I’m a stay-at-home mom. My kids are 13 & 11 and I can’t tell you how many times they’ve thanked me making my job their care. My whole life is using my time to listen to them, drive them everywhere, make sure they do well at school, remind them to do their chores and practice their instruments, read books, and we watch k-dramas and football together as a family. I also keep my house clean and cook relatively decent healthy meals.
I love talking with strangers. We travel quite a bit, and if the person I talk to ever gets around to asking me what I do, when I say I stay home, the reaction is usually praise akin to telling a two-year-old he was very smart for putting the block in the square hole. “What an important job that is!”
I don’t tell them I have a master’s degree in educational psychology, or that I’ve authored several novels, or that I can read and write in Korean and speak conversationally.
I’m sure there are many jobs I could do, I just love doing this the most- it’s the best for us and that’s the most I can say about it. I can’t advocate this lifestyle for anyone else. Some think I got here because of “luck” that my husband does well when we actually had to work hard and make many sacrifices along the way and I would tell anyone that it’s worth it, if only I could.
There is no way you’re a stay at home mom who didn’t get there because of “luck.” Nobody I know can just drop their job to take of their children, even if they desperately want to. You need to acknowledge that you did get into this position because of luck and a poor, working-class family would not be able to afford living the way you do. It’s also ridiculous that you make this type of post on an article that criticizes the hypocrisy of elites because you clearly are one.
I thought the article was about elite hypocrisy- living their life one way while advocating for something else entirely. I’m clearly advocating for my own lifestyle in this comment, though I don’t feel comfortable doing it in a wider setting, especially because doing so elicits comments like yours.
You have also made assumptions about me based on my situation when you don’t know my circumstances. I know you can’t just leave a job to take care of kids. I knew that before I had kids so I worked very hard early on in my life to give myself the best shot of raising my future children this way. I worked and saved and didn’t get into debt even when doing so much schooling. I promise it wasn’t easy. If you knew me in real life you would know I’m not an elite, and if we had this conversation in person, it would be so much better.
Everyone’s circumstances are uniquely their own and I believe most people are trying their best. I love that I can stay home but that doesn’t mean I look down on someone who doesn’t. I wish you the best in whatever your own life circumstances are.
Are you serious? I worked since 14 and saved/invested every penny i made, worked my TAIL off to be able to buy a home CASH at 30 ( that was my goal. Homeowner by 30 and i MADE IT HAPPEN) bc i grew up poor and had to live in my grandmother’s house bc my parents couldnt afford a home on their own.
So when i married in my mid 30’s , i offered a home free of debt and my husband then took over so i could raise our future family. This was our PLAN.
We were in a long distance relationship for 5 years bc we had this goal .
We do not need Marxist lectures because you offend us. She is part of the new response to the silent tendency of destroying the traditional American family. Once a family has two kids. the wife is working only to pay for the daycare. Being just a service, that it is not part of the family. My daughter-in-law stays home with the two kids as well as my son-in-law because he takes care of our diabetic grandson. He is also working from home. Many young families have adopted this way and it is a response to the pressure and the mental manipulation to keep up with the "American Dream," of living beyond means, with leather sofas and driveway size TV's.
I'm a stay-at-home dad who didn't get here because of luck. It's not luck that made us not a poor, working-class family, it's years and years of hard work and education and not living beyond our means. Before we got married, we talked about the idea that eventually, when the time was right, we'd be a family with a stay-at-home parent... and then we both buckled down and worked our butts off for ten years to make that possible. I quit my job when our son was six because he desperately needed to be out of school where he was being bullied. I homeschooled him for the rest of elementary school, during which time, because my work travel was out of the way, my wife's career really took off... and of course we never had to pay for daycare for his little sister. He's finishing his bachelor's now, but he and his sister both need me on the daily, and they would not be as happy and secure if I weren't available to them. I, like the other people responding to you, am living my values. We didn't roll a lucky seven, we worked to make this happen.
My wealthy neighbourhood is rife with self aggrandizing posers saying the right thing in that very particular tone of voice: a faux air of saccharine compassion, a self satisfied confidence in their own correctness and a smug “doing the right thing” superiority.
Our author is right, “doing the right thing” is a consumer product, a luxury good. My street has one American car otherwise, BMW, Audi, Volvo, Lexus. It’s all one piece.
Good Morning Rob - “For all their talk of gender equity, elites are the most likely to be in marriages in which husbands outearn their wives. For all their condemnation of the sexism and misogyny of the middle and working class, it is precisely within these strata that women are more likely to outearn their husbands.“ Thanks for identifying and bringing up this important contradiction. Where do we go from here?
Great newsletter today. So tragic to read this statistic “ In dual-income households within the top socioeconomic quintile, only 29 percent of wives earn more than their husbands, whereas in the bottom quintile, an incredible 69 percent of wives out-earn their husbands.”. Far too many women in the lower economic circumstances will find it difficult to take any time off at all for their children since they are shouldering the greater burden of earning. Meanwhile the more influential members of the top tier will be out of touch with the realities of surviving in such a precarious situation.
For what it is worth, have read, fairly consistently, that given a choice, roughly one third of all women would be either a stay at home mother or a wife who took care of the house and her husband, formerly called a homemaker. Unfortunately, a fair number of feminists, believe this is a poor thing to do. If it were accepted as an avenue, that was honored, more women, and their men, might go back to basics and stay married, not have kids before marriage, etc..
Rob, there’s a new sitcom coming out with a title that struck me as odd/unsettling: ‘George and Mandy’s 1st Marriage’. It was the ‘1st Marriage’ bit that has me scratching my head, w/ Hollywood further helping to culturally normalize divorce. There’s being sold an expectation of multiple marriages.
The economic aspect of paying women more than men has devastated many families. I had friends who lost their child to drugs overdose. Eventually, they divorced. At least the ethnic groups are getting some help from older relatives in order to maintain the sanity of their families. After decades of living in this manipulated and altered socioeconomic environment, I wonder what is left from my dream of being in this country. This article does not take in account the toxic environment that made my daughter, my grandson and my daughter-in-law sick with irreparable diseases.
From my perspective it is a simple explanation. It is individual pursuit of status lacking a solid moral foundation.
First, I really dislike this connection to "meritocracy" as being the broken thing with elites. In my world as a person living in the land of the WIERD people... the educated elites that self identify politically as liberal progressive... but with a background and worldview that is solid normie... they are absolutely not in line with preference over true merit... what I would call "productive merit"... except where they perform well... and it is typically with their privileges in modern academic achievement where that form of merit has been dumbed down and narrowed in focus and measures to allow them easy achievement.
I have said it before and I will keep saying it until I am given a good logical tongue-lashing that changes my mind... but the primary source of the problem is 3rd wave feminism in control of the education system and the educated females they crank out through the system. There are males in the mix, but they are a minority in this raging hypocrisy of the upper class... which is the same as the raging hypocrisy of the political left/Democrats.
When I graduated high school about 18% of the 65% of students that became high school graduates graduated with a college degree. Today is is about 95% high school graduates and 38% college graduates. Most of those college graduates today are females.
We have bunched up these people expecting their education to plant them firmly in a high status position. However, it was a lie to them because college is at best only a slight advantage in the job market, and at worst just a delay in a launch of a career after high school. This is especially the cause with the degrees of choice for females... liberal art humanities focuses... where no real professional job skills derive.
Millennials got economically destroyed in 2008 and had to stay in school longer. Inflation of education and housing costs have hammered subsequent generations. So here they are incapable of breaking into the upper middle class from an income, wealth and related normie status position. So, they create their own version of high status and yell at normies claiming they are racist, misogynist, transphobic, Islamophobic, fascists, etc.... and virtue signal to a new woke ideology where only the cool upper class people hang out,
The actual problem is that they break from the meritocracy... the productive meritocracy.
I think a solution is civil rights 2.0... making preference in education class-based, but after school there is no preference other than productive merit. If we legislate this then these little feminist brainwashed hazards of upper class malice will have to drop their destructive ideological virtue signaling and we will see better integration with them and the normies... thus equalizing society and reducing the class divisions we are dealing with today.
The article does not go in depth on the degrees the college graduates are getting nowadays. Most of them, again, imitate the Elites and get useless degrees that lead them to poor incomes. If the Elites are studying liberal arts, they will have different arrangements after graduation whereas the others are having hard times even forming a family.
Have you by any chance heard of HoeMath? He's a Youtuber that gives dating advice to men, and he focuses a lot on status and wealth. I highly recommend his channel as his ideas are similar yours.
I’m a stay-at-home mom. My kids are 13 & 11 and I can’t tell you how many times they’ve thanked me making my job their care. My whole life is using my time to listen to them, drive them everywhere, make sure they do well at school, remind them to do their chores and practice their instruments, read books, and we watch k-dramas and football together as a family. I also keep my house clean and cook relatively decent healthy meals.
I love talking with strangers. We travel quite a bit, and if the person I talk to ever gets around to asking me what I do, when I say I stay home, the reaction is usually praise akin to telling a two-year-old he was very smart for putting the block in the square hole. “What an important job that is!”
I don’t tell them I have a master’s degree in educational psychology, or that I’ve authored several novels, or that I can read and write in Korean and speak conversationally.
I’m sure there are many jobs I could do, I just love doing this the most- it’s the best for us and that’s the most I can say about it. I can’t advocate this lifestyle for anyone else. Some think I got here because of “luck” that my husband does well when we actually had to work hard and make many sacrifices along the way and I would tell anyone that it’s worth it, if only I could.
There is no way you’re a stay at home mom who didn’t get there because of “luck.” Nobody I know can just drop their job to take of their children, even if they desperately want to. You need to acknowledge that you did get into this position because of luck and a poor, working-class family would not be able to afford living the way you do. It’s also ridiculous that you make this type of post on an article that criticizes the hypocrisy of elites because you clearly are one.
I thought the article was about elite hypocrisy- living their life one way while advocating for something else entirely. I’m clearly advocating for my own lifestyle in this comment, though I don’t feel comfortable doing it in a wider setting, especially because doing so elicits comments like yours.
You have also made assumptions about me based on my situation when you don’t know my circumstances. I know you can’t just leave a job to take care of kids. I knew that before I had kids so I worked very hard early on in my life to give myself the best shot of raising my future children this way. I worked and saved and didn’t get into debt even when doing so much schooling. I promise it wasn’t easy. If you knew me in real life you would know I’m not an elite, and if we had this conversation in person, it would be so much better.
Everyone’s circumstances are uniquely their own and I believe most people are trying their best. I love that I can stay home but that doesn’t mean I look down on someone who doesn’t. I wish you the best in whatever your own life circumstances are.
Are you serious? I worked since 14 and saved/invested every penny i made, worked my TAIL off to be able to buy a home CASH at 30 ( that was my goal. Homeowner by 30 and i MADE IT HAPPEN) bc i grew up poor and had to live in my grandmother’s house bc my parents couldnt afford a home on their own.
So when i married in my mid 30’s , i offered a home free of debt and my husband then took over so i could raise our future family. This was our PLAN.
We were in a long distance relationship for 5 years bc we had this goal .
So NO. LUCK HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
We do not need Marxist lectures because you offend us. She is part of the new response to the silent tendency of destroying the traditional American family. Once a family has two kids. the wife is working only to pay for the daycare. Being just a service, that it is not part of the family. My daughter-in-law stays home with the two kids as well as my son-in-law because he takes care of our diabetic grandson. He is also working from home. Many young families have adopted this way and it is a response to the pressure and the mental manipulation to keep up with the "American Dream," of living beyond means, with leather sofas and driveway size TV's.
I'm a stay-at-home dad who didn't get here because of luck. It's not luck that made us not a poor, working-class family, it's years and years of hard work and education and not living beyond our means. Before we got married, we talked about the idea that eventually, when the time was right, we'd be a family with a stay-at-home parent... and then we both buckled down and worked our butts off for ten years to make that possible. I quit my job when our son was six because he desperately needed to be out of school where he was being bullied. I homeschooled him for the rest of elementary school, during which time, because my work travel was out of the way, my wife's career really took off... and of course we never had to pay for daycare for his little sister. He's finishing his bachelor's now, but he and his sister both need me on the daily, and they would not be as happy and secure if I weren't available to them. I, like the other people responding to you, am living my values. We didn't roll a lucky seven, we worked to make this happen.
Shit-libs, they make my skin crawl.
I am surrounded by them.
My wealthy neighbourhood is rife with self aggrandizing posers saying the right thing in that very particular tone of voice: a faux air of saccharine compassion, a self satisfied confidence in their own correctness and a smug “doing the right thing” superiority.
Our author is right, “doing the right thing” is a consumer product, a luxury good. My street has one American car otherwise, BMW, Audi, Volvo, Lexus. It’s all one piece.
Their kids are weird.
Good Morning Rob - “For all their talk of gender equity, elites are the most likely to be in marriages in which husbands outearn their wives. For all their condemnation of the sexism and misogyny of the middle and working class, it is precisely within these strata that women are more likely to outearn their husbands.“ Thanks for identifying and bringing up this important contradiction. Where do we go from here?
Great newsletter today. So tragic to read this statistic “ In dual-income households within the top socioeconomic quintile, only 29 percent of wives earn more than their husbands, whereas in the bottom quintile, an incredible 69 percent of wives out-earn their husbands.”. Far too many women in the lower economic circumstances will find it difficult to take any time off at all for their children since they are shouldering the greater burden of earning. Meanwhile the more influential members of the top tier will be out of touch with the realities of surviving in such a precarious situation.
For what it is worth, have read, fairly consistently, that given a choice, roughly one third of all women would be either a stay at home mother or a wife who took care of the house and her husband, formerly called a homemaker. Unfortunately, a fair number of feminists, believe this is a poor thing to do. If it were accepted as an avenue, that was honored, more women, and their men, might go back to basics and stay married, not have kids before marriage, etc..
Rob, there’s a new sitcom coming out with a title that struck me as odd/unsettling: ‘George and Mandy’s 1st Marriage’. It was the ‘1st Marriage’ bit that has me scratching my head, w/ Hollywood further helping to culturally normalize divorce. There’s being sold an expectation of multiple marriages.
The economic aspect of paying women more than men has devastated many families. I had friends who lost their child to drugs overdose. Eventually, they divorced. At least the ethnic groups are getting some help from older relatives in order to maintain the sanity of their families. After decades of living in this manipulated and altered socioeconomic environment, I wonder what is left from my dream of being in this country. This article does not take in account the toxic environment that made my daughter, my grandson and my daughter-in-law sick with irreparable diseases.
From my perspective it is a simple explanation. It is individual pursuit of status lacking a solid moral foundation.
First, I really dislike this connection to "meritocracy" as being the broken thing with elites. In my world as a person living in the land of the WIERD people... the educated elites that self identify politically as liberal progressive... but with a background and worldview that is solid normie... they are absolutely not in line with preference over true merit... what I would call "productive merit"... except where they perform well... and it is typically with their privileges in modern academic achievement where that form of merit has been dumbed down and narrowed in focus and measures to allow them easy achievement.
I have said it before and I will keep saying it until I am given a good logical tongue-lashing that changes my mind... but the primary source of the problem is 3rd wave feminism in control of the education system and the educated females they crank out through the system. There are males in the mix, but they are a minority in this raging hypocrisy of the upper class... which is the same as the raging hypocrisy of the political left/Democrats.
When I graduated high school about 18% of the 65% of students that became high school graduates graduated with a college degree. Today is is about 95% high school graduates and 38% college graduates. Most of those college graduates today are females.
We have bunched up these people expecting their education to plant them firmly in a high status position. However, it was a lie to them because college is at best only a slight advantage in the job market, and at worst just a delay in a launch of a career after high school. This is especially the cause with the degrees of choice for females... liberal art humanities focuses... where no real professional job skills derive.
Millennials got economically destroyed in 2008 and had to stay in school longer. Inflation of education and housing costs have hammered subsequent generations. So here they are incapable of breaking into the upper middle class from an income, wealth and related normie status position. So, they create their own version of high status and yell at normies claiming they are racist, misogynist, transphobic, Islamophobic, fascists, etc.... and virtue signal to a new woke ideology where only the cool upper class people hang out,
The actual problem is that they break from the meritocracy... the productive meritocracy.
I think a solution is civil rights 2.0... making preference in education class-based, but after school there is no preference other than productive merit. If we legislate this then these little feminist brainwashed hazards of upper class malice will have to drop their destructive ideological virtue signaling and we will see better integration with them and the normies... thus equalizing society and reducing the class divisions we are dealing with today.
The article does not go in depth on the degrees the college graduates are getting nowadays. Most of them, again, imitate the Elites and get useless degrees that lead them to poor incomes. If the Elites are studying liberal arts, they will have different arrangements after graduation whereas the others are having hard times even forming a family.
“That’s not happening; it’s good that it is; it’s always been that way; and why are you so obsessed with it?” reminds me of Bart Simpson:
"I didn't do it, nobody saw me, and you can't prove anything!"
Epstein?
That Chris Rock bit is outstanding. He NAILS it. Rock is a better sociologist than any phd.
Have you by any chance heard of HoeMath? He's a Youtuber that gives dating advice to men, and he focuses a lot on status and wealth. I highly recommend his channel as his ideas are similar yours.