So then I expect you'll have a child and give up several years of your career to do so? Or perhaps multiple children and drop out of the workforce altogether?

Some people, believe it or not, find their jobs fulfilling. They go to school to learn something so they can do it for the rest of their lives. Having a child jeopardizes the role you planned for yourself for the future. The goals you wanted to accomplish often never get accomplished because having a child takes up an insane amount of your time.

Yes, being a parent is a very important job in society, but often it means that your personal horizons become a lot more narrow. Rather than aspiring to climb to the top of your field, create art, invent something, discover new things, or whatever else you'd hoped to do when you were a teenager, your focus becomes almost entirely on keeping a single human being alive and then raising them.

My children are more important than my personal ambitions. I will find a wife who feels the same. I don't live to work, I work to live and to support my children.

Then why don't we pay them for it? Why aren't men clamoring for the role? Why do we often put "job" in quotes when we talk about it?

Being a caregiver is absolutely noble but unless you're working in a professional environment taking care of the infirm, we don't really give the role much respect.

Men can't be mothers. It's not a job for which you can train. It's a role imposed upon you by nature.

Fathers (and men, generally) can, of course, be caregivers, but that's only one of a mother's roles. It's far from the only one.

I accept that your "we" is a group of people who don't value motherhood highly. Based on my wife's experiences as a pregnant woman and our experiences being out and about with our children, I don't think that's a common sentiment in the general population.

I'll end with an unsupported assertion and a small mental leap: people are paid for work because it's the only incentive that will make them come to work. Since the 19th century, society has been progressively more successful at incentivizing women to abandon child rearing and home making in favor of commercial enterprise. Perhaps as a result (but certainly correlated), women's sense of well being has been dropping (at least through the latter third of the 20th century). Perhaps this link is causal, and the happiness lost is the reward for child rearing.

Men can stay home and that's the point: we don't see men volunteering to be the stay-at-home parent because there's no incentive for them. We assume being mom is the pinnacle of female existence because we ignore the reality that all humans have goals and independent needs. Maybe your wife is special and thinks she needs nothing else and get cup is filled only by pouring herself out into the cups of others until she's empty. Maybe your local community days the same thing out loud. But I bet if you asked your wife if she ever felt like she'd like to do have something for herself, something that let her feel like individual she once was, she'd probably have some comments and ideas. Perhaps explore that a bit.

Without exception, my male friends with kids have significantly reduced their time and energy spent on their jobs to focus more on their small children. They all say that their kids are the most rewarding part of their lives. Most have highly-paid professional jobs. I expect to do the same, at least for the early years, when I eventually have children.

This seems to be a huge shift from the previous generation. My father and most of his peers worked long hours and contributed little to childrearing.

I think you're still in the minority but it's a good thing. I'm devoted to my spouse and my kid. I'll drop anything for them. Some of the fathers I know feel the same but some smell like mine and he was a piece of crap. I fully support parenting being a team sport and in my opinion, that's how we're going to fix the modern family, by making it better than pretend version of The Good Old Days.

I don't know about your good old days, but I am just emulating my very religious, very conservative father, who, like me, made similar career choices to spend more time with his kids, as well as that of my grandfather's. Their good old days were pretty darn nice and I fully intend to recreate it for my children.

Reduced but not abandoned, that's the difference. My wife works part time hours since since the birth of our son, but she would never quit her job entirely and that dynamic will change substantially once he's old enough to start school.

Referring back to your previous post, I asked my wife if she felt she should be paid. She says she is paid, in that my money (which I make for the family) is her money and supports the entire household.

I'd guess men don't volunteer to be primary child rearers because stay-at-home jobs have been relatively rare, prior to the past 4 years, men tend overwhelmingly to want to support a spouse than to be supported (which is probably why gay couples have greater household incomes and lower divorce rates than all other categories), and women tend to be hypergamous in mate selection. It's not that there's no incentive to stay home (if you like your children, at least, which I hope is true), it's that there's a strong incentive to go to work.

In my particular situation, tax and childcare would eat most of my wife's income, so she'd be spending 40+ hrs/wk working with other people's children in exchange for less time with hers. She'd rather work with our children and be able to take an afternoon nap.

Would we both prefer to be independently wealthy and not have to work, sure! Might one or both of us work anyway? I probably would. She probably wouldn't.

The remainder of your message appears to be uninformed condescension. My wife is not a chattel slave. Her primary focus is child rearing and home making, but it's not her sole occupation nor solely her responsibility.

There are parts of being single we miss, and parts of being childless we miss. That doesn't change the fact that we've worked very hard for the life we have, find it very rewarding, and wouldn't give it up easily.

I'm not sure who the "we" is in this comment, and I can't think of any group I know in real life that it aligns to.

Because everywhere I've lived and every community I've been a part of, "we" absolutely do give motherhood profound levels of respect. So much so, that being a mother is an almost sacrosanct role and puts the holder of the title above reproach in many situations.

Also "we" do pay them for it? If you feel better thinking about it that way, their income-earning spouse can be seen as paying them (by having the single income pay for all household spending). Also society at large pays them, by virtue of the myriad subsidies, deductions, services, and programs for children and parents.

The biggest challenge I've witnessed to praising motherhood as a full-time profession, is that mothers who work corporate jobs feel attacked or disparaged if they hear any comment which suggests they are doing any less mothering than the full-time mothers. So we end up in a tricky position culturally, where you can call someone a full-time mother, but a phrase like part-time mother is seen as offensive or inappropriate.

It's very challenging to balance giving respect and recognition to full-time mothers in a way that won't offend mothers who work for companies.

Yeah I don't get this. My wife and I have both traveled alone with kids. She says that when she's in an airport with the kids, people help her and approach her and tell her what good jobs she's doing. I've never experienced that. At most I get a 'cute kids' comment. No one ever helps or even offers or even acknowledges. She says people give up their seats for her, help her with luggage, etc...

Would be nice.

Women are responsible for 80% of the consumer spending. If we assume men and women have equal pay, then 3/5 of men's income is spent by women. If women make 20-30% less overall, then women are actually spending more than 3/4 of all the money men make.

If men are handing 60-75% of their money over to their wives/partners to spend, I'd assert that those women are getting paid better than men are.

This is the dumbest take I’ve seen in a while. Perhaps “buying stuff for the household” is just another chore that a non-working partner has more time for? It’s not like the average young family’s consumer spending is mostly discretionary purchases the wife makes to amuse herself.

Do you really think all of that is solely for the household and that the man is scrutinizing every single penny?

Setting that aside, once you have a family, nobody is going to have much discretionary money and they’ll have even less with just one income earner.

Who gets more respect, garbage man or mother, in your opinion?

To be honest, I'm not even sure who you expect respect from and why that'd be of terrible importance.