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ChristianKl comments on Some thoughts on having children - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you look back a hundred years ago most relationship where organised in a way that the woman did the housework and the man was the breadwinner.
I think it's fair to call that model the traditional model.
Sexual division of labor is historically common (approaching ubiquitous), but a strict breadwinner/housekeeper model isn't a particularly good description of it in most of the times and places I'm familiar with. In forager societies, for example, it's common for both sexes to work as breadwinners, albeit targeting different food sources. Subsistence farmers (who make up a vast majority of the population in pretty much every preindustrial agrarian society) tend to work similarly; in a free 10th-century Scandinavian farmer's household, for example, you might see the adult men (it likely wouldn't have been a nuclear family) plowing fields and felling trees, while the adult women wove cloth, churned butter, tended animals and brewed beer.
I'm not terribly familiar with the evolution of the housewife institution, but I'd hazard a guess that it's an aspirational outgrowth of the division of labor in the upper classes of early modern societies (where "breadwinner" in the modern sense wouldn't have applied terribly well to either sex).
That's an interesting comment, thank you. Wikipedia says the divide is not ancient vs modern, but rather rural vs urban:
Few people mean forager values when use the term traditional values. I also not claim that the model has universal usage for everyone. I'm mainly saying that it should be considered, when it fulfills the utility functions of the involved persons.
When people in modern Western culture talk about traditional values, they usually mean the reputed values of the middle classes circa 1950 or so. The point I'm trying to make is that those values aren't necessarily reflective of the conditions most people lived under for most of history (never mind prehistory), and thus that they aren't necessarily a good guide to what people will "naturally" be happy with.
We're not talking about the arrangement when the man works and the woman keeps house. We are talking about a man giving permission to his wife to have a baby in return for him not being bothered with house chores. A quid pro quo of sorts.
No, that's the effect of what we are talking about. It one of the models you can end up when it's the woman's goal to raise children and the man's goal to pursue outside projects.
When I say: "agree" I mean that both parties talk about and understand there mutual values and then come to a conclusion that optimizes those.
The good that this post might do is that it helps someone to be more clear about his values. I did use a game theoretic frame to talk about the exchange, but that's just a frame. A way of talking about the issue.
I certainly don't advocate that you should specifically pay attention to optimize game theoretic advantages to win against your partner.
If the man's goal is to pursue outside projects then why would he want children anyway?
And if you are describing a situation where a man does not want children, but can be persuaded to tolerate them in exchange for not being bothered with house chores, I repeat my assertion that the woman should kick him in the balls and run away.
I think there a difference between being unwilling to spend a very time and straight out not wanting children.
If the guy wants children but is unwilling to spend time, I think the woman should kick him in the balls several times. Just to be sure.
The guy doesn't want children, but he doesn't mind having children with the woman as long as it's not too bothersome for him. The woman either really wants children, in which case this arrangement is to her benefit, or does not want children that badly, in which case they don't have children.
You speak as if these two are the only people on the planet.
Well, it's none of anyone elses business, so I don't see how other people being there is relevant.
If you mean it in the sense of "don't settle for someone who isn't going to help you with kids, no matter how good a match you otherwise are"... Never settle is a brag