I’d make a sarcastic comment here, but really it writes itself.

Slocum-I’m inclined to agree with you that wage rate disparities play a role—albeit partial—in determining which parent withdraws from the labor market to care for children. But can you document that fathers in the U.S. are really more likely to stay home than their European counterparts?—and if so, which European counterparts, since the relevant policies appear to vary substantially from country to country.

Which suggests an interesting point: much of the discussion has implicitly presupposed that people make fertility decisions, and then subsequently flounder about in the policy environment of whatever country they happen to live in. However, at least if you’re willing to trust things like this, it may be the other way around: the policy environment may have a substantial impact on fertility decisions.

Although utopian is accurate.

I also personally believe the answer in the States is not about asking the government to mandate subsidized day care, or longer leaves, or what have you. It’s about breaking the connection between health care / FICA expense and full-time work. If a half-time employee cost his/her employer exactly half what a full-timer costs, businesses would have many more part-time employees. And if you could walk out on an overly-demanding employer without risking your family’s health coverage, you’d see a lot more parents voting with their feet.

I used the “two-biological-parent” classification only because the census bureau break down I was linking to uses it. As far as adoption is concerned, my point in #12 was merely that, even if one were to accept leederick’s argument about step parents (in #9), adoptive parents should not be considered comparable.

My normative intuitions on this are, I think, pretty close to Chris Armstrong’s.

My husband just took a week off from work to mind the kids while they had off from school and I didn’t. He loved it. I loved it. The kids loved it. If we could afford to pay the mortgage on my salary alone, he would quit and be a full time parent. The best option would be if he could take a lesser job with less money, so he could do more at home during the week. Unfortuneately, his employer would never allow that.

Like you, Harry, I’m convinced that men would like to shoulder a bigger chunk of labor at home and that it would be good for parents and kids alike. I’m sorry that the optimists like us weren’t more well represented at your conference.

I’d be surprised if such a conference came to any other conclusion—it seems overdetermined.

And yet—European countries have these sorts of policies and they seem to result in the preservation of gender inequality. The generous leaves are taken almost only by women (even when equally available).

The U.S. has little or none of these, but fathers serving as primary caregivers seems a much more common pattern because of economics. E.g. free, government-provided daycare is not provided so when the father makes less money (which is increasingly common) families do sometimes decide to have the father stay home (or work part time). But I’d predict that if women were offered generous paid leave at near their salaries, they would be the ones taking leave regardless of whether or not they were the higher paid spouse.

I say this, BTW, as a father who has, over the past 15 years, done more than half of the child care—mainly because I could (I can telecommute and work while at home with children over the summer or when they’re sick, but my wife cannot).

In response to #12—I use the term “original” parents here to mean “the 2-parent unit that had full parental responsibility before the split”. I think that adoptive parents are not at all like steps, and should be treated as the real parents for normative purposes. In fact I think biological parenthood is irrelevant here—it is only when the biological parent makes the lifelong commitment that the adoptive parent is expected to make that he or she gets to count as the real parent.

I do agree that in families with children of the age of 10, or 12, or 14, that stepping in as a parent can be incredibly fraught and emotionally difficult. And to put it simply, children may simply refuse to BE ‘parented’ in the conventional sense by the new spouse. But I’m still not sure that this undermines the normative idea about the importance of equal parenthood. I’d need more argument as to just how, anyway.

On the topic, I am always surprised to which extent all this focuses on male behavior, while so much data seems to suggest that it is female mating decisions that determine male role choices more than anything else. Under this assumption, shouldn’t a conference on real utopias be more concerned with the apparent incongruency between the stated and revealed female mating preferences?

Maybe this is ashortcoming explicable by the lack of “sex” or “mating” as a useful concepts in most feminist approaches.