to think dual person 'full time' worker family households should never have become the norm?

[workingdilemma]

Was thinking about the other thread talking about tax credits etc.

Around 40 years ago, as a society we'd reached a point where one person working in a household was enough to support a young family.

Now we've ended up where it's pretty much required to have both working full time to be able to afford the same lifestyle - mainly due to the insane 'cost' of housing.

It would have been far better to have had both people in a couple working perhaps part time to allow engagement with the world of work, and also a healthier work/life balance.

Why did we end up like this? Was it all an orchestrated plan to keep the debt cycle going - after all, you can lend on two incomes now for a mortgage. Lovely jubbly for the debt pushers. Is that why the banks and governments encourage this?

I dunno, but I do yearn for a better way to deal with the problems we're having now then everyone demonising each other.

Is that better for you? Stop picking on my personal situation. It has nothing to do with the macro problem. Not once did i reference it in my op. This is not just about me.

Your wonderful 'advice' was utterly unsolicited.

It's a government conspiracy to get us all to put our children in regulated childcare for indoctrination early years education; avoid paying benefits; keep the unemployment stats low; & prop up the construction industry [along with encouraging couples to get together/split up at regular intervals, which means we need more houses - one for each partner to have the kids at weekends]. The only people who win these days are builders and solicitors doing conveyancing [and divorces of course]. I think the govt is in bed with the housing construction industry but can never figure out quite why?

cynical - me?

The trouble is OP, you've made an assumption, rather aggressively, and stuck to it without moving the discussion forwards.

For you, it seems to be based on personal dislike of certain circumstances/people's choices:

I don't want to take on a huge loan, and i dont want to bail out some swine who bought it years ago for pennies

I think its the usual story of someone wanting an easy life for nothing, and then moaning when that doesn't happen.

I think enforcing some sort of thinking that only one parent should work is more likely to lead to poverty/people being trapped in relationships they are no longer happy in for monetary reasons/lack of ambition/lack of opportunity. Many people are happier with both of the parents in their family unit working.

Otherwise you would need one over inflated salary which would price others out of the workplace and most likely lead to pay inequality between men and women. I suppose you would favour leaving the EU too, since that's where our pay equality legislation originated.

Thank you MrsRossPoldark - its good to get away from anecdotal stuff and into the proper discussion again.

Yeah i agree! The reasons - champagne lunches from the lobbyists, post gov directorships and shares held in nominee accounts in the spouses names perhaps?

I've not read the full thread OP but I was reading some very interesting articles about Sweden yesterday. They are in Stylist magazine, which is available online. In Sweden it is the norm for both parents to work full-time and in fact women are stigmatised if they don't go back to work. I';m not saying that's right - there should always be a proper choice - but you might find the articles interesting to read.

Many women in the past did work, like my mum. It was middle class women who didn't work. And the middle class then was much smaller.
Also people do expect more extravagant lifestyles now. Families rarely if ever ate out, going for a coffee was very rare, children often had very few clothes and much less toys. And holidays for many was visiting cousins.

Considering the advances in technology over the last 50 years, why have we ended up still spending so much of our time at work vs family life?

Because middle class aspirations now include two cars, at least one foreign holiday, kitchen appliances, restaurants, theatres and university education, all extremely rare fifty years ago.

Yeah i want something for nothing. Never mind the 6 figures of saved earned income, vs a wide eyed couple going in and borrowing it so the bank can create it out of thin air and guarantee another revenue stream.

Yeah i really am awful.

Never mind the 6 figures of saved earned income

Have you considered getting a tee-shirt made up with your bank statements on the front? You seem awfully proud of this, but it doesn't seem to be making you happy.

It was you who brought your own personal circumstances in to this discussion OP. Hence why I know how much you earn, where you live (ish), how much cash you have and how much rent you pay.

You're angry because things aren't better for you. Or so it seems to be. But tbf you're displaying a very typical example of what the problem is. Too much expectation.

I've been doing some genealogy and my family research shows that wives working, at least part time, was the norm.

My mother, born 1915, worked full time as soon as her youngest started school. In Victorian times (according to census) my female ancestors were all working, often in jobs affiliated to the work their husbands were doing. The older girls looked after the younger children until they married and left home. Girls often went to live with their aunts to look after the young family there.

Imo there was a very small window in the last century when wives weren't working. Unless they were very rich.

two cars,

Nope.

at least one foreign holiday

Nope.

kitchen appliances

They cost barely anything.

restaurants

So i went to prezzos once this year. Shoot me.

theatres

Nope.

university education

Which has been foisted upon the masses regardless of suitability to go regardless of whether it suits the young person in question.

all extremely rare fifty years ago.

And all quite optional today, and forgoing them still makes it tougher to live a similar life in the south east.

Sounds like your financial plan didn't work out. Perhaps you should have got a mortgage instead of building that cash pile? Is reading your bank statements making you happy? It doesn't seem to be.

OP - agree with you entirely. I graduated in the mid-80s with a Computing Science degree, a promise of paperless society, less stress and a better work-life balance.

Now we are working the longest hours - if you leave your desk at 5:30, you are branded a part-timer; if you are a part-timer you never actually do your hours, always more; when you get home, there is interminable paperwork to get through just to keep an eye on household expenditure and monitor your bank balance by spending hours logged on to your online bank account; endless statistics on obscure topics [just because you have so much data you might as well get lots of weird information from it]; kids spending hours stuck in their rooms playing games/on social media.

We have never worked so hard for so little reward. I can count on the fingers of one hand the friends I know who have jobs they actualy want to get up for. Most work to live. And don't get me started on pensions! We now have to work until we leave our desk in a wooden box as we don't have pensions to rely on due to banks etc screwing up our savings over the last 20 years resulting in no return for investors/pension plans. Just keep it under the mattress!

Childcare only works if you can find it; can work your hours round pickup and drop-off; have willing relatives to pick up when you can't. My parents live 450 miles away so have never been available to stand in and all my 'emergency contacts' also work, so couldn't pick up for me if I asked! My DH works away from home all week so it's down to me to run the house, fetch and carry the kids, etc, so the fact that we are a 2-worker household means nothing as we are effectively a sole-parent family during the week. Having been SAHM for the previous 17 years, my house is now messy, disorganised and sometimes depressing as I can't get on top of the chores.

Loving the attacks from the boomers who dont care their generation has robbed ours blind.

..apart from that, everything's fine!

Yep thats how millions feel MrsRossPoldark - no reward for a load of effort. Basically to subsidise the massive pension deficits all our companies have when they promised those of the golden generation index linked final salary wonder packages.

Working. I didn't join in to attack you. I thought you raised an interesting question. But I don't recognise either this 40 year old 'dream' you're chasing, or this terrible life of all work no reward you're harping on about. Because although you want to keep your personal circumstances out of this, the fact is there is no reason you couldn't buy a house and lower your outgoings by £600 a month. You just don't want to.

I'm not a boomer. I'm 35. I didn't go to university, neither did DH. We don't have rich parents. And yet here we are, running our own business, living a good standard of living and sending the DCs to private school. There's been no hand-outs, no lottery win. Just hard work and good choices. If I don't seem to have much sympathy it's because, quite frankly, if we can achieve what we have done, I don't see why others can't.

Are you kidding? Both my grandparents had to work in order to maintain their (not at all luxurious) lifestyle. That wasn't unusual.

It's pretty much always been very common for the vast majority of people to have to keep working (both) after having children. Only the wealthy could afford to have one person staying at home on a permanent basis.

This is much more a case of "rose tinted spectacles" than it is "huge government conspiracy".

sovery some very valid points made. Especially about moving. I can't help thinking there is a very strong sense of what is usually referred to here as 'entitlement' amongst my generation. People think they are entitled to a house they can't afford, entitled to live around their family and friends regardless of price or work availability, entitled to moan that they had to pay for a university education. Blah blah blah.

MrsRossPoldark - (albeit at 8.46!)

People also go on here about "satisfying careers" - are there enough of these for the entire population? I think not. Whenever there is any mention of women and work, be it on here or on Woman's Hour, say, the discussion completely ignores those who are doing very ordinary but necessary (or even unnecessary) work. How many Poundland workers leap out of bed every morning so happy that they are emancipated women and can enjoy the privilege of a satisfying career? I'm sure many care workers are punching the air with joy as they wipe yet another old lady's bottom, happy in the knowledge that they are doing this work because it provides mental stimulation outside the home.

Both going part time tends to screw up both careers. Part time is not Shangri-La.

Reliable birth control and labour saving devices are the two things which make 2 partners working demanding jobs a reasonable possibility. I wouldn't give up either.