Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives?

[ray245]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/opin ... EDUMayINTL

Millennials, generally defined as people born between 1982 and 2000, were supposed to be the generation that forged what has been called “a new national consensus” in favor of gender equality. Indeed, in February the prominent Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs labeled the 2016 election, where an extremely qualified female candidate lost to a man with a history of disrespecting women, “a blip” on the road to the egalitarian society that will be achieved once millennial voters outnumber their conservative elders.

But the millennial category lumps together everybody from age 17 to 34, a group varied by race, ethnicity, religion, income, education and life experience. Don’t think for a second they are united. As a set of reports released Friday by the Council on Contemporary Families reveals, fewer of the youngest millennials, those aged 18 to 25, support egalitarian family arrangements than did the same age group 20 years earlier.

Using a survey that has monitored the attitudes of high school seniors for nearly 40 years, the sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter find that the proportion of young people holding egalitarian views about gender relationships rose steadily from 1977 to the mid-1990s but has fallen since. In 1994, only 42 percent of high school seniors agreed that the best family was one where the man was the main income earner and the woman took care of the home. But in 2014, 58 percent of seniors said they preferred that arrangement. In 1994, fewer than 30 percent of high school seniors thought “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family.” By 2014, nearly 40 percent subscribed to that premise.

A different survey found a similar trend, in this case concentrated mainly among men. In 1994, 83 percent of young men rejected the superiority of the male-breadwinner family. By 2014 that had fallen to 55 percent. Women’s disagreement fell far less, from 85 percent in 1994 to 72 percent in 2014. Since 1994, young women’s confidence that employed women are just as good mothers as stay-at-home moms has continued to inch up, but young men’s has fallen. In fact, by 2014, men aged 18 to 25 were more traditional than their elders.

Such slippage in support for gender equality may have been a factor in the 2016 election, even though voters 18 to 30 were more likely than any other age group to vote for Hillary Clinton. An analysis of exit polls by Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg of Tufts University reveals that millennial support for a white woman in 2016 was 10 percentage points lower than their vote for a black man in 2008. Furthermore, the gender gap among young people was larger than in previous elections. While 63 percent of young women voted for Mrs. Clinton, only 47 percent of young men did so.

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RECENT COMMENTS

LKG April 2, 2017
Also---how about couples where the wife wants to stay home--and they could afford to live on husband's salary--but husband insists wife...
sam finn April 2, 2017
As Garrison Keilllor once reminded his listeners,after the wedding vows have been exchanged,the music that is played is not some silly love...
Anne McGrath April 2, 2017
I would suggest that this article misses an obvious point that explains the resurgent traditionalism. Millennials missed having their...
SEE ALL COMMENTS
The political scientist Dan Cassino suggests that the increased support for male leadership in home life among 18- to 25-year-olds may reflect an attempt to compensate for men’s loss of dominance in the work world. Youths surveyed in 2014 grew up in the shadow of the financial crisis, which accelerated the longstanding erosion of men’s earning power. During the 2016 primaries, when Professor Cassino asked voters questions designed to remind them that many women now earn more than men, men became less likely to support Mrs. Clinton. Perhaps a segment of youth is reacting to financial setbacks suffered by their fathers. Indeed, a 2015 poll commissioned by MTV found that 27 percent of males aged 14 to 24 felt women’s gains had come at the expense of men.

It’s not just the youngest millennials who seem resistant to continuing the gender revolution. Overall, Americans aged 18 to 34 are less comfortable than their elders with the idea of women holding roles historically held by men. And millennial men are significantly more likely than Gen X or baby boomer men to say that society has already made all the changes needed to create equality in the workplace.

Are we facing a stall or even a turnaround in the movement toward gender equality? That’s a possibility, especially if we continue to pin our hopes on an evolutionary process of generational liberalization. But there is considerable evidence that the decline in support for “nontraditional” domestic arrangements stems from young people witnessing the difficulties experienced by parents in two-earner families. A recent study of 22 European and English-speaking countries found that American parents report the highest levels of unhappiness compared with non-parents, a difference the researchers found is “entirely explained” by the absence of policies supporting work-family balance.

No wonder some young people think that more traditional family arrangements might make life less stressful. Tellingly, support for gender equality has continued to rise among all age groups in Europe, where substantial public investments in affordable, high-quality child care and paid leave for fathers and mothers are the norm.

The availability of such options increasingly outweighs cultural support for traditional gender arrangements. When young Americans are asked about their family aspirations, large majorities choose equally shared breadwinning and child-rearing if the option of family-friendly work policies is mentioned.

Furthermore, the financial advantages of dual-earner couples over male-breadwinner families have increased significantly in recent years, and an unequal division of housework has become progressively more damaging to relationships. The minority of couples who do manage to divide chores and child-rearing equally report higher levels of marital and sexual satisfaction, and more frequent sex, than do men and women in homes where the wife does most of the housework and child care.

But most young parents will not be able to sustain egalitarian values and practices without better work-family policies. Those should be possible to attain, given that more than 80 percent of Americans — and strong majorities of both sexes — support paid leave for mothers, with 70 percent favoring it for fathers, too. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, that rises to 91 percent favoring paid leave for mothers and 82 percent favoring it for fathers.

If, but only if, we can win such reforms, we may find that rather than growing out of youthful egalitarian idealism, as the popular view of aging might lead us to expect, more young Americans may grow into it, creating the most egalitarian family arrangements yet.

Update: After this article was posted, 2016 data from the General Social Survey became available, adding some nuance to this analysis. The latest numbers show a rebound in young men’s disagreement with the claim that male-breadwinner families are superior. The trend still confirms a rise in traditionalism among high school seniors and 18-to-25-year-olds, but the new data shows that this rise is no longer driven mainly by young men, as it was in the General Social Survey results from 1994 through 2014.

It's becoming more and more apparent that there is some pushback against feminism, even among those that are younger.

[K. A. Pital]

Oh... Young first worlders with their first world problems...

[Simon_Jester]

Christ but do I despise the alleged men who turn around and start voting 'go patriarchs!' as soon as they find out women are starting to make good in this society...

Crab mentality at its sickest.

[mr friendly guy]

No wonder some young people think that more traditional family arrangements might make life less stressful. Tellingly, support for gender equality has continued to rise among all age groups in Europe, where substantial public investments in affordable, high-quality child care and paid leave for fathers and mothers are the norm.

Is this because nowadays in some countries both partners have to work to make ends meat? So it appears that a traditional arrangement of one working parent is less stressful.

[Zaune]

I don't see anything necessarily anti-feminist about the idea that one parent working full-time and one parent looking after the kids is better than both parents working, because caring for a preschool-age child is a full-time job itself; if the parents can't then someone else has to do it instead, like daycare or one or both sets of grandparents. And most people who conceive a child on purpose don't particularly want to outsource the job of actually raising them.

Of course, both parents working part-time and taking turns to do the childcare stuff would be the ideal solution, but that presents some non-trivial logistical issues. Neither does it necessarily have to be the mother who stays home with the kids, unless they're really dedicated to not using formula milk, but unfortunately societal expectations and peer pressure are at play there.

[Alferd Packer]

The article seems to tiptoe up to the idea that it's a lack of affordable, highly-available child care that's partially to blame, and I can't say I blame people for feeling that way. Child care the US for the extremely young is going to run between $1000-$2000 a month, which may wind up being most, if not all, of the mother's take-home pay(especially in the 18-25 age range). At that point, it's simply more economical for a parent to stay home and care for the child for the first few years, and hell, if you plan having more than one, well, there goes the better part of a decade where you are unable to develop your professional skillset. Trying to leap back into the job market after such a prolonged absence is...difficult.

[Esquire]

Using a survey that has monitored the attitudes of high school seniors for nearly 40 years, the sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter find that the proportion of young people holding egalitarian views about gender relationships rose steadily from 1977 to the mid-1990s but has fallen since. In 1994, only 42 percent of high school seniors agreed that the best family was one where the man was the main income earner and the woman took care of the home. But in 2014, 58 percent of seniors said they preferred that arrangement. In 1994, fewer than 30 percent of high school seniors thought “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family.” By 2014, nearly 40 percent subscribed to that premise.

I'm almost certain that what happened here is that comparatively socially-conservative subgroups (i.e. Hispanics; data support both parts of this) make up a larger fraction of the population than they did in 1994; the percentages have probably improved in all subgroups but at the aggregate level the demographic changes outweigh the attitudinal ones. I've said it before: if you're going to report on surveys or polls in the first place, talk about the design and analysis methods so that we can assess the conclusions usefully.

Such slippage in support for gender equality may have been a factor in the 2016 election, even though voters 18 to 30 were more likely than any other age group to vote for Hillary Clinton. An analysis of exit polls by Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg of Tufts University reveals that millennial support for a white woman in 2016 was 10 percentage points lower than their vote for a black man in 2008. Furthermore, the gender gap among young people was larger than in previous elections. While 63 percent of young women voted for Mrs. Clinton, only 47 percent of young men did so.

Besides the vast problems in poll reliability and validity that we've been talking about since last November, there are all sorts of reasons not to have been as excited about voting for Clinton as for Obama, very few of which have anything to do with her gender. And I'll point out that she still won the popular vote.

The political scientist Dan Cassino suggests that the increased support for male leadership in home life among 18- to 25-year-olds may reflect an attempt to compensate for men’s loss of dominance in the work world. Youths surveyed in 2014 grew up in the shadow of the financial crisis, which accelerated the longstanding erosion of men’s earning power. During the 2016 primaries, when Professor Cassino asked voters questions designed to remind them that many women now earn more than men, men became less likely to support Mrs. Clinton. Perhaps a segment of youth is reacting to financial setbacks suffered by their fathers. Indeed, a 2015 poll commissioned by MTV found that 27 percent of males aged 14 to 24 felt women’s gains had come at the expense of men.

See above, and this type of study definitely doesn't support any causal inference. Also, given the relative employment percentages by gender and industry in, say, 1950 and 2010, I expect it's actually true that women gained at the expense of (less-qualified) men, exactly as the job market is supposed to function. That this is not a problem in any way does not mean that it's wrong to notice that it happened.

No wonder some young people think that more traditional family arrangements might make life less stressful. Tellingly, support for gender equality has continued to rise among all age groups in Europe, where substantial public investments in affordable, high-quality child care and paid leave for fathers and mothers are the norm.

They are, in fact, correct. The data are quite clear that two working parents makes for a more stressful home environment, as well as worse overall educational and social outcomes for children when controlled for income (the second one is IIRC; it's been a while since I looked into this deeply). The only problem with having a stay-at-home parent is if that decision isn't made fully cooperatively, and if it isn't equally plausible for the man to be the homemaker.

But most young parents will not be able to sustain egalitarian values and practices without better work-family policies. Those should be possible to attain, given that more than 80 percent of Americans — and strong majorities of both sexes — support paid leave for mothers, with 70 percent favoring it for fathers, too. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, that rises to 91 percent favoring paid leave for mothers and 82 percent favoring it for fathers.

Which rather undermines the premise of the article, doesn't it? Although as before, poll results are meaningless without more descriptions of the survey itself. Basically, I think this article does a very poor job of making a very poor argument, and that any panic over its conclusions is probably unwarranted.

[ArmorPierce]

Believing that having a father work and a mother stay home is superior house hold arrangements is not inherently anti-feminist. It can in fact generally be true, or not. What would be anti- feminist is removing that choice element, which I don't think is being mentioned in this article.

[ray245]

Believing that having a father work and a mother stay home is superior house hold arrangements is not inherently anti-feminist. It can in fact generally be true, or not. What would be anti- feminist is removing that choice element, which I don't think is being mentioned in this article.

However, it is rather concerning if millennial men do think that most of the fight for feminism has already been won. This bit especially.

It’s not just the youngest millennials who seem resistant to continuing the gender revolution. Overall, Americans aged 18 to 34 are less comfortable than their elders with the idea of women holding roles historically held by men. And millennial men are significantly more likely than Gen X or baby boomer men to say that society has already made all the changes needed to create equality in the workplace.

[Rogue 9]

I'm on the older end of the millennial generation, and my mother worked outside the home while my father stayed home to mind the kids and farm. Child care services cost enough that a whole job can go entirely toward paying for it; at that point, one of the parents might as well stay home. If it were me in that situation, I would say the one with the higher paying/better benefits job should be the one to continue working, whichever partner that might be.

[houser2112]

Even if all of the wages from that second job are going toward child care, the benefit of still working is (if in the US) increased Social Security payments once you reach retirement age.

[Esquire]

Financial benefits in forty years do not necessarily make up for massively increased family stress and slightly worse outcomes for children now.

[Solauren]

I am of the view that, if a couple decides that one of them will stay home to parent any kids, they need to start living on the higher wage, and when they have the kid, the lower wage earner stays home.

REGARDLESS of Gender.

Hey, I told that to my (eventual) wife when we realized it was long term, and she was in school for a career that had more earning potential then mine.

[Elheru Aran]

...$1,000 to 2000 a month?

That's an extremely high price. More realistically you're probably looking at something like $300-400 a month in my neck of the woods. That gets you a meal or two a day, diaper changes, some basic classes, maybe even a couple of uniforms if that's how your childcare rolls.

There are even cheaper childcares who run about $200 a month, but at that level you're basically talking about someone's aunt watching a bunch of kids in her living room for a few hours each day.

That said, for a lot of people in my wage bracket (~$25K a year, plus or minus a thou or so), 400 a month is still a decent chunk of change. That's as much as my wife makes in one biweekly paycheck. It's not terrible, but it would make planning our budget a more cautious process. If my wife lost her job, well, we wouldn't be worrying about day care...

[Rogue 9]

I was out to lunch with some friends of mine who have three children 5 and under today, and it came up that they pay about $350 a week for daycare for all three of them.

[Zaune]

How many hours and what part of the day have an effect as well; someone who gets off work at 5PM is probably paying less than someone who gets off at 10, or starts work at six in the morning.

[His Divine Shadow]

Our costs for communal daycare varies based on how much we're taking home as a family, it used to be as high as 400€ a month for both kids when we both worked full time. Sometimes recently it's been as low as 120€

[Patroklos]

The military has pretty cheap daycare on base. We don't use it at the moment as my wife is at home but when we did it was around $500 a month for three days a week. My planned retirement date is actually dictated by when we believe we will no longer require day care.

[Alferd Packer]

...$1,000 to 2000 a month?

That's an extremely high price.

Not really. Not for infant care, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week. One of our faculty members was paying $3800 a month for her two children, both of whom were under two, when she was a postdoc. Once the kids can start talking, using the toilet, etc, the prices for childcare plummet, but infants simply demand higher staffing levels and care standards.

[His Divine Shadow]

That's insanely high to be paying for childcare (even infants) in comparison to many their countries with more extensive welfare nets is a better phrasing.

Fuck I don't even make 3800 _before_ tax. If I did I'd consider myself rich as fuck.

[Patroklos]

Where do you live AP? Your number is not out of whack for everywhere, but the vast majority of US citizens pay nowhere near that:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/07/02/ ... story.html

Interestingly its the stats with the social safety nets with the highest out of pocket costs. 13 states have infant care costs that breach the lower end of your range. DC gets the closest to the upper end at $1820 a month, but costs drop off dramatically for the second highest at $1370.

I am not sure who your friends are, but they are obviously paying for gold plated care. Which is their call of course.

[Alferd Packer]

I am not sure who your friends are, but they are obviously paying for gold plated care. Which is their call of course.

Unfortunately, they weren't paying for gold-plated care. The faculty member did her postdoc at UC Berkley, and ~2 grand a month is just the going rate for infant care there(another faculty member who got her doctorate at UC Berkley confirmed this). I imagine that like in other things, the Bay Area is one of the most expensive places in the country for childcare, but the higher costs don't translate to a standard of care that much higher than the price would imply.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. Basically, the main cost of child care is labor, so costs are going to scale with the regional standard of living and average salaries.

Plus, the parts of the country with the highest per capita GDP tend to be urban areas with relatively liberal local/state governments. So it's not surprising that as Patroklos notes, child care tends to be expensive in parts of the country with a lot of welfare programs. There isn't as much in the way of welfare programs in, say, Wyoming or Mississippi or Kansas... but by the same token, the standard of living is lower and it's going to be easier to find child care for less money.

[Elheru Aran]

...$1,000 to 2000 a month?

That's an extremely high price.

Not really. Not for infant care, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week. One of our faculty members was paying $3800 a month for her two children, both of whom were under two, when she was a postdoc. Once the kids can start talking, using the toilet, etc, the prices for childcare plummet, but infants simply demand higher staffing levels and care standards.

I suspect that 10 hours a day for a baby is what really runs up the price there. Normal prices probably assume a 8-hour period of care with a little wiggle room for commute times, but two hours over that would be running into overtime-fee territory, and 10 hours overtime a week in the Bay Area... well, that'll add up.

I still maintain that IMO almost $4K a month is absurdly high, though... I can possibly see 2 grand a month, but $3800? Ye gads.

[Gandalf]

On the subject of changing family trends over generations...

Childless couples 'on track to be Australia's most common family type'

A society dominated by childless couples could become Australia's reality, with data analysis suggesting they will become the most common family type by 2023.

One sociologist says the trend is already happening, and future government policy will determine whether the traditional family model continues to exist.

For many millennials, like 23-year-old Karim Eldib, changing financial and social realities are important factors in the choice to have kids.

"[A lot of people] get the point where they say 'yep, going to have a child', and they don't think about all the things that come with having children," Mr Eldib said.

"I'm in a relationship and there has been talk of that but it's not something that we're seriously considering — it's something we'd like to consider after we've done all the things we want to do."

His view is shared by other couples delaying their decision to extend their families, a trend which paired with Australia's ageing population means the nuclear family is in decline.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates between 2023 and 2029, there will be more people in a relationship living without children than families with kids.

Jackie Mahony and Trina Gilchrist, who are raising two-year-old Angus together, said the decision to have a child took a lot of thought.

"For us I think it's very much about should we just have the one child? One is easy for us," Ms Mahoney said.
"We've been in a really long-term relationship — 13 years coming on and Angus was certainly a part of that relationship and conversation," said Ms Gilchrist.

Future policy will impact family choices

University of Melbourne sociologist Leah Ruppanner said while the trend of not having children varies between countries, it is already happening in Australia.

"[The trend is most evident in] a lot of countries like South Korea and Japan, where their populations are shrinking because they are not having enough babies," Dr Ruppanner said.

"One of the things is governments need populations to grow because it means you have people paying taxes, people looking after the older generation, and people supporting the economy."

Bronwyn Harman of Edith Cowan University, who studies social responses to childless couples, said the public has become more accepting of non-traditional families.

"In the past, we had the traditional family of mum, dad and the kids — mum stayed at home, dad was the bread-winner. We know that's not true now," Dr Harman said.

She expects the 2016 Census data, which has not been fully released yet, will show an increase in households without children.

"I think if there are more couples without children in future or even people unpartnered, society will change with a change in policy and perspective," she said.

Early results from the latest Census are expected to be released next month.