Opinion | The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals

It’s because there’s still a widespread reverence for the “ideal worker.” We commonly define the ideal worker as someone who starts working in early adulthood and continues, full-time and full force, for 40 years straight. The concept reflects a breadwinner-homemaker model that dates back to the Industrial Revolution and functioned fairly well thr

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The more money you make, the less likely you are to place ‘being a parent’ at the center of your identity. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that middle and upper-income people are more likely to understand their identity  as  their job, but even that doesn’t fully explain this stat. Instead, I’d argue that bourgeois parents

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The problem is that when you make productivity personal, you put the pressure on individuals to figure out the tension between different roles in their life. You’re telling them: You figure out how you organize the work, how you execute it. The more you do, the better. Now you have this tension of: If I spend less time with my family, I could do m

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TO MY MIND, THOUGH, there is a third development that has altered our parenting experience above all others, and that is the wholesale transformation of the child’s role, both in the home and in society. Since the end of World War II, childhood has been completely redefined. Today, we work hard to shield children from life’s hardships. But througho... See more

So the sort of norm of the father as provider directly maps onto this ideal worker norm of always being available to work and prioritizing work, which privileges men.