The problem is that parents in general are given worse and worse (but more numerous) options in a culture which has severe problems w/kids.
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If you frame the problem in terms of capitalism (that is, in terms of human labor exploited as a method of value production), it's simple.
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Having children is necessary for the future of humanity (and capitalism), but children do not produce labor, and they consume parental labor
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Raising a child is a full time job without holidays, pay or benefits of any kind. The only value it (hopefully) produces is a happy child.
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Because we're not living in commune-style societies where childcare is done collectively, kids obvoiusly reduce labor output from parents.
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The solution from state and corporate power becomes to reduce parenting work - put kids in kindergardens and schools, which make jobs.
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But concordantly, labor value drops from the size of the workforce. The amount of work it takes to keep kids fed and clothed keeps going up.
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At the same time, we've entered some weird cultural lacuna where most Western cultures have stopped treating childhood as normal or right.
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When I was a child, children across Europe were play outside for hours, unattended.
Today it's a quaint Scandinavian phenomenon.
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In some countries, parents risk jail time or loss of their parental rights over just letting their kids sit in the car for a few minutes.
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Despite the West in many ways being a safer place for a kid to play unattended today than it was 20 years ago.
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We have normalized a way of looking at child-rearing that is abjectly fascist, in the worst possible sense. But few people even realize.
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Irrespective of gender, parents who do not work full time after the 1st year of their kid's life (but preferably sooner) are judged harshly.
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