No kidding. Here’s an example of a highly endogenous website that’s vehemently anti-daycare….
http://www.daycaresdontcare.org

Got it in one. There’s far more status to having shut down a wife who had other options.

Why, the daycare, of course!

“Those of you who implicitly advocate the position that the creation of the next generation of humanity is not a role for society as a whole are demented, disgusting, and bizarre.”

Say what? I knew it took a village to raise a child, but I didn’t know it took a village as a WHOLE to raise a child.

I just love this whole topic. People are getting hackles raised, angry, sickened, disheartened, and irritated; people are calling each other animals, scabs, scum, money-grubbing, legalized prostitutes, anti-feminist stooges; issues of methodolgy are being raised, conspiracies sighted, historical practices derided and my favorite, the specter of the Death Knell for Feminism cited.

Do I hear it tolling long and hard from a tall, ivory tower…

Nah, its just the daycare down the block.

i wanted to pass along this information about the survey instrument involved.

It included questions like:

“When you have children, do you plan to stay at home with them or do you plan to continue working? Why?”

Please follow the link, it’s not my information but it’s very interesting, and i think will help this conversation focus on whether the survey actually was valid at all, rendering much of this speculation moot.

Thanks.

I have you say that you are very lucky to be in a financial position where one spouse earns enough money to pay for the other to be in school and to pay for full-time daycare. I wish that we were in a similar position, but we are not. That is one reason why it will take me four years to finish a graduate degree that should take me only two. But you have to work with the circumstances that life deals to you, not what you wish it would be. I suppose I could have married someone with a highly paid corporate job, but instead I fell in love with a lowly Ph.D student. If you haven’t noticed, an assistant professor’s salary is rather meagre. We are both Ivy grads, so you should note that an Ivy degree is not a guarantee of a six-figure salary.

However, I don’t believe that I am depressing the wages of childcare workers by providing childcare for my own child. Nor does your example of the taxi driver offering free rides apply, if you think carefully about the argument. I do not babysit for other people’s children for free. Furthermore, if this were the case, then the same would apply to free childcare provided by a stay-at-home father or by members of the extended family, which Hektor previously recommended as a better solution to the childcare question than a parent providing childcare. In real terms, the cost of childcare to my family is equivalent to the income that I am choosing to forego by providing it for myself. Remember, that I’m not competing with you for a job (at least right now), so if it makes you feel better, I am driving up your earning potential by making the workforce that much smaller. Would you raise the same objections if my husband were planning to provide childcare rather than me? Too bad his employer turned down his paternity leave request, or that’s exactly what would have happened last year.

I also find it highly ironic that you claim that my willingness to provide childcare for “free” (clearly your graduate degree isn’t in economics, or you wouldn’t make that claim) is evidence that I devalue childcare or consider it to be “not real work”. No where in this thread have I said anything that could be construed to mean that I think childcare isn’t real work. In fact, I have said quite the opposite. The notion that well-educated, white collar women demean themselves (I believe you called me a “corporate stooge and scab”) by caring for children, I must say, seems to devalue childcare much more so that my saying that I did a cost-benefit calculation of the cost of childcare vs. the short-term income potential of my specific situation and that it came up a bit short.

I have never judged you or any other family who finds that childcare outside the home works better for them. There are certainly plenty of people for whom the intrinsic value of working far outweighs the costs of childcare, even when the second income is not enough to compensate. I’m not sure where you get the idea that I have characterized myself as a paragon of female sacrifice or that I have chosen to provide my own childcare primarily out of concern for exploited childcare workers (a ridiculous and rather amusing strawman, or, perhaps, straw-woman).

That said, I have seen professional, working women discuss whether it’s appropriate for their nanny to eat lunch while the child is awake (workday starts at 7:30, nanny eats at home, and afternoon nap isn’t until 2pm, meaning that nanny is expected to go for 8 hours without food) and wonder if they should pay their nanny less if they take her on vacation with them because she’s getting a free vacation. Not everyone who hires a nanny exploits her, but, I am certainly not the first person to observe that this relationship can be exploitive. The desire of upper-class women to pursue high-powered, intensive careers is often made possible by the low-income labor of other women (nannies, housecleaners, etc.). It is not bad to hire other people to perform domestic labor, but we still have to be aware of the privilege inherent in our decision (the classic formulation of this is “who cares for the nanny’s child?”). Feminists, myself included, can’t just congratulate ourselves on for having wonderful, fulfilling careers, when those wonderful, fulfilling careers are all too commonly built on the backs of women who are paid off the books, get no health benefits, and no overtime. The real problem is that childcare is a reverse pyramid scheme: it has to cost less than the median after-tax wage earned by those who want childcare, or else it isn’t affordable. Upper income women can afford it easily, but for the rest of us, childcare decisions are series of compromises, some more palatable than others. Far, far up-thread, I commented that the availability of affordable, quality childcare (i.e., publicly subsidized) might have changed my own cost-benefit analysis. I wish that our politicians would get off their collective asses and publicly subsidize childcare, but it seems to be so far off the current political agenda that I am certainly not holding my breath.

You can’t have it both ways. If your decision to use your husband’s wage to pay for childcare does not drive up the labor costs of childcare, thereby squeezing out less fortunate moms and dads, then Mrs. Coulter’s decision to take time off from her career does not drive down childcare workers’ wages. By conceding my argument, you vitiate your own.

In of itself, that vitiates your attacks against Mrs. Coulter. Nevertheless, you are simply incorrect to reject my analogies.

What do taxicab drivers do? They take individuals from destination A to destination B. By driving my own care, I take myself from destination A to destination B, thereby driving down demand for their services. What do childcare professionals do? They take care of other people’s children for a fee. If I take care of my own child, I do just as much to depress their wages as I would in the first scenario.

Now, your “counterargument” is that this would only be an issue of I were standing at a corner hawking free rides. Well, Mrs. Coulter isn’t standing at a corner hawking free childcare (I assume), she’s simply providing a service herself, out of her own time and labor, that she could pay others to perform. I suppose if she agreed to watch a friend’s child for nothing for an afternoon, there might be an analogy with the counter-analogy you draw, but I don’t imagine you worry about being an “antifeminist tool” whenever you have a friend’s kid over, do you?

Since you feel compelled to lecture me on proper weblog behavior, a few pointers:

1. If you want to come in and defend your husband, at least be aware of the arguments he’s been making. I’m simply pointing out that Hektor’s “suggestion” to Mrs. Coulter could equally be applied to you. I think Hektor’s wrong: you should be in graduate school and Mrs. Coulter should take time off from work.

2. It is a bit late to cry foul over “ad hominem” attacks, let alone appropriate tone, when your first post includes the following:

“women who are willing to do it for free by choice (and not by necessity) should be treated as scabs and/or antifeminist corporate stooges. Saying that child-care workers are underpaid bacause women’s work is always undervalued misses the economic reality that child-care workers are underpaid because a certain class of women are willing to do the work for free and the paid workers can’t compete.”

I’m sure Mrs. Coulter appreciates being called an “antifeminist corporate stooge.” My view: if you’re going to throw names at people for the choices they defend, you should have the guts to take a good deal more than I’m throwing your way.

If you go back over the thread, you’ll also find that neither I nor Mrs. Coulter have attacked anyone’s decisions; not so much true of you and Hektor, despite your denial in your follow up post. Indeed, Mrs. Coulter’s early interventions focused on structural problems involved in childcare and how they led her to opt for a particular strategy of providing it to her own child.

Can’t speak from personal experience but from what I’ve heard and been told, on average, I don’t think there’s that much sex going on in them things, relative to other forms of binary social relationships, like, say, datin’. Which means that both parties would probably be better of switching to the prostitution of the plain ol’ illegal type. The fact that most don’t, suggests that people get hitched for other, nobler reasons, than sex and money. Raisin’ rugrats and twue wuv come to mind.

Again, thank you for pointing this out.

Why do these women want to go to professional school? Why not stop with a nice B.A. from Yale, Amherst, or the like?

I can understand that an undergrad degree teaches us to become better citizens, more informed, etc. But isn’t a professional degree supposed to help one advance in terms of a profession? Of course, not everyone who goes to law school, say, has to practice law – there are many other trajectories that can be enhanced by legal training – but, what does a JD offer to a parent-in-training?

Or is an elite grad degree the new sine qua non for a marriageable upper middle class female?