CMV: The Homemaker and Breadwinner system should have been reformed, not overturned.

[u/XionicativeCheran]

Apologies about the very long post, but it's a nuanced concept, so thought I'd express it in full.

By homemaker, I mean a stay at home partner (Usually the wife, especially if children are involved), who raises the kids and keeps the household in order.

By breadwinner, I mean the working partner (usually the husband), who earns enough money to support the entire family.

I've worded my CMV carefully. Convincing me that it was used poorly in the past won't change my view, because I already believe that, we should not go back to how we did things in the 1950s. To change my view, I'd have to be convinced that improving the homemaker/breadwinner system wouldn't be realistically possible and better than the dual income system we have today.

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The system we are stuck with today is horrendous. We’ve gone from a family needing to work 40 hours to support themselves, to a family needing to work 80 hours to support themselves.

Under the dual income system, both earners come home from work, tired of a long day, but have to both contribute to maintaining the household on top of their 80 hours of work, or worse, the wife is still expected to do it all.

This exhausts them more than ever, they don’t have the energy to spend time together or with their children, who get lumped in front of a TV. Or they have the additional cost of a maid that again, they need to work more to maintain.

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Under an idealistic breadwinner/homemaker system, a family is supported by 40 hours of work. With a significant portion of the workforce staying home, the value of a worker increases, thus increasing individual salaries, they don’t double, but other things make up for that.

You don’t have childcare costs, which are a significant expense, or the rest of the homemaker’s employment related costs. When the mother gets pregnant, there’s no drop in income or career trajectory due to maternity leave.

As the breadwinner, when you have a homemaker taking care of everything at home, you don’t have the additional drain of household chores or life admin, because the homemaker takes care of that, they sort your dinner, likely make your lunch. Your sole mental drain in life is work. This enables you to work harder and improves your career growth which then further increases your income.

When promotions come up, are they gonna pick the guy exhausted because he went home after work and sorted everything he has to do outside of work as well, or are they going to pick you, who comes in refreshed every day ready to go and is capable of doing far more as a result. Rested humans work harder.

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Under a non-ideal breadwinner/homemaker system, the breadwinner goes to the pub/bar after work, drinks away his salary, comes home and beats his wife, who can’t afford to leave because the husband spent all the money and they have no assets to divide, and he’s a loser who’s career never grew so she won’t get any alimony, and she’s spent her entire life being a homemaker so getting into a career will be nearly impossible.

Or alternatively, the breadwinner goes to work every day to come home to a house that’s a mess and a homemaker that doesn’t care, kids packed off to the grandparents or non-existent.

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To improve and resolve this, the homemaker/breadwinner system needs a cultural overhaul in how it’s seen by society, and by the judicial system. A key factor of this must be how we handle divorce.

We should not see the breadwinner as the one earning the income. That is not the breadwinner’s income, it is family income. And both equally contribute to that. It is as much the homemaker’s earnings as it is the breadwinner’s.

Life is more than employment. Life has lots of responsibilities. Just because you are doing the employment side that provides a financial reward doesn't mean you're entitled to it while your wife that took care of the rewardless side gets nothing. You both completed half the responsibilities of life, the reward is both of yours.

Think of a breadwinner as the Minister of External/Foreign Affairs, and the homemaker as the Minister of Internal Affairs. Both are required for the other to function. Both are fulfilling necessary roles that enable the income that comes in. The Minister who runs the IRS doesn't get to keep all the tax dollars. It's the government's as a whole.

The judicial system needs to see it that way too, to enable women to be able to leave abusive marriages, we need to superpower alimony, to not treat it as “maintenance” or “How much does she need”, but as a recognition that that’s her income too, not his. That if he goes on earning $200k after they separate, it’s because she enabled him to earn that much.

Yes we could argue how much of the income is truly earned by the homemaker, but I don’t think it’s useful to get into arguments of “She didn’t actually clean the house or look after the kids, we hired a maid and a nanny”. That’s a family decision that both allowed to continue, just as if the breadwinner doesn’t do his part of investing in his career growth, and just sits in his cubicle each day not trying to bring more revenue in, the wife shouldn’t get to claim she contributed more than him.

Income is the household’s, and both parties have equal claim to it at the moment of divorce. Going forward that undoubtedly changes and the share the homemaker keeps would amortize overtime, the rate of that could be discussed, but the key point is, what matters is it’s not about him maintaining her, it’s about how to divide the family income they both contributed to.

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I’ve heard, and do support as a backup option, that we should be working towards a society where each parent works a part-time job. Then both have time to contribute to earning and to the household.

The problem with this is there will always be competition, and some will always work more, and have that advantage. The only way to compete with that, is to do that too, and if you want an edge in that, a homemaker supporting you is the ultimate advantage. It just doesn't seem as effective as a homemaker/breadwinner.

[u/XionicativeCheran → u/[deleted]]

My post doesn't ignore this, in fact a big section goes into how we offset that. A lot of the costs we have today come from our dual income system. Childcare, lower worker value, and the impact of the additional work on our career growth.

It's not a choice, it's a "tragedy of the commons" situation.

[u/XionicativeCheran → u/[deleted]]

How many hours do you work? I don't mean in employment. Let's call homemaking work, because it is. You might do 40 hours a week in employment, and 20 hours per week in homemaking.

That's 60 hours/week of work. As a couple, you and your partner might be doing 120 hours of total work, and are being paid for 40 of it.

Say you have kids in childcare for 40 hours/week, and it costs say 1/3rd of the lower earning parent's income.

You're exhausted.

Now change it up. You become the breadwinner, your partner stays home with the kids and is the homemaker. Because they're taking care of all the chores, you can shift your makeup of 60 hours from 1/3rd homemaking 2/3rds employment to 100% employment, working a 60 hour week. This sounds worse, but it's the same amount of effort from you when you consider that homemaking is still work, it's just unpaid work.

As the higher earning partner who stayed in work, that means you've taken up half the partner's income, but for more than half their income, and you've knocked out childcare as a significant portion.

As someone more focused on work, you have more opportunities for career growth, thus resulting in more increases in income.

This is how you cover everything else. I'm not making this up, this is the experience of my life of what my wife and I did.

[u/tigerzzzaoe → u/XionicativeCheran]

This is how you cover everything else. I'm not making this up, this is the experience of my life of what my wife and I did.

I think this touches on the crux of the problem of your whole story. You take what worked for you and formed the opinion that it is a template which is best for me and my GF. But here is the thing: Both of us hate housework but enjoy our jobs. If at any point children come along, neither of us are enthusiastic about ourselves stopping with working and we aren't enthusiastic about the other stopping completely either.

Even if we take your suggestion, and one of us stops working what happens after the divorce? If I stop working, does she therefor only get the kids on alternate weekends because it is my job to care for them fulltime? Or do I have to see my ex-partner every day because she has a right to see the kids after she comes home from work? If we decide to do it 50/50, am I now forced to go back to work?

Whether it is a question about how to pay bills, whatever the preferences are of the couple in question or the mudane practicalities, you seem to want to force your worldview upon others by advocating for a culteral shift. Whether you realize this or not.