I defy you to read this New York Times piece and not ask yourself why this woman wanted children in the first place. Be sure to read the original Craigslist post.
I understand we are biologically driven to procreate, but why do we have kids so other people can raise them? Is this some stubborn holdout of aristocratic society? The all-devouring necessity to produce an heir?
Danielle found the story for me and said she thought it would be perfect for my Decline of Western Civilization category.
When we were in New York, we saw a lot of nannies out with their charges as we walked around Manhattan. The most striking scene involved a mother in a business suit descending to the subway and waving to her daughter through the balusters. The daughter, of course, sat in a trendy stroller pushed by a nanny.
The Atlantic published a piece by Sandra Tsing Loh in their ‘Ideas Issue’ on working moms that nails the basic irony of the drive for both parents to work.
The debate about mothers and work: it always ends—doesn’t it?—with Sweden. Oh, if America could only be like Sweden—such a humane society, with its free day care for working mothers and its government subsidies of up to $11,900 per child per year. The problem? One hates to be Mrs. Red-State Republican Bringdown, but yes … the taxes. Currently, the top marginal income-tax rate in Sweden is nearly 60 percent (down from its peak in 1979 of 87 percent). Government spending amounts to more than half of Sweden’s GDP. (And it doesn’t all go to children, given Sweden’s low fertility rate.) On the upside, government spending creates jobs: from 1970 to 1990, a whopping 75 percent of Swedish jobs created were in the public sector … providing social welfare services … almost all of which were filled by women. Uh-oh. In short, as Gilbert points out, because of the 40 percent tax rate on her husband’s job, a new mother may be forced to take that second, highly taxed job to supplement the family’s finances; in other words, she leaves her toddlers behind from eight to five (in that convenient universal day care) so she can go take care of other people’s toddlers or empty the bedpans of elderly strangers.
The only entity that benefits from the employment of both parents of an upper-middle-class family (the kind of family who can afford to hire a nanny) is the GDP.
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