Comment by SoftTalker
5 days ago
The 40 hour work week is most assuredly not new in the past 30 years.
The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still somewhat common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.
Dual income earners hasn't even increased that much, 44% in 1967 to 53% in 2011 - https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm
Yeah I think there's this fictional idea that families in the past didn't struggle with money and need both parents to work. My father worked full time and my mother worked about 30 hours a week when I was a child (1970s).
We have a lot of fiction about the past. I'm one of those assholes that points out fictional narrative are actually just fictional any chance I get
Example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973149
This 40 hr/week need to be combined with
1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.
2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.
3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs
4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".
I don't know about the sports. It's probably more serious now. Youth soccer is a whole thing that didn't exist at all when I was a kid. But lots of kids played Little League or basketball or football back then (1970s). "Travel" teams were probably not as common, but I was not a sports kid so I don't have a lot of direct experience. There were also swimming lessons, music lessons, Cub Scouts, a lot of other kids activities. It wasn't all just hanging out at home.
Youth sports are pants on your head crazy these days. Like most things you don't have to go nuts but so many families do.