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This doesn't really sound like the problem is with education, but more that the mothers have zero time to do stuff outside their immediate duties. Given modern work hours and convenient household appliances, part of me wants to question that premise. But taken on its face, I would assume poorly educated mothers should face a similar problem where they want to their life to have meaning beyond kids and use whatever skillset they have to attain status, but just can't find the time and energy to do so. In other words, what you are pointing out is a problem with the overall structure of society, not women attaining skills and knowledge at higher education.
Otherwise, what is keeping the intellectual women from organizing book clubs, starting a podcast, or using their skillset to discuss the state of the world over a glass of wine?
The limiting factor is mostly sustained attention. I brought my kids over to my friends house the other day to play with her kids, and it was nice, I'd like to do it more often, but a child needed something about every 5 minutes. I'm sure this gets to be less frequent as the youngest children are older, but it has been about 7 years of this for us now, which is certainly not nothing. Her husband was looking forward to returning to his trades job after a month of parental leave, because it was less chaotic and allowed more sustained attention.
The parents arguing on Substack seem to consist of some parents who want to vent, often because they're playing on hard mode. Their husband is gone until evening, they have six children spaced very closely together, the youngest is a baby or toddler, and they're homeschooling the other ones. Then someone pipes up and says: you can just teach your children to not be like that. Arguing ensues.
Have you considered hanging out with families that have kids who are a bit older? Little kids love teenagers and tweens and will prefer to bother them instead. And girls don't really need to be coaxed to not complain about it.
Sure, if I manage to befriend anyone. We were friends before having kids. My mom started making new mom friends when my brother and I got into 4-H.
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I think you can. Theoretically it's possible. If we raised cattle the way parents are expected to raise kids, nobody would ever get to eat beef. Easing the regulations on parenting and education would help the supply issue.
If the birth rate issue was serious, we probably shouldn't have any child protective services at all, as it should be pretty trivial to demonstrate that the fear of legal repercussions for accidental child harm prevents the average non-abusive parents from adding another child. Exhibit 1 on travel-related regulations reducing birth rate:
When the bureaucrats run out of peasants to feed them they'll find out that you can't eat paper. It's odd how millenials who literally grew up with the libertarian revolution of the web, birthing such bureaucracy-killers as uber, youtube, amazon or onlyfans, still hold dear to letting dead people decide how their life should be lived.
Unironically.
Maybe. "You could do things that are now technically legal, but everyone in your social group will think you're a crappy mom" isn't much of a pitch to have more children.
But I'm currently having an annoying summer break because my youngest, not yet two, needs to be chased down and grabbed everywhere we go, I'm sure I'll feel better about him again in a month.
Well I'm not saying you should be doing this in the current circumstances, but there are some easy things that could be done to make it easier to be a parent, legally and socially.
Currently we have parents getting arrested for letting their child walk to a nearby shop in a tiny town.
Yes and of course you'd get judged if you were to put them on a leash, even though that's the safest, most responsible thing to do as a parent of such a child.
Sure, kids should be able to go places alone a bit more. That wouldn't affect my own neighborhood all that much, but would be an improvement on the margin.
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