The problem is that you can't be both the bread winner and give equal time to your kids. One will always suffer over the other.
It's much better to have one bread winner and one care giver. It's been like this for most of human history and it has worked very well. I'm not sure why these new-age articles and psychologists think that they can somehow change it.
Because logistical barriers often became lazy justification for distant/absent parenting?
Sure, 'millennials' father may not be the kind of dads they want to be - but, hell, at least they WANT to be active parents to their kids. That falls on the positive side of the line for me as it will add emphasis on normalizing paternity leave (for one example) as a legitimate work/life demand.
Are we sure older fathers didn’t want to be active parents? In the past there was a lot of social pressure on men to be a breadwinner which effectively locked out fathers who wanted to be more involved in their children’s upbringing.
We are all only a few generations from being peasants. Being a peasant is not the greatest job in the world, but peasant fathers are actively involved in their children’s upbring as they are working alongside them from sunrise to sunset.
There's data that shows that's not true. Check out the number of hours of paid work by mothers over time in the past 50 years, and the corresponding decrease in housework. [1] The world is not changed by "new-age articles and psychologists." It's changed by technology that reduces the hours required for housework.
Actually, it is a pretty sound argument when it comes to describing human behaviour.
Things are often they way they are because it works on a macro and micro level. Sure, some things get into weird feedback loops and drift to silliness, but for the most part, if you see something working for a lot of people, they're not doing it just because of tradition.
The OP is absolutely correct in that many people will find it better to specialise in child-rearing and income-generation for a two-parent family. That doesn't mean one doesn't do child rearing and the other never works, but the primary responsibilities will fall down that way.
That's how it has been for a millennia or three, and that's likely how it will stay. Behaviours like this are all about reproductive success so that's why they the way they are.
Have you not noticed that a few centuries ago society and technology made evolutionary instincts for reproductive success mostly obsolete? Do you think that a boy with a stay at home dad will fail to impregnate a woman before be dies?
Having kids re-prioritizes things sure and careers can languish because a parent might not stay in the office till 7pm to socialize, or be available at any hour and respond to emails till you hit the bed as the childless or (single or paired up) can do but if you don't mind not keeping with the joneses careerwise, it's doable.
Not everyone has to be the superachieving career minded semi-absent parent.
Honestly, as someone who kinda grew up with two super-achieving career minded parents (on the scale of "majorly influenced their respective academic fields"), it's possible to keep a top tier career going strong and raise kids.
By their example, you have to be pretty ruthless about work/housework/childraising division, though: my parents split weekends and weekdays, so when I was young it was either the day we spent with mom or the day we spent with dad, with a few evenings and dinners together, and as we got older we had a lot of unsupervised freedom (not really a bad thing, imo, but it might mean not living in a crowded suburb or a city). However, it's certainly possible to be on the forefront of the /field/ you are in and still raise reasonably well adjusted kids evenly, it just takes a lot of effort from /both/ parents and a lot of conscious organization and division of tasks. They did have very flexible work schedules (including being completely able to work on weekends), though, which probably made it a lot easier than the (traditional) "You will work from 9am-5pm on Monday through Friday" most corporations (still) expect.
You're right, some people can pull it off and successfully. It's great for those who want to and can. I think my implicit point is not everyone _should_ want to. Career is not an end goal. Career affords us a path to a life we desire. Some people actually enjoy and want a real livable work-life balance --not just the HR PR diluted version.
However, yes, it's great that some people are single minded and discover new drugs and treatments for disease and contribute to accelerated human progress.
I'd say that career is a path to afford us what we find satisfying in life. For some people, that's more time with family and friends, hiking, knitting, or social dance. For some, it might be watching netflix. If that's what satisfies, that's what you should do.
For some folks, though, it is their career activities that they find satisfying (i.e. it is the end goal, because it's what they'd be doing with their time anyways, so it's nice that somebody is paying them to do it full time). My parents were genuinely in the last category, but not everyone is or needs to be.
at the very least, if you don't try to clean away the accumulated societal dead wood, you will end up with not just one bread winner and one care giver, but with women almost exclusively being pushed into the caregiver role and men almost exclusively being pushed into the breadwinner role.
Which is ideal, as men and women are both ideally biologically and psychologically equipped for their respective traditional role. This generation is strongly committed to spitting in the face of biology, evolution, and common sense, but they'll find out these realities are quite stubborn, for better or worse. The only question is how much of the generational consequences they'll live to see.
It's much better to have one bread winner and one care giver. It's been like this for most of human history and it has worked very well. I'm not sure why these new-age articles and psychologists think that they can somehow change it.