Houllie

Some of us have broken into that glass nursery.

I think that I remember you mentioning that you had kids. Have you ever discussed with your partner the possibility of you staying home. You certainly seem able to state your point.

We have discussed it benk before having kids, and I brought up I could work 4 days and her 3, or vice versa. She was not too keen. Originally I think although she reflexively assumed women should get first dibs on staying home, she accepted she was more career minded, liked her job more and after formalising her qualifications could earn the same as me.

Then when she had our first, she lost all interest in career.
She has worked hard on creating a little community of mothers, and she is finishing her degree, but things may be reassessed when she is finished her degree and the kids start school.

There are many factors at play, ins and outs as it were, one of them being her living in my home country with no family here. Relationships are a compromise.

Suffice to say we are both happy enough with our lot, though I do dream of working part time or 9-3 when the kids start school, and it just may happen as I may also need to re-skill about that time.

Pelican:"I think if you read over my posts objectively Antiseptic you will see that is not true "

I take the general point, but your first response when this topic was raised was to try to pretend it was somehow trivial and meaningless, when it clearly is not. It is a sign that the social engineering of the past 40 years has been very successful in streaming women into professions and men into trades/labouring jobs.

Any process takes time to start and time to stop. The real problem with this process is that there is no brake - the lever has been removed and is being hidden by a cloud of self-serving "feminist" indignation that billows forth whenever it is suggested that a brake might be a good idea. Furthemore,every time a brake is mentioned, there is a rush to stand on the throttle and calls for still more fuel to be made available.

Bloody women drivers...

Houellebecq, I take your point very well.
When my children came along, my wife and I very deliberately decided we would rather be poor with a close knit family, than financially well off. Typically, I had to take it to the next level and decry the established 'wisdom' which said the mum should stay with the kids while dad works. We bought a small farm so we could both be at home.
Of course, this resulted in abject poverty, and I found I had to work long days and long weeks to make ends meet.
I probably saw less of my children, and had less 'quality time' for them than if I'd had a normal job.
Almost all the mothers I have spoken to say the same thing. They would much rather stay home and raise their children, but just can't 'afford' to.
Of course, what one can and can't afford depends very much on one's material aspirations.
I discovered long ago it's very easy to get whatever you want out of life. Just don't want anything you can't have.
I seem to recall Bob Menzies got into trouble for saying 4% unemployment was 'a good thing'.
The socialists, of course, were up in arms; maybe for industry, but not for the 4%, they said.
Of course, at that time Menzies was talking about 4% unemployment for men.
Why are we still trapped in that paradigm? Why has living become less affordable than 30 or 50 years ago?
And why do all political parties insist on doing everything they can to get everyone working, at the inevitable expense of their home and family life?
I think we've lost the plot.

Well it is trivial and meaningless Anti. Note the title refers to Gen Y only. What about all the other sectors of human population. Where is your outrage at the injustices of those disparities. If someone started a thread about stoning women in the Middle East for misdemeanours you would be the first to find some excuse for it or put it down to "why is what we do in the West any better" blah blah.

Houlley I agree that women do generaly have first dibs on the stay at home aspect of raising kids especially at the beginning but that is more due to breastfeeding needs as well as desire. Men do have less choice in this but that is changing too and people will work out what works best for them as a family and I guess those are the sorts of questions people should be asking prior to having kids or making commitments.

Social enginnering has worked for men too, there is now paternity leave and more men in female-dominated professions like nursing etc.

Yes pelican, social engineering has worked very well for men for hundreds of years. Because of social engineering women have for centuries been denied access to an 'independent' living wage and equal job opportunities and various infrastructure opportunities. In other words, a woman was forced via social engineering, to be dependent on a man if she really wanted to live the good life. Wage equality, meaning equal pay for the exact same job done, was non existent prior to the early 70s when the laws were finally changed in Oz. It's almost unbelievable that such overt social engineering was in place right up to as recently as the 70s. I used to work for the Commonwealth Bank in the late 50s, and I remember that when a woman got married she had to resign from her job; no other words for it, "social engineering".