Policy for womens rights to career/work has reduced families choices...

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Gov policy and society has responded to the push for equality/women’s rights over the past 40 yrs by policies that facilitate women to work more hours (such as 30hrs free childcare etc), and one of the consequences has been that dual income families are the norm rather than the exception. The housing market is driven by supply and demand but most critically by affordability. People tend to push to the top of their budget to get the best house they can, so the growth in dual income families correlates with, and has driven the growth in house prices.

Combine that with the cost of living increases, that now means that most families can only afford to survive if both parents are working full time. As retirement age increases and the average age of parents increases, family support is less available- many grandparents are still working, or too old to give the same support commitments in the past. So long childcare hours has become a necessity, not a choice for most, along with the pressure and stress that trying to keep all the plates spinning of full time work, family and a house to run entail.

How many times do we hear how families are struggling- financially and practically- exhausted trying to juggle running a family with 2 full time jobs. In my experience far more than the people grateful that they can chose to both work full time.

What if the money chucked at the poorly implemented 30 hrs of childcare (which means childcare settings run at a loss or have to top up income in other ways), was given to families to have the choice of how best to support their family. It might well be by using it for childcare to enable both parents to progress careers they want to continue/progress, but it would also give people the choice to invest their time and energy in giving their children for a lower stress home, with parents who are able to be more present.

Alongside this there is the exponential rise of children struggling at school, (which will have a big knock on effect on the workforce in the future.) Children need a stable, loving and un-stressed environment to thrive and develop. Has no one wondered whether there is link between the rise of the stress/pressure of 2 full time working parents, the increase in stress at home and kids struggling.

Yes there would be a cost (reduced income tax from parents) by giving families a choice whether they use support for childcare, or to enable them to care for their children, but my bet is it would be small in comparison to the corresponding huge saving in other areas, a marked increase in quality of life and reduction in the crisis in children.

Of course there are other factors- the impact of tech etc, but it seems that policies driven by individual/small group gain, are in fact having a societal detriment in the long term…

Why are you blaming women?

In the time when women had little choice but to give up their jobs, they were completely dependent on men. Financial abuse was rife and women had no choice but to stay in abusive relationships.

Women need financial independence so that they have the freedom to leave relationship that aren't working. They also have a right to self determination.

We need more flexible working so that both parents can fit work around the family. We need men to step up, to share the domestic responsibility and to pay towards their children in the event of a relationship breakdown.

Rent/house prices are out of control. Child care fees are some of the highest in Europe. We're being held to ransom regarding energy costs and a third of children are in poverty. That's not the fault of women.

Think we've crossed wires- I'm absolutely not blaming women, nor saying that we should go back to being financially dependent on men. I'm saying that famillies need support and should be able to choose what best supports their family- that might be both working full time, it might be to share the load of work, and share the load of home without being so frazzled, it might be that they chose to split the load equally but differently. It would give equal levels of choice to men and women, and enable all parents to prioritise to choose how they used the financial support.

Absolutely agree. The house prices rises based on 2 salaries have been fairly devastating for families. The majority of my mum friends would love to work part time and be with their kids more but they just can't afford to (mostly due to mortgages but also cost of living). Our mortgage is doable on one salary because we bought a wreck and renovated it ourselves over years. I am lucky enough to be able to work part time so can do 3pm pick ups, be around when they get home from school etc but I only know one other mum in the same situation and she lives on a boat so no huge mortgage!

I find it odd that people think women didn't work. I come from a long line of women that did on both sides. Usually poorly paid as they weren't men of course.

Making women poorer would reduce their purchasing power (and reduce GDP figures), which I suppose would reduce demand for housing.

However, successive governments have been insistent on increasing the population which has gone from 58 mil in 2000 to 68 mil now. So long as population growth continues then demand for housing will increase. I suspect if we reduced demand by disempowering women then the governments would balance it out with even higher immigration and the underlying supply vs demand problem would still be there.

“Has no one wondered whether there is link between the rise of the stress/pressure of 2 full time working parents, the increase in stress at home and kids struggling”

What this kind of statement usually means is “Has no one wondered whether there is link between the rise of the stress/pressure of women working full time…and kids struggling”

This faux concern for the poor kids is used by traditionalists on the Right who want to see a return to the men in the workplace, women at home looking after kids/running the household model. Many women who believe children can only thrive if they are at home with mum (never dad) buy into this. These are the women who proudly proclaim they are “full time mums” and would never leave their DC to be looked after by strangers.

And so now we have a generation of women who will be reaching retirement age in the coming decades and are in for a nasty shock when they see the financial consequences of leaving for the workforce for years on end to care for kids without thinking about the gap in their pension contributions.

Honestly it’s bonkers the way so many women are guilt tripped into staying at home, derailing their careers and taking on PT poorly paid mum jobs in order to “reduce stress on the family/kids” and, you know, kids are only young once and you won’t get this time with them again” (spoiler: your kids will be fine if you work FT. If they don’t turn out ok, it really isn’t because of your working patterns).

Your comments sound well meaning OP but the reality is, in almost all cases it’s women who pay the financial and professional cost when parents decide to do ‘what best supports their family’.

So basically OP you don't want to work and would like to be a SAHM but don't want others to get a financial benefit from choosing to work, you want govt to hand you some free money to enable you to make a choice that benefits only yourself.

People imagine this golden time when mums didn't work... Women have worked throughout history they were just pretty poorly paid for it compared to men.
Its still perfectly possible for families to afford one parent working part time to achieve some balance, and the government already top up lower incomes with universal credit and child benefit.
Its never enough for some people!

Also, my mum worked full time when I was young (at a time when there were more SAHM's than now) and I'm glad she did, she was a fabulous role model and a fantastic mum. Her working meant we could afford that bit more, and now in her retirement she has a good pension of her own having paid in for more than 30 years.

People in continental Europe both work, men and women. Actually in Eastern Europe they've done so since the start of the communist times (so 1940s at the latest).

It's only in the Anglo culture countries that there's this continuing phenomenon of SAHMs.

And there's no evidence that Italian or Polish children being worse off than British ones, despite their mother's working.

The problem is that many men want their wives to pay 50% of the bills, look after the kids around his work schedule and do 90% of the housework but be able to support themselves without child maintenance and benefits should the relationship break down.

I wouldn’t say that both parents working is a major reason for children to struggle emotionally. School and childcare is the only source of stability for some kids because social services and health services like CAMHS are inadequately resourced. If problems are dealt with quicker then they have more chance of being sorted but the state of the NHS means that they are too busy dealing with the people past crisis point that problems may never be fixed. The threshold for social services help is too high and the practicalities of leaving an abusive partner is too difficult and costly with courts giving unsuitable parents contact with vulnerable children

If policies changed to facilitate parents leaving the workforce, it's incredibly unlikely that men would leave at equal rates as women.

We're seeing a rollback of women's rights across the world, including western countries so I wouldn't support the kind of policies you're suggesting.

More focus or reducing the gender pay gap would be welcome.

I totally disagree, I was born in the 80s to parents who both worked full time (dm in a professional job, df flexible/self employed) and would never have considered it an option, remotely desirable or anything other than a complete waste for myself to be a housewife/SAHM. I don’t understand why others see it as desirable to be honest, seems lazy to me to settle for low earnings/ limited prospects for your family to choose not to work. Obviously, government policy will always continue to support all adults to be economically active tax payers.

anecdotally, the only families I know where a dc has autism or similar are where the mother is either a SAHM or in a low paid/part time role. I know a lot of high earning professionals who have used nurseries since the age of 1 and none of them have significant special needs. I suspect any research would prove the opposite to your hypothesis is true, if there is any link.

If the government pays c.£3 × 30 = £90pw to enable a child to attend a nursery with a 5:1 staff to child ratio, and that enables a parent to go out and earn at least £36kpa = £692pw (median income is £37.5kpa) they will pay income tax on that of circa £90pw (plus also national insurance) and ALSO the staff employed by the nursery pay tax too. After the intensive childcare years, the income tax keeps flowing in because there was no career hiatus. Paying for childcare boosts government revenue and helps the economy, it isn't a net cost. You couldn't possibly give the families the same government money to provide 1:1 care at home because that wouldn't create revenue in the same way. 1:1 childcare at home is expensive and inefficient. Families are welcome to choose it if they can afford it but it doesn't warrant government support, any more than pony ownership or any other luxury you'd like but can't afford.

It would be possible and potentially reasonable to have stricter controls on rent - perhaps limiting the maximum rent on a small council-tax-band A or B home to no more than 50% of the take-home pay after tax & NI from local median income - (that would be circa £1,200pcm for the national median take home) - making a basic no-frills lifestyle achievable on a single income. But supply and demand market forces would still mean that single income families couldn't afford what dual income families can have. You'd have to destroy capitalism to stop that being the case.

@RaspberryRipple2 I suspect that's more because the working mums of neurodiverse kids are far too busy juggling their work with supporting the additional needs of their family that they don't have time to tell you about it. I worked full time until cancer did the whammy on me (I now work 50%fte which is as much as I can cope with) and have neurodiverse DC. All the people I know from uni, who were all members of a uni society for geeks and nerds and social misfits, have sooner or later obtained autism diagnoses for themselves, have neurodiverse kids, and work full time, but don't tend to post about it much on social media or tell their neurotypical acquaintances about what it's like.

Maternal employment rates in the uk aren't much out of kilter with continental Europe averages. They are just below halfway down the chart. The big difference here is more mothers work part time than some places. The oecd chart of maternal employment (for 2021) has more women working here overal than Italy and Poland. Polish seems to be mainly full time, but Italy has a mix too.

I actually think the working culture here pushes people to part time. There are lots of jobs which unpaid overtime on top of the standard working week is expected. It pushes people to be part time. Obviously some uk jobs are very much do your hours go home, but having done the same professional role in a eu country and this country, it was easier to stay full time in the eu one, as literally everyone clocked off at the end of the day at the time they were supposed to.

It’s convenient to blame pesky women demanding their rights when the underlying problem for most families is the way that neoliberal capitalism inflates the cost of housing.

Families are getting more support than ever. If one parent doesn’t want to work, no one is forcing them. My parents have both always worked full time as have DH and I.

As a single mum, I've never had a problem working full time and being available for my ds. I didn't need any financial help because I planned ahead and didn't overstretch myself.

Taking the money spent on 30 hrs childcare a week and handing that directly to parents would be a huge waste of money and would limit women's choices rather than give them greater choice. Today, that money is spent on childcare that is essential.

Hand it directly to families and it would be spent on a myriad of cars, holidays and other lifestyle stuff, push up house prices even more and leave mums trying to balance work and care without the 30 funded hours, and children in less secure situations.

This is one of the reasons i decided not to have children. I wasnt going to run myself ragged doing both

Equal rights are not the problem here it's housing. Ex council houses get sold to BTL and rents are unaffordable on one salary. Previous governments did away with rent caps.
If rents were limited non landlords would be able to buy houses. Ordinary people can't compete. At the moment there is a swing towards HMOs so as many people as possible can be crammed in. When these properties don't attract 'professional' people they are let to single unwaged people. The TV programme Homes under the hammer seems to be encouraging this. It effects the street dynamics and unless the house is ginormous removes three bed terraces from housing stock (these properties often don't have communal spaces as that is turned into bedrooms). Mortgages were three times salaries in the 1980s and affordability 25%.This allowed for one salary. I agree with the pp Europe has a culture of working mums. Infact in France where I have frequently worked it's frowned on if women don't use their degree /skills to work. I've always worked as did my mother.
A secure home is the basis of needs (Maslow). We have some of the highest housing and energy costs in the world. Control those and you have a fairer and happier society.

I have no idea what you mean as my family is working class and so women have always, always worked. No one-income households as that has never, ever been affordable. Both parents contributing financially isn’t the exception across generations of my family, it’s absolutely the norm.

I was also born in the 80s and brought up with both parents working full time. I think my mum went back to work full time when we started school, and was working part time before then. It wasn't particularly unusual and I never remember feeling I missed out. I've also always worked full time and, having teens now, couldn't tell you which of their friends had a parent at home and which have both working without asking - my anecdotal evidence is that it hasn't made much of a difference to outcomes, behavior or how close their relationship is with their parents (so far at least!). In fact some of the children who appear to be struggling most come from households where their mums haven't worked since they had them (although that also correlates roughly with children from very low income households as well and so I wouldn't say having a stay at home mum has been the issue - more parental education and expectations*).

We don't have enough housing stock in the UK - house prices would have risen regardless. Would they have risen so much if childcare had been even less affordable? Maybe not, but I suspect that it wouldn't have been easy to survive on one income regardless. I also hear the complete opposite of what you're saying a lot - households that can't afford for both parents to work and one parent being forced to take a career break. I suspect the families you're talking about are not on minimum wage, but are women who earn above the UK average and have opportunities. They could choose to take a lifestyle cut (eg move area, dramatically reduce standard of accommodation) and not work but don't want to. That's what choice is, and choice is important.

You also can't compare the amount of work required to maintain a household now with that required in say the 50s/60s - the actual time the labor takes is much lower. Only about 40% of households owned a washing machine in the 1960s. Yes it's easy to get caught up in ridiculous expectations of what is needed, but again that is choice.

*I am not saying that all children from low income households have parents with low education, or even all parents with low education have low expectations for their children. This is based on the people I know only!

Agreed

The other point to add is that I'm not sure what your proposal is - give all families an amount equal to the cost of the 30 free hours, and then they can choose how to spend the money? Can I take that money, add it to my universal credit, keep my child at home all day on their ipad and spend the money on fags because that will make my life easier? If not, why not, and how will you decide how people spend the money.

Also is there any data to support that children are struggling at school because they're in childcare not at home? I haven't seen anything to suggest that, and the reason that pre-school funding was first introduced was to support early years education because it was considered that children were starting school so far behind they could not realistically catch up.

I totally agree the money funding the 30 hours of childcare etc should be given to families to use as they see fit, knowing their own circumstances. Great policy idea - if only there was a chance it might happen!

I will need to return to work part time at 15 months, in all likelihood - not looking forward to it one bit. But I worry being out of the workforce for years raising my child would torpedo my career to the point where I’d struggle to get back into a decent job in my field (specialist professional support lawyer). I don’t think I have enough assets to quit forever sadly 😂

I’ve already taken massive pay cuts leaving high stress, long hours jobs in the past - zero regrets on that!