On Feb 10, 3:27*pm, (Cynic) wrote:
On Thu, 9 Feb 2012 13:25:15 -0800 (PST), Ste
wrote:

Not that I think it would be a bad thing, from a sociological
perspective, to return to the old-fashioned system of having the
husband as the breadwinner and the wife staying at home taking care of
the domestic duties.

Lol! Aside from the fact that domestic duties are not nearly as
onerous as they once were, what advantages do you see in this system?

The main advantage is that the children will be fully cared for by a
single (thus hopefully consistent) adult during their formative years.

I'm not sure that is a real advantage. Adults need time to recover
from child-rearing, and it doesn't harm children to interact with, and
have good relations with, more than one caring adult. The reality is
that society needs to move forward by reducing the working week and
giving people (men in particular) more flexible and family-friendly
working hours.



And not only merely cared for, but also given lots of individual love
and attention of the sort that is lacking when a child is sent to a
nursery or day-care every day.

I quite agree that children do need love and close attention from
adults who have a long-term stake in the child's wellbeing. The whole
point of a nursery is to achieve an efficiency of labour by spreading
the attention of each adult across several children, but not only does
that mean children get less attention and socialisation, but the
little attention they do receive will be from adults who will have
little time to build mutual relationships and who do not expect to see
those children grow up - in other words, the children receive too
little adult attention, and both adults and children experience too
little continuity fo relationships.

It's also worth pointing out that it does not replicate the usual way
in which large families are managed, which is that as the family grows
older, the older children increasingly participate in child rearing
and domestic labour, so that to a certain extent the effort that the
parents put into the older children, trickles down to the younger
children without additional effort on the parents' part, and obviously
the nature of a family is such that there is a high degree of
continuity.



*I firmly believe that that is a huge
factor in producing well-behaved and well-educated adults who have
sound social values.

I agree.



*Next is that there is far more time to spend on
non-essential household tasks that improve the quality of life for
both people. *Meals, for example, are a lot better if time is spent
preparing them from fresh ingredients and cooking at the optimum rate
rather than having insufficient time to cook properly and resorting to
frozen microwave food, or ordering from the local takeaway.

It is certainly nice to come in from work and have one's food ready
cooked. I'm not sure it is an efficient use of labour, however, to
have a woman and a cooker in each house to prepare food (which the man
has to bankroll). I've said before that what our society really needs
to look at, is providing high-quality restaurant/takeaway food at an
affordable cost, so that the labour of cooking and shopping (which is
particularly onerous for families with children) is reduced.



As a departure from the traditional, I see no reason why the housewife
should not also undertake household repair, redecoration and other DIY
tasks, which will improve the house and save money that would
otherwise have been spent on tradesmen.

Indeed!



=A0Unfortunately the economy has changed to make it
impossible for a great proportion of families to be able to live on a
single income.
It is possible from a purely economic point of view - our society is
more than rich enough.

The average individual family cannot survive on a single salary
without suffering a significant loss of living standards.

Quite, although this seems incongruous with your proposal that
families do exactly that: survive on one salary.



*The
ever-rising fixed expenses such as mortgage/rent, council tax, water,
electricity, gas etc. have resulted in *very* little money left over
from the wages of an average worker, and in many cases the second
income is necessary to even be able to afford to buy a reasonable
amount of food, let alone any luxury/leisure items.

Agreed, although I suppose it will not be unexpected if I point out
that this is all perfectly consistent with what I said about there
being sufficient economic capacity for all families to live on a
single income. The only reason some families would struggle under the
current circumstances, is because other rich families are consuming
vast amounts of finite economic resources.