Oh thank goodness, the article opens with explaining the utter uselessness of the term "millennial". I (32) have next to nothing in common with someone who was born when I was graduating high school. It's an absurd category.

Anyway, it's still silly to take this particular question as a proxy for views on gender equality. I think there's an obvious desire for it to be economically feasible for one partner to be able to take time off to raise children in their early years. It's usually not possible anymore.

Then the second paragraph states directly that this category is over-broad, and that lumping so many age groups is problematic, and dissects younger versus older "millenials". Sometimes more than one sentence is needed for context :).

Absolutely. What happened to Generation Y? If Gen X cuts off at 1980, wouldn't Gen Y be from 1980 to early/mid '90s? Millenials are kids who don't remember dial-up, and perhaps even wired ethernet.

I'm considered a millennial and I was born in 1985. The most common I've heard is it is anyone who turned 18 on or after 2000.

Also, I very definitely remember dial-up... and cassette tapes, and VHS, and walkmans, diskmans, CRT monitors, playing outside, etc :)

Born in 93, is playing outside really not common anymore or are you just joking?

I am half joking on that one. But yes, I get the distinct feeling playing outside is becoming increasingly less common.

And when kids do play outside their parents hover over them and they can't explore or take risks.

Speaking purely from the perspective of someone in the US. I know other countries are very different.

I hover over my kid when he plays outside... but then, he's 18 months old.

Gen Y was the placeholder name until they the millennial name stuck. Depending on who you ask the generation starts from 1977 to 1984 and ends from 1994 to 2000. We are rapidly approaching the time when we can expect some catchy name to stick for the next cohort.

Generations tend to be around 20 years and every one has a big gap between the start and the finish. Just look at baby boomers, do you think someone born in 1946 with a returning GI father and graduating high school right into the start of Vietnam escalation had much in common with someone born in 1964 and not graduating high school until the Reagan administration?

If only people would be grouped by decades, ie 90's kids. The problem with this though is it doesn't mean you were born in the 90's, but you grew up on the 90's - but what age is growing up?

Regardless, although I understand the ubiquity of terms like millenial, I think there's so much more value in breaking down things into decades. I'd actually say 8 year segments are the most useful because you can use presidents (who often serve 2 full terms) as references, but that's specific for the US and doesn't jive well with a base-10 counting system.

I bet out there somewhere someone has come up with a great way to classify generations specific to cultural changes and I just haven't found it yet. Maybe it'll show up in this thread.

Born in 1978 I was clearly too young to be part of Gen X at the time it was popular in the media. Gen Y was sort of a transitional label that never really got traction until it coalesced into Millenial. Ultimately for me it just shows the absurdity of bucketing generations in this way since I clearly don't fit in either.

Connection method seems an odd choice. In terms of cultural changes, I'd pick from not remembering a time before (1) Amazon/web-selling, (2) laptops over desktops, (3) Google or (4) smartphones.

90s kids remember dial up, vhs, car cassette players and wired ethernet without doubt. In fact, I remember plugging my xbox 360 into my phone jack hoping it was the same as ethernet.

to me the more functional definition is "do you remember life before the internet?"

As incomes rise in the US (mostly in high productivity sectors), child care costs increase even though the productivity of child care stays stagnant. As a result, per dollar spent, the quality of child care has been getting worse. On top of that, the best nannies/day cares/schools are being bided up by more market forces in those sectors. As a result, the point at which increasing family income by a secondary earner is no longer net positive (especially when considering tax implications.. someplace where unpaid household labor majorly wins).

Improved educational attainment may have just made Millennials act more economically 'rational' than their previous versions.

Those who in high productivity sectors make more than enough to warrant working instead of staying at home. My wife is in this category. And you need to think of this more than a simple one year ROI.

Leaving the workforce for 5-7 years (or more) can shave hundreds of thousands or millions off of lifetime earnings. You are talking about leaving the workforce in prime of your career and not getting experience and promotions for several years. My daughter is 2.5, and my wife has been promoted twice since she was born. Leaving the workforce from the ages of 30 to 37 could be fairly catastrophic to one's lifetime earnings.

We live in the Washington, DC area, with the highest childcare costs in the U.S., and the long-term financial impact of her not working would be staggering, even if working versus not working was a complete push while we had pre-school age kids.

There are reasons why a spouse may want to stay at home to raise kids, but rarely does it make long-term financial sense.

What do you say to people who decry the concentration of high incomes in our governments capital?

As a working mom with a stay-at-home husband, I don't love the wording of the question. There's no way to tell which respondents think women shouldn't work, and which ones simply value the work of stay-at-home parents. I know they've asked the same question with the same wording for decades, but I'd still like to see what results they got with a gender-neutral statement like "It is much better for everyone involved if one spouse works outside the home and the other takes care of the home and family."

I'm a homeschooling SAHM (was a software engineer for 6 years, have a MS in CS) expecting our 4 child, born in 1982. This is not surprising to me, I know many women choosing being at home over a lucrative & promising career. Both my parents are MDs, and I was raised by nannies. Here's the thing about nannies - you don't know a situation is really bad until it's too late. Also, the second shift is a very real, exhausting phenomenon. Lots of smart women with smart early wave feminist moms have looked at our own childhoods and said, "I'd rather be significantly poorer and spend the time with my kids. I missed my mom when I was a kid and it hurt. I don't want the stress of working a full day followed afterschool pickup followed by homework and extracurriculars followed by dinner and cleaning." Not shockingly, I married a guy who agrees with me on this.

I would say the Dutch (as is often the case) probably have it about right: married women with kids frequently work about 20 hours a week and the man works a 40 hours that actually ends up being closer to 50-60 hours away from the family (Figure commutes alone easily adds 5).

Anecdotally, my wife couldn't stand to stay at home, but it's also physically impossible to work full time and cover the kids' schedules, groceries, etc.

It doesn't have to be the woman either. We have friends where the woman works and the husband stays home. But they also adopted, so she never stayed home to recover, breastfeed, etc.

What kinds of jobs allow 20 hours/week?

I can't remember ever seeing a single software development job (which wasn't contracting) where the employer advertised less than 40 hour weeks.

Europe has a much stronger culture of respecting part time work than the US.

I was surprised to hear that my parttime friends in Europe had benefits equivalent to their fulltime colleagues.

If you want to look for a decent part-time job, I would guess you could look for somewhere that employs a lot of late 20s and 30s women.

Alternatively, a company which has employees who work in shifts is likely to already have the infrastructure for people to track their working time and be paid accordingly.

The same goes for somewhere where people work on multiple projects for different clients on a payment for time spent basis (you have to know how much you worked for each client in order to bill them).

The downside is that you would likely have to fill in a timesheet.

There is an entire class of employment in healthcare called "per diem", and everyone who touches a patient can work per diem: doctor to therapy assistant. Probably stems from an admittedly patriarchal system wherein nurses often marry doctors, and suddenly find themselves with healthcare benefits for life, then deciding they don't want to work full time.

As far as you can tell, in your country, does it have to be always one or the other (spouse A spending 20ish hours working and the rest with the child while spouse B spending 50ish hours working)? Is it plausible for both of them to spend, say, X hours with the kid and 30-40ish hours working? I find the latter much more pleasant arrangement, for those that want to be able to have both careers and children (but this is obviously not a universal opinion).

yes, I think it's safe to say one works more hours away from the home, and one works more hours in the home. Any "perfect balance" is likely to be an unstable equilibrium, and one driver toward a more stable "prestressed' equilibrium is the need to maintain the kids' schedules. One person becomes more in tune with managing that.

i hate how this article confuses 'wanting a stay at home wife' with gender equality. so according to this article, having this preference must mean they are not in favor of gender equality.

Actually, while the title is a little off-the-mark, the article clarifies that they determine the desire for "gender equality" from surveys which ask about it directly. The surveys they use do not ask "Would you prefer a stay-at-home-wife?". Instead, they ask if the respondents agree that "It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.". Clearly the latter sentence is a value judgement that does not support gender equality (because if they had supported gender equality, they would disagree since having a stay-at-home dad and working mom should be equivalent to the situation described).

I can kind of see it if the 'one person stays home to care for a child' part is fixed, and then the choice becomes one of 'man stays home' vs 'woman stays home'. If millennial men choose the second over the first consistently, you could easily draw that conclusion.

Similarly, it's stated early on that millennials were expected to see greater parity between the sexes in most roles, especially professional ones. If that's not happening, and if people are swinging back towards preferring men in the position of 'earner' (and therefore in a position of power), it's not hard to make that connection.

It's definitely true that they should have been more explicit about it, rather than seeming to conflate the two without identifying one as a proxy for the other, maybe.

NYT becoming more and more like BuzzFeed.

actually becoming more and more like Fox News, except "liberal" instead of "conservative".

That was always the case.

The New York Times has endorsed Republican presidential candidates in the past.

Hahahaha, yeah. Last time: Eisenhower in 1956.

Although it is a bit of a stretch if there was no gender bias involved the husband would choose to stay at home (if the actual goal is one employed person, one home maker).

I guess I'm in this category. My wife quit her job when we had our second kid. It was our decision. She's planning on going back to work when the younger one turns 4. Parent > Paid Caregiver for taking care of a child. Could be either parent.

Women have expectations now (for the better imho) that simply weren't there 50 or 60 years ago. I know the career sacrifice that my wife would have to make to stay at home and raise our kids would shatter her sense of wellbeing, so I want her to get back into the workforce when she is able: in the long term, a happy, fulfilled wife is going to make for a happier marriage, and I am all about a peaceful life at home.

It also means that at any given time, either of us could support the family in case of disruption (e.g. I start a major project that takes a few years to generate revenue, or she decides to take time off active research to write a book). I value the flexibility that having both spouses work brings our family.

I imagine that gay millennial men don't, but who knows, it could work.

Leaving that aside, I want a co-equal partner, but that doesn't necessarily exclude someone who stays at home for any number of reasons. I think gender equality should also be pursued by undoing the devaluation of what has been historically considered "women's work" (caring for loved ones, housework, etc).

I fall in this category and I would love to be a stay at home husband, not sure about wanting kids though. I'd do all the domestic duties happily and work on my own projects with my freetime, what a dream that would be!

From a financial stand point unless a parent makes significantly more than the cost of child care it makes since for them to stay at home.

I was thinking the same thing at least from the point of view of someone who came from a state where the job market has been shrinking or at least not growing in pace with the population. I don't think I knew anyone around my age or a little older who were married where only one spouse was working. It seemed back home almost everyone worked full time if they could and possibly an additional part-time job to cover costs especially if they had children.

I have one. Her choice though as we homeschool 3 kids.

If she wanted to work, would you stay home to homeschool, or would you stop homeschooling?

I'm not the person you replied to, but I'm in the same situation. My wife and I have two daughters, ages three and eight. My wife stays home and I go to work.

I would change places in a heartbeat if it made sense. It's not really an option for us because my earning potential is so much higher. We're beyond the window of time where we could make that change in arrangement without a major life upheaval.

For what it's worth though, my wife supported me entirely for a few years in our early twenties. Neither of us liked that arrangement very much, so when we had the opportunity to swap we did.

It depends, likely she would work part-time and we could continue homeschooling. But if she wanted to go FT, then yeah we would need to send the kids to school/daycare.

Thanks for the reply. I know for some people homeschooling is non-negotiable, so was curious to know your approach. My aunt in Alaska homeschooled her kids, but mostly "because the local school wasn't very good."

I'm an older millennial (barely even in the group). My wife has a career and so do I. Plus we have a small child. It would certainly be easier if one of us stayed home (not necessarily her). But I think it would be even better if we could both have a healthy work life balance.

My girlfriend has a minimum wage job in retail. She doesn't particularly enjoy it. But I guess she can take comfort in the knowledge that she is participating in a "gender revolution". Not like those traitorous stay-at-home wives.

Millennial Men wants to be Stay at Home Husbands!

I do.

Me too. And have. And am happy.

Perhaps because it has become harder for families to afford so it is now seen as a luxury? And people want luxuries...

Sometimes my wife and I joke that we could use a stay-at-home wife...

What's the comparative divorce rate between families with stay at home dads vs stay at home moms?

It's interesting how you get downvoted with "I don't" while the comment saying "I do" gets upvoted. It seems this crowd doesn't just see this as a matter of opinion but would rather silence one view - namely the view of men who don't want their wives to be stay-at-home moms. This lends quite a bit of credibility to the hypothesis that millennials strongly prefer traditional gender roles.

If the Millennial Men have kids and want the best for them, then, yeah. Hard to argue that a mother is better than a baby sitter.

I wonder how hard that is to argue? We can afford for one of us to stay home, and we can afford the best nanny we could find, but we've sent our kids to daycare because they can learn more from 4 teachers than one. Languages, cultural customs, social interactions. We see this again and again when they meet kids that have a single stay home parent or a nanny. They are more comfortable in social settings, they understand how to relate to other people, and they don't think people are strange for doing things differently.

I'd love to see some data that shows that a mother is better than a trained baby sitter, is better than group care of some kind.

There's a decent amount of developmental psychology research on the subject:

https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/documents/seccyd...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200704/daycare-rais...

Interesting:

>the more their teachers later reported that they do not work independently, did not use their time wisely, and did not complete their work promptly in grade school.

I'm not raising kids to do homework. Real learning isn't copying from a book. It'd be interesting to look at this at a later date. Looks like these studies should have this data by now, since it started with kids in 1991.

Daycare/preschool isn't a baby sitter. Kids in this setting get a lot of interaction with their peers, which they generally love. They learn a lot from play, and kids are more likely to play with peers around than with just adults.

The men could just as easily be the one staying home.

"just as easily" is not exactly true. Sure mom can pump and leave breastmilk (an inconvenience, some might say!), but there is at least one good reason that moms are moms, at least for the first year. Hard to argue with biology.

If a woman is only staying at home for the first year of an infant's life, I really wouldn't call that a "Stay-at-home-wife". That's more of an extended maternity leave. I've always seen "Stay-at-home" wife/mom used to describe women who choose to stay home long-term, usually in place of a full-time career.

Starting at 6 months after birth, at the earliest, yes. Breastfeeding is so important for health in later life that it should not be sacrificed for a couple months of work.

As a "millennial man", I would like her to work while I stay home.

I enjoy housework, childcare, and my ideal career would work fine spending 4 or so hours a day working from home (and indeed, might work better).

So I think lots of Millennials want one of the couple to stay home for finance reasons or personal preference, but I think a lot of them pick who out of practical concerns, not gender roles.

While we should treat genders equally with respect, we should not pretend genders are interchangeable. Men are not good moms, for us and all species. Women have a much harder choice than men with work, and we should not pretend they don't.