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This seems really reductionist. The power of a nation is not so much in its population size now, so returning to a society where everyone has 5 kids has limited benefits (if any) and lots of negatives. What makes a nation powerful now is its economic engine, and that includes having women work. Obviously the current system is a failure as well, but when you say feminism is a failure, you need to remember its been a gradual change since the 1800s. Maybe the current additions are failures (I would argue so) but women joining the workforce and participating in society in at least some different ways is hard to make a rational case again.
There are economic benefits to keeping women out of work but they have never been robustly measured due to ethics and feasibility. Studies show that primates separated from their mother early receive lifelong mental illness and worse learning outcomes, and we are arguably in a mental illness crisis nowadays, so it’s reasonable to assume it has something to do with the eradication of the mother-child bond. Early life is important for future outcomes, and women are inherently invested in teaching their children lessons unlike Random Bureaucrat #183729, so we are impairing the learning of our whole population. There are important emotional and social lessons that only a mother can supply to her child at a young age, and a mother will supply hundreds of such lessons a day with very salient terms of reinforcement and punishment (for a child, nothing is more reinforcing than love, or punishing than alienation thereof). A child is supposed to be breastfed for 3-4 years, and this is good for their future health. Stressed women produce worse kids with worse health, and work stresses women. Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home. When women stay with their children all day it keeps them occupied and away from the computer where they might promote really bad things that destroy civilization like affirmative action. Keeping a woman at home and away from work means that everyone in the family can eat better and has clean living conditions, which affects health for the next generations.
Good luck trying to measure any of this in studies, ripping twins away from mothers and measuring the outcomes unto the third generation. Stress and poor health are exorbitantly expensive. Antisocial behavior is expensive. This comes from working moms. And if we were able to make pronatality a status symbol, then the smartest people would have the most children (as they would see it as a mark of success, and a smart choice, maybe even a problem to solve, and they could afford it). So in the 1960 cohort, the smartest men and women would have 64 grandchildren by now, instead of their meager four. Imagine 16x the number of geniuses just from the 1960 cohort, and then 65x for the generation after ours. Imagine 65x the Terence Taos or John Carmacks. This is bad for the economy!
The problem is that in the 21st century, a housewife and mother of three is not going to be relaxed; she's going to be perpetually stressed and exhausted. Servants are the missing variable in these arguments. The old system presupposed that anyone middle-class or above would have at least part-time servants to do the cleaning and look after the very young (and even for the poor, to a certain extent it presumed big family clans where retired members could be put to "work" for household and childrearing stuff, though it also largely presumed that it was okay if poor women's mental health was a horror show).
Women are relaxed around children. Female school teachers for young grades are like the most relaxed women in the world, and those aren’t even her kids and she isn’t at home. There is a biological reason for why a woman would be stressed after being severed from her child but no reason why she would be stressed being in a homemaking environment. When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs). There’s also a study showing Amish women are significantly less stressed than normal Americans, and they have eight kids. There are a lot of different compelling reasons to believe that a mother with her child is the least stressed version of woman, provided she isn’t also laboring for eight hours a day away from her kid.
You don't actually have a wife and kids, do you?
Notably, these games can be paused when you get tired of them.
Can a woman pause her work when she gets tired of it? Do you think SAHMs play “excel simulator” to relax? Preferences are revealed.
Okay, no wife, no kids. That explains a lot.
What does this have to do with anything? Did anyone make the ludicrous claim that work is relaxing?
Pal, I don't know if you want to go down the revealed preferences route given the revealed preferences women apparently have around marriage and number of children. Your whole argument revolves around how women would be happier if they did something other than they do - i.e. a denial of the validity of the revealed preferences.
I don’t think your n=1 wife who likely works has any relevance here. But maybe you married a Mennonite chick, I don’t know. Sorry about your stressed out wife. Here is n=288 showing that sahm culture produces 1/4th the amount of “feeling overloaded” as girlboss culture and 1/10th the depressive on a symptoms scale.
My wife hasn't worked the entire time we've had children, and I've talked to other women who have had children and worked or didn't work at different times of their kids' lives. My wife is also not a stressed woman, which is not to say that she finds kids "relaxing".
My point is that if you've literally never raised a child and get your view on what it's like, and what women think of it, from discord and other Internet forums, you basically have no idea what you're talking about. It is, quite simply, one of those human experiences that you have no access to without going through it yourself.
I am curious - have you actually discussed whether or not children are relaxing IRL with a flesh and blood woman? Even your mother?
That's really not what this is comparing.
The groups are Amish women vs non-Amish women, so there's already a lot of differences between the groups besides "works" or "sahm".
Only a minority of both samples (19% Amish, 28% genpop) are mothers. So most of the comparison here is between women without children, rather than SAHMs vs working mothers.
28% of the Amish women work, and 75% of the non-Amish women work - so this isn't even comparing "Amish SAHM" vs "non-Amish working mothers".
Given that this is mostly a comparison of unemployed childless women vs employed childless women, I'm hardly surprised the first group is less overloaded than the second. Especially since the Amish are generally okay with using washing machines - the work of running the household without any kids is just not that much.
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