid egalitarian attitudes couldn’t stand up to reality.
But this seems like an oversimplified model. There is a big selection bias when passing to the “men with children” group. It’s likely that men who get married and have children at a younger age probably tend to be from more religious backgrounds, for example.
To reliably make the kind of inferences the paper is making, you would need to survey men without children, wait a few years, then survey the same men after they had had children, and ignore the original interviews of men who still haven’t had children by the time of the second set of surveys.
Edit: I’m trying to track down the sources for this story, and it’s even more confusing, as from what I can tell they’re comparing numbers from different studies with different samples and methodologies. I really wish they would more concretely quote exactly which numbers were coming from which source.