I’m on a fairly steep learning curve as a first-time father. Having changed fewer than five diapers in my life before a fortnight ago, I’m an increasingly efficient middle-of-the-night cleaner and re-coverer of baby behinds. I consider myself nearly an expert on working with teenagers, but this infant business is new stuff to me. Our beautiful daughter is teaching me a great many things.
Last week, I was changing her “onesie”, and was quite tentative about it, not wanting to bend or pull her little arms too briskly. My mother-in-law, who has been immensely helpful, came to my aid: “She won’t break, Hugo”, she said; “babies are less fragile than you think.” It was a reassuring thing to hear, though I’m still a bit frightened to pull too fiercely on any part of my daughter’s frame.
But my mother-in-law’s words reminded me of an essential feminist point: women don’t break as easily as we imagine. On Friday, I posted a rebuke to the sorry Zoe Lewis op-ed in the London Times which suggested that feminism led women astray with promises of independence, fulfillment, and satisfying relationships all at once. Part of the discourse anti-feminists like Lewis push isn’t just about feminism, however; they also peddle the notion that the bewombed are particularly easy to break. At 36, less than halfway through an normal lifespan for a woman in the Western world, Lewis is convinced that feminism has “ruined her life.” She’s wrong about feminism, of course, but she’s also wrong about something more fundamental: that women are easily ruined “for life” by either their own poor choices or their early capitulation to certain cultural messages.
In a post about how my students responded to Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism (a piece that played a small part in one of the many internecine wars to which the feminist blogosphere is lamentably prone), I noted that some of the most enthusiastic responses I received were to the author’s brief but memorable defense of making mistakes. Jessica wrote:
I’ve had more than a couple of embarrassing moments in my life and sexual history — but isn’t that what makes us who we are? Do we really have to be on point and thinking politics all the time? Sometimes doing silly, disempowering, sexually vapid things when you’re young is just part of getting to the good stuff.
I’ve had several excellent class discussions about this section of FFF since.
Thinking about Jessica Valenti’s book and about changing my daughter’s onesies reminds me of an essential truth: we tell a great lie to young women when we issue dire warnings to them about sex, men and other choices if we accompany our warning with the phrase “you might ruin your life.” I often ask the young women whom I teach and with whom I work how often they’ve heard “Don’t do x, or you’ll ruin your life.” Most raise their hands. Far fewer of the young men to whom I pose the same question respond affirmatively. Even now, with almost a decade of the 21st century under our belts, our culture still clings to destructive myths of female fragility. Girls born as recently as the Clinton Administration are taught that adolescence and young adulthood consists of a series of pitfalls to be avoided, and that one false step could mean a lifetime of heartbreak and regret. Do the wrong thing, this discourse suggests, and you’ll end up (for the literary minded) like Dickens’ Miss Havisham (possibly with the same fiery demise.)
Feminists are rightly concerned with protecting women and girls from abuse. We do as much as we can to draw awareness to the near-ubiquity of sexual and commercial exploitation of women around the world. We point out the ongoing reality of sexual harassment in our fields, our offices, and our schools. We also are eager, in general to (oh, over-used word a’ comin’) empower young women to make the best possible choices for their own lives and to pursue their own happiness as they see fit. Most feminists recognize that not every woman wants the same thing; rather than prescribe specific choices (go to this school, wait until this age to get married, have this number of sexual partners of each sex, prioritize this cause) we encourage self-awareness and self-love as a predicate to good decision-making. Whether to embrace a cultural norm or not (like, say, the wearing of a headscarf) is less important a decision than the process by which that decision is made. At least for those of us who are in the liberal (as opposed, say, to the radical) tradition, empowering individual girls to make autonomous choices without regard to external pressures is a very high priority.
I’ve written before, several times, about the Martha Complex: the perfectionism so common in a certain subset of young American women. “Marthas” have a hard time relaxing, because when they do stop their own whirlwind of activity, the anxiety about what they aren’t doing (and what will happen to them if they don’t start doing) begins to overwhelm them.
Last week I realized, while changing my daughter’s darned onesie, how much the discourse of “ruining your life by making one bad decision” contributes to the Martha Complex. I was worried, like many first-time parents, that my infant daughter was more fragile than she in fact is. I was terrified of “breaking her” with one slip of my hand. I needed to see that even tiny babies are remarkably hardy. (This doesn’t mean we should test the limits of that hardiness — they will do so on their own. And it doesn’t mean I’m going to hold back on the hugs, kisses, and loving affection.) In much the same way, we need to recognize that our older daughters are far more resilient than we imagine. Broken hearts heal. Loss and colorful experience do not automatically embitter or alienate. Skinned knees might leave interesting scars, but they do not break the spirit — and neither do passionate love affairs that come to an end. Of course, if we set our daughters up with the expectation that early sexual experience or an unplanned pregnancy will “ruin their lives”, then we can expect that in some cases, this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just as the myth of male weakness is perpetuated by the culture, so too a myth of female frailty seems to become real for those who are unwilling to consider an alternate possibility.
The peddlers of “purity” and the advocates of abstinence make the case that experience tarnishes, that “mistakes” will “ruin lives” forever. They make this case with far more urgency to young women than to young men, knowing that a great many young women are already programmed to believe that they are so emotionally fragile that they will indeed shatter as the consequence of a single error. Many well-meaning parents buy into this myth, just as I bought into the notion that my little baby girl would break if I wiggled her into her onesie too forcefully. While we ought not to encourage reckless or self-destructive behavior, or buy into the silly myth about the need to “sow oats”, we can send our children, especially our daughters, a message that they are resilient. They have the capacity not only to survive their missteps, but to learn from them and thrive as a consequence.
We humans are hardy people, both in body and in soul. We do well to treat all living things with care, of course. But a reverence for all that lives and breathes should not turn into a hyper-vigilant anxiety to protect our loved ones from every possible source of discomfort and subsequent growth. I want to protect little Cerys from harm, of course; she means the world to me. But I want her to grow up knowing that she has a colossal capacity to survive, to thrive, to grow. And making mistakes is invariably the only reliable way to discover that capacity. She is my precious baby girl, but not my frail one. There is a difference.
Another good post. Yes, children are more resilient than we think.
I think one reason young women get more “don’t do what I did” advice from older women than men do, is because women just have more options than men do and (therefore) get to make more decisions about their lives. Zoe Lewis’s piece, for example — the choice between raising a family and plunging headlong into a career. Few men get to make this choice. Some end up being “househusbands”, but that is a situation that tends to fall into their laps. I don’t think many men go to the expense of a college education thinking of that as an option, even in the back of their minds — *even though it might be an option they prefer*. A young man has to assume that after college he’ll have to work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work until he’s dead — or, if he’s lucky, he gets to retire and enjoy the few measley years left on his lesser life expectancy.
By contrast, a young woman knows that she can marry someone and put her career on hold, or even work part-time, or indulge in a human-services career (relying on the husband to make the “real” money). None of these might be what she wants to do as she gets her degree, but she knows these are the usual (and very often taken) options.
It also stands to reason that women would get more “don’t do what I did” advice as to relationships. In the first and most obvious place, women bear children. For biological, social, and other reasons, a child is something a man can more easily walk away from than a woman can (with less regret). In the second place, usually it is the man who pursues the woman and the woman *decides* whether to say yes or no to him. (It’s the man who decides whether to pursue, of course, but for him that’s a decision already taken.) The decision as to whether to have a relationship or not, in this scenario, is the woman’s.
Of course, the above are generalizations and even they might fade away as gender roles become less focused in the future.
Awesome post, Hugo.
Was that the first name drop, or did I miss it before? :)
And, great post.
Heloise Cerys Raquel Schwyzer.
She’ll be called Cerys, pronounced the Welsh way.
Hugo, my take on feminism/masculinism is that there will never be absolute equality.
What equality ? Woman have to give birth to children, before and after she cannot work, and probably her career is decreased as a result. Men in North America tend to take equality too literally (in our biased view), whereas Continental men are more flexible in accepting both a career woman and a occasional-fragile female. The flip side of the first group is that they are more relaxed on the idea of househusband :)
So I don’t think women is anymore fragile than men. If any, it’s their role in the family or freedom in society that gives false notion. A good friend of mine, an american writer, put his finger on the difference: Women are emotional and mental, Men are physical.
Women are emotional and mental, Men are physical.
Nathalie, as I am sure you know, the exceptions to that rule (my wife and I are two big ones) are so numerous as to make such a sweeping generalization irrelevant. I’ve spent a lot of time on the continent (Austria, mostly), and the notion that men as a group are all one way or women another is patently absurd. Gender is far more of a construct and less of a biological fixed truth than we imagine; having had a daughter makes this point clearer to me than ever before.
Captcrisis, your comments about women having more life choices/options strikes me as both untrue as well as privileged. The ‘women’ you are referring to are in fact a very, very small minority of women. The vast majority of women in the world indisputably have fewer choices than their male counterparts. Moreover, even in places where women might enjoy wider life possibilities, the kind you describe only exist for those of a certain class (that goes for the men you describe as well–college is not a possibility much less an option for many people).
Most women don’t get to go to college, have a ‘career’, “know” that she can marry someone (what if she’s gay?), or afford to work part time. And calling human service jobs “indulgences” is insulting.
Please be more careful about your vast generalisations in the future. It’s offensive.
Hugo, I’m sorry if you feel this is off-topic or derailing the thread. I have no such intention. But I feel pretty strongly that this was important to point out.
As for this post, YES YES YES! I think there’s an awful lot to what you call the Martha complex and what my college advisor referred to as the pressure on young women to be “effortlessly perfect”. I think this kind of pressure is discussed in terms of beauty standards a lot, but nearly as much in reference to other areas like academics. I also appreciate that you recognise the corresponding compulsion to not make any mistakes, because any mistake is really a Mistake (cue apocalyptic music).
Jessica,
I understand your point. I was talking about women in college, just as Hugo was. Though even where nobody is going to college, getting married and staying home with kids is not a choice that men get to make, especially in an unenlightened subculture (which an uneducated subculture usually is).
As for human services, I used to be in it. I have many female friends who are in it — almost all of whom have husbands in the private sector making more money. Anyone in human services, working for that low pay, has to think awful hard before deciding to start a family — IF your spouse is at a low-paying job too. If your spouse is making serious bucks, the choice is rather easier.
pronounced the Welsh way
Which is…?
Closest to “kerris”, emphasis on the first syllable, with a tiny elongation (very tiny and lilting) of the second syllable.
What is it about fathers and daughters, anyway?
Hugo is probably feeling it for the first time. I’ve always felt it with my daughter.
As a baby she wanted to be with me more than with her mother. (Maybe Freud was onto something with his “Electra complex”.) Later she always wanted to hang out with me. I was her hero, her prince, her court jester, her reference library. Now we trade one-line zingers. We embarrass each other in public, good-naturedly.
In a few years, there won’t be a dry eye at her wedding as we take the first dance to “Wind Beneath My Wings”.
I am really REALLY lucky to have fathered both a daughter and a son. But somehow the daughter is special.
I still don’t know what it is!
It isn’t? What federal law makes it illegal for a man to stay home with his kids? I need to know this, quick, so I can get my college-educated husband out of the house before he’s arrested!
Mythago,
You know exactly what I’m talking about.
As an almost-eight-week-old mother myself, I am, of course, late to the party (my husband, who reads your blog, too, told me about your little girl)–HUGE congratulations, Hugo!
And yes, I had the same thing happen to me: When my daughter was born, on December 21 (in Santa Barbara, BTW), she seemed so little to me, her fingers tiny, her eyes always searching for my husband or me. And it would have been no different if she had been a boy. They’re babies, and they’re totally dependent on their caregivers’ protection, no matter what’s between their legs. The anxiety that we feel around them is largely a result of all the warnings they come with: “baby must wear a hat at all times;” “do not shake vigorously;” “make sure to track feedings and diaper contents to ensure s/he is eating enough;” and so on.
And yes, I remember the first onesie change–and gosh, I was a nervous wreck before, during, and after giving my little girl her first bath, for fear that the towel wouldn’t be thick enough to keep her warm afterwards. Stuff like this will happen all the time, as long as your child is smaller than an average adult, and even then, you’ll feel fiercely protective of her.
But you know, sometimes babies are really just babies, all cultural theory aside–if you can afford to let them be just babies without forcing any gender markers on them yourself (you know what I’m talking about–pink ruffles, purple glitter, white lace!). My little daughter is currently snoozing in her aquarium swing as I write this, having just finished her “workout session” to become, as I tell her “gross und stark” one day, no matter whether she’ll wear glasses, keep those rounded baby legs for a good cowboy-swagger, or carry a pound or two “too many” or “too few” around on her frame.
“Gross und stark,” Hugo. That’s my wish for your babygirl, too.
Congrats, again!
It’s true over here too. Girls get raised, far more than boys, to think of life as a very narrow path between very steep cliffs, and if you put a foot wrong you risk falling forever.
Which of course is not true. Mistakes are for the most part mistakes, not disasters.
I sometimes wonder if parents convince their pregnant daughters to have abortions, instead of putting the child up for adoption, because they believe that if their daughter has the child, it will “ruin her life forever.”
I think you may be right, Fred. Of course, pro-lifers often use a similar tactic to discourage abortion by suggesting to a pregnant woman that she will “regret an abortion for the rest of (her) life.” Both sides are capable of using this doomsday rhetoric to serve their purposes.
Oh, and Charlotte, danke vielmals. Congrats on your little one too!
captcrisis, what’s good for the gander is good for the goose. There’s no *law* (at least not in the US) that says women can’t have a husband at home with the kids while they become CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or serve in the Senate, or do neurosurgery on destitute children in the slums of Hong Kong. Women do, in theory, have the option to do these things. But there are all kinds of social pressures and ‘invisible barriers’ - she’d have to find a man who is, in Gonz’s terms, happy to be second-fiddle.
Does that mean women do not have the option to do these things? If it does, then you have to concede that women, just like men, are limited in their options by social mores. If it doesn’t, then your argument that men can’t be at-home daddies is nonsense.
Any man who really wants to be at home with the kids just needs to find a suitable partner who is happy for him to do that. Don’t pretend that he has any fewer ‘options’ than a woman who is looking for a husband to manage the household instead of leaving it to her. Personally, I’m not into enabling pity parties; why are you?
“Any man who really wants to be at home with the kids just needs to find a suitable partner who is happy for him to do that.”
Do you really think any young man is going to invest in a college education and then count on this happening?
I can also imagine how this would play out in a working-class, no-one-goes-to-college situation.
Him: “You have the kids, then you go to work and I’ll sit home and watch them.”
Her: “Get out, you bum!”
My point is that the children vs. career choice is not a choice that a man can seriously entertain. Of course you can find whatever exceptions and weird real-life situations you want, but my basic point holds.
One more thing:
The mere status of being a college graduate is something that a woman is more likely to find herself in than a man. Women go to college in greater numbers and graduate in greater numbers. This has been true for 30 years — and the gap is widening.
Thanks, Hugo. Yeah, my little daughter is fabulous–just as, I’m sure, yours is, too. :-)
And now to this discussion:
“Do you really think any young man is going to invest in a college education and then count on this happening?”
My version:
“Do you really think any young woman is going to invest in a college education and then count on this happening?”
Funnily enough, I seem to be hanging out with a crowd of female breadwinners (engineers, nonetheless) whose husbands have, indeed, chosen to stay at home as caregivers. Again, cultural theory aside and practicality to the forefront, in an economy such as this one, what couple can afford to share their lifework based on outdated gendered labor models? If there is really an option that one partner can stay home, shouldn’t it be the one with the bigger paycheck? And that’s not always the man.
Which, of course, opens up a whole other can of worms …
Granted, I am currently on maternity leave because I’m the one with the “organic” food supply, the c-section scar, and the glorious federal, corporate, and state benefits while my husband, a university administrator without any of these benefits whatsoever, is back at work. We do need both of our salaries to keep us in mortgage, bread, and butter, but if 1. we didn’t, and 2. my salary were the one that would allow him to stay home, he’d do so in a heartbeat.
Secondly, “staying home” does not always have to equal giving up one’s career. Corporations are increasingly moving towards work-from-home models for economic reasons, and unless you’re finding yourself in a job or occupation that is geographically fixed and/ or limited, there are flextime/ shift options that allow a couple to share caregiving, even without the help of daycare.
I realize that I’m speaking from the privileged position of the white, overeducated, middle-class (I just blogged about this at http://theatricalmilestones.blogspot.com/2009/02/not-so-much.html) and that gender models in other parts of the country may vary, but it’s erroneous to assume that the barriers between home life and professional life are still as gendered as they used to be.
Charlotte,
All of what you say is good news.
My point is that a young man goes to college assuming he’ll be working the rest of his life. If he prefers to be a “househusband” that’s something that he might fall into if he’s lucky. Work vs. staying at home to raise a family is not a “choice” that he gets to contemplate.
Young women have that “career v. raising family” choice. Giving up their career, or cutting it back, or interrupting it, is something that, in fact, MOST of them do.
So we have older women like Zoe Lewis lamenting a choice she made as a young woman. That choice is not on a young man’s radar screen. So, as men get older they are less likely as older men to tell younger men about choices they’ve regretted, because they simply did not have that choice.
Captcrisis: When you have been to college as a young woman, then you get to talk about what young women at college assume about the rest of their lives.
Which is that we’d best get a move on and find ourselves careers, because we can’t count on finding a man, and if we do find a man he couldn’t support us on one income. We know we’ll have to take a year or more out if we have children, and we want to be very sure of having a career to come back to afterwards because you can’t raise kids on one income.
Among the young women at college I know, none of us thinks of ‘housewife’ as an option. It’s impractical. It’s not on our radar screens. We’ll have to do it in a few years if we want kids, but it’ll be horribly inconvenient.
Froth,
Well if I can’t get inside the heads of young women, you sure can’t get inside the heads of young men. All I can really point out to you are the facts — that *most* women who have families do it, to some extent, by choosing between family and career, if only to some extent (maybe a year or two, as you say, though this is on the short end of the scale).
A young man assumes he will have to work his whole life, whether he has a family or not.
So he never gets to make the “career v. family” choice, a choice that women like Zoe Lewis — and any woman who gets involved with a man and who wants children — gets to make.
Let me put it another way.
The idea of a man “putting children and family on hold” so that he can concentrate on his career, is not a choice that enters his head like it does a woman’s. Not in our culture. Of course, as I said, things may change and I hope they do.
captcrisis, I get where you’re coming from, though you phrase things in more absolute terms than I think is entirely correct.
When I was in college (97-01) I talked to a bunch of women who quit doing computer science because it was a super-competitive boys’ club and they were subtly but pervasively made to feel inadequate. I thought that was really sad.
I also talked to some young men who stuck with computer science even though they really didn’t like it. But their parents (and to some degree they themselves) felt that they better major in something that would enable them to make a lot of money. I thought that was sad, too.
(This isn’t necessarily a privileged white thing, btw, if anything I saw more of those pressures coming from immigrant parents one generation removed from poverty, and they applied those pressures and more on their daughters too. But that’s a tangent.)
On the bright side, I know many women my age who would be delighted to be the main bread-winner while her husband takes care of children (myself included). I know couples who are planning on it actually. I also know couples where the mom mostly stays home, or where they share the load pretty equally… the point is, stay at home dads aren’t such a rarity in my generation. And increasingly it *is* a choice that young men get to consider. As for finding a partner who will be down with that, you can’t “count on” anything (to use your phrase), but you’d be well-advised to discuss parenting roles with your partner before getting hitched and/or starting a family, and decide for yourself whether their views on the matter are a deal breaker. (Good advice for men and women both.)
So yeah the social pressure is real. If it doesn’t totally constrain your choices, it does make some of them harder than others. But yknow, I’d say the same to a guy who wants to raise kids as I would to a girl who wants to hack computers… do your best to resist all that stupid indoctrination. Complain if you want about the way the deck is stacked, because maybe your complaints can bring about some change. Try and keep supportive people around. You can tell me it’s difficult, but please don’t tell me you had no choice at all in the matter.
I dunno, I think we’re in this awkward stage where feminism’s made enough gains that it’s OK for women to do traditionally male stuff, but it’s not yet OK for men to do traditionally female stuff. People still hold some sexist beliefs that feminine things aren’t quite as good as masculine things, and obviously women want to be like men, but why would men ever want to be like women? blech. But I also think it’s changing for the better, gradually but visibly.
oh yikes. sorry so wordy!
metamanda,
I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees this change happen around her. In fact, I’d say “ask young men in college if they want to have a family; then ask them whether they’d stay home with the kids if their wife brings home the bigger paycheck.” I’m really thinking this discussion rests on historical assumptions and anecdotal evidence–and I doubt that young men in college are so backwards as to assume that they’ll have to be the breadwinner uninterruptedly for the rest of their lives. In fact, I’d say, run the survey among freshmen and then among seniors to see how attitudes, if they existed in the first place, have changed throughout the college career.
Ah. So if you want to present imaginary conversations between a husband and wife, or make sweeping comments about what men can and “can’t” do, that is absolute truth, and any real-life evidence to the contrary are “exceptions” and “weird”. That’s certainly one way to be 100% sure in your own mind that you’re correct, I suppose.
Now, I do actually agree with what you finally came around to admitting - that in our culture, everybody just assumes that juggling kids and career is the wife’s problem, whereas the husband is going to work outside the home and leave childrearing and home management to his wife.
This cuts both ways, not only towards men, as you suggest; if a man home with his kids is a bum, a woman not home with her kids is a heartless woman who cares about her “career” (always in quotes) and is a bad mother who will someday wish she spent more time scrubbing oatmeal out of the carpet instead of at the office. (Hell, Hugo has actually suggested this in the past.) You see women who get to do whatever they want, but you apparently don’t see women who are assumed not to be serious contenders for promotion because of their children, or whose husbands leave all the childrearing and house management to them. (It’s one thing to play laundry chicken. You really can’t play sick child chicken.)
I too hope that this changes. It is changing. Of course, your pointing to such families as “weird” does not exactly improve the atmosphere.
Young women have that “career v. raising family” choice. Giving up their career, or cutting it back, or interrupting it, is something that, in fact, MOST of them do.
Actually, over half of mothers return to the workforce within a year of giving birth. Few couples can manage the extra expense of a child on one income, and that includes the college-educated.
captcrisis, I think what you are saying was true for women in my mother’s generation, but it wasn’t true for mine (I’m 41), and it certainly isn’t true (in general) for those a generation behind me. Those young women seem to be keenly aware that not pursuing a career is a recipe for poverty. Also, men with a college education may date women without a career (seldom, but it happens), but they marry women with one. If one of a woman’s goals is to someday marry and/or have children, she’s best off staying employed. (shouldn’t it go without saying that most folks that didn’t marry their high school or college sweetheart met their spouse either directly through work, or through people they know from work?)
I can’t think of one married man under the age of forty in my local union who didn’t choose a woman with a career as a spouse. In fact, I can’t think of any that married a woman without a college degree (expect for those who married a tradeswoman). Anecdata, yeah, but times have changed. Young men don’t want to marry someone they view as a potential financial burden. It’s risky to get by on one income.
I’m just giving my perception, not as to how things *should* be, but as to what goes through the minds of young men as they contemplate the future and the choices they make.
And I’m not talking about women who don’t decide to go to college. Obviously if she can go she should go (and a lot more women go than men). She obviously has to earn a living to support herself and wants a career. I’m just saying that she knows that raising children is a choice she can make.
I don’t know ANY family where the man stayed at home to tend to the kids. None. It has always been the woman. In my own family, of the three of us who have kids, the wives are all stay-at-homes. (My sister is about to (hopefully) rejoin the work force now that her youngest is 14.) And for a lower income family there is no alternative. The woman certainly has to stay home just before and after birth, and so it’s easier for her to just stay there. Child care costs would mostly wipe out what the lesser-earning spouse would be making.
Obviously it would be different elsewhere, particularly in higher income areas, or progressive areas with low-cost child care.
“Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we’ve always had: work or prison.” I remember the mostly male laughter and applause that resulted when Tim Allen said this some years ago. From what I see, it’s mostly still true.
Oh, then such families don’t exist. Or they’re “weird”.
As for Tim Allen….uh, men don’t have the choice to marry and have children? Men don’t have the choice to have children without getting married first? I wonder how many of those men actually, given the choice, would chuck their jobs and stay home full-time with the kids, managing the household, while their wives earned all the money. It’s one thing to gripe about the grass being greener on the other side, and quite another to jump the fence.
mythago,
Are you trying to tell me that Mexico exists even though I’ve never seen it? Don’t destroy my self-centered view of the world.
Can’t you see it from your house?
“Child care costs would mostly wipe out what the lesser-earning spouse would be making.
Sigh. This is Dumb Math.”
This is in fact the situation confronting my wife and I some years ago.
Don’t you know this? Haven’t you ever been in this position? If not, you have no right to criticize. If you have, and you had a different experience, then leave it at that. Which I will.
Well, no, I don’t know what situation you and your wife confronted several years ago. I do know that if the only thing you’re considering is “how much is left over after daycare?” then you’re not really making a decision based on financial prudence.