"we, too, want to be responsible for our children's dysfunction!"
Very interesting.
I don't like the expression "children being brought up by someone else" used for child care, which the English journalist uses. I use child care, but all the same, my partner and I bring up our child. We just have to have help looking after her when we are working.
I would like more information about the Danish working culture. I have always been ambivalent (long before having children) about the high demands placed on people by high pressure jobs - as they always seem to be - no matter how junior or badly paid I have always felt pressured by work and by the associated commute. Yet without a job I feel lost and adrift. I was astonished by how much returning to work after mat leave with dd restored my sense of health and self; but now I am pregnant again, and tired, and DP is also working full time, it's just too hard and I honestly feel on the edge of falling apart. I think (for me) the ideal solution is a more manageable, flexible job in a culture which recognises the validity and importance of your life outside work. I would be interested in knowing what the usual hours of work are in Copenhagen (including commute) for full time workers. Here it is impossible to do a normal full time job and use standard 8 - 6 childcare - the childcare hours are too short to allow for work + commute. If everyone in Copenhagen is working, that can't be the case.
In short I felt the English journalist's decision to work freelance part time is a personal, private and rather privileged approach to that problem and I think a political, public, general analysis of working conditions might be more generally fruitful: it might be better for more people if "full time" jobs were more realistically manageable, rather than a socially sanctioned middle-class only arena of "personal choice" to work part time for a certain few who earn enough per hour, or whose partners do.
I suppose I have less sympathy for her worrying that the Danish social culture might not support her choice to work 2 days a week, than for everyone else who has no choice about when and how they work for brutal economic reasons.