Open letter to the guy who refuses to be the sole breadwinner

Open letter to the guy who refuses to be the sole breadwinner I coach so many women who say they want career advice, but what they really want is permission to not work. These women can see that the jobs they always dreamed of having are not compatible with raising kids, ant that makes  the work world feel very disappointing. So we agree that they dont really want to work. And their husband makes enough money to support the family. And thenthis happens all the timethe guy says he doesnt want to be the only one earning money. So this is my letter to all those husbands: Dear Mr. Do you want kids? If you dont want kids, you should only date  women who are past child bearing age. A huge number of women  who are 23 say they might be okay not having kids, but 80% of women over 40 have kids. So realistically speaking, if you date a  woman  under age 35, assume shell decide she wants kids. Because she might not but the odds are she will. Do you want to stay home with the kids? I bet the answer is no.  So you probably think both parents  are going to have careers and both will take care of kids. But thats not how the world works. Kids are a full-time job, which means until the kids are school-age, someone needs to take care of them. A deluge of research says that    there should be  a  single caregiver  until the child is three. If you ignore that research and your wife works, you will pay for childcare the whole time your wife works. Which means if your wife works full time and makes $50K a year, shell make $35K after taxes, and a huge  percentage of that will go to childcare   to leave your child with someone who probably does not make a living wage. Lets say your wife takes  maternity leave and then goes back to work. Someone has to pick up the baby at childcare at 5pm every day. No being late. Whoever does that cannot have a high-paying job, because people dont get paid a lot to leave at 4:30 every day. If parents switch off pickup days, it means both parents have a job that is not high paying. Or the parents have a fight every day at 4pm because neither feels able to leave work. So one person has to leave work at 4:30pm every day. That will be your wife, of course, because she doesnt even want to be at work in the first place. This means your wifes salary will never be particularly large because she can never be fully committed to work. Of course you already knew she was not fully committed to work because when you married her you knew she was not passionate about  making a ton of money. She was interested in other things. You could have married someone who loved making money, but then shed be threatening to you, and shed make you stay home with the kids. And you wouldnt like that. Thats why you picked this particular woman for your wife. So you have a wife who doesnt want to work. She wants to take care of your kids. And you want her to take care of the kids AND work. Because you dont want all the responsibility of earning the money. But you are not going to split the responsibility of childcare in half, because then your career would be nothing, so your wife is taking the responsibility of taking care of kids. Which means all thats left for you is to take responsibility for earning the money. Look: you can divide everything in half and have two half-time parents working half-speed at their jobs. Or you can have each parent specializing and the kids get a full-time parent and the family has a full-time breadwinner. Obviously the family works better with parents who take full responsibility for their half of the deal. Research abounds to show that marriages stay together better with a stay-at-home parent. And increasingly  educated couples are keeping one parent at home. And most women aspire to stay home. Want to look at what part-time work looks like for a mother? Look at all the law-firms that tried it: the women worked full-time and got paid for part-time. Because good part-time jobs do not really exist. You cannot leave work at 3pm when school gets out because theres always going to be a twenty-five year old who will do the job full-time. Want to know what two parents working looks like? Google latchkey kid. And you know where you got the idea that splitting things 50/50 is a good idea?  From people who didnt  split everything 50/50. Why? Because its impossible. There are two jobs for adults in a family. Kids or money.  Grow up and take one of those jobs. Because while yes, it is a lot of pressure to be an adult and earn the money, its a lot harder to be a kid who doesnt have a parent around when they need one.