In the end kids are a lifestyle choice and how the person chooses to raise them is a lifestyle choice as well. Kind of like my dog. I like to go home at lunch and walk him, so I have to live close to work. By limiting myself to employers that are close enough that I can walk home during lunch, I have probably hurt my earning potential, but the loss of money is offset by the enjoyment I get from having a happy pet. The same can be said of kids, they are probably going to harm your income potential, it is almost impossible to work on weekends and work OT to complete projects if you have to be at soccer games and doctor appointments and such. but hopefully the joy the kids bring you offsets the income you lose.

On that we can agree: the idea that you can have kids, be there for them, and not sacrifice your career somewhat doesn't work for most people in modern America.  (I think a fair number of middle/upper-middle class find this hard to accept.) But the question of how to do it in a way that doesn't give anyone - kids, mother or father - the short end of the stick, that's harder.  Given the 50% divorce rate, a parent that opts to stay home is taking a serious long-term risk.  But meaningful and well-paid part time work isn't that easy to come by, for most folks.  

I think there are policy things that can make a difference, but I doubt that there are political solutions to the problem, as you've spelled it out.  Work that feels meaningful is difficult to find, and to tangent on your suggestion that this is why depression seems to be on the rise, I think that may be right.  To a degree, further, I don't know that there is much encouragement for looking for work that you find meaningful (and it's perhaps arguable that you can't have a functioning society without a significant lack of worker satisfaction in this sense - in any big social group, there are lots of jobs that must be done for common survival that nonetheless feel fairly sysiphean).  And, if the evolutionary theory of depression is correct, and depression has evolved to ensure that members of social groups work to find a niche that fits their talents, rather than all compete for alpha status, the cutthroat competition, not to mention insecurity due to outsourcing, might trigger the mechanism that makes us depressed.

So much for lengthy digression.  The work thing I think is ultimately a problem with imperfect solutions at best.  If you're a parent, you can choose to stay competitive and get ahead, you can choose to opt out entirely and find some other way to make things work (stay at home, work for yourself, something), or you can play it down the middle, keep working, but accept that you're losing something at work to have more flexibility at home.  But you have to accept that you're going to be overstretched, stressed, and probably feeling guilty one way or the other a fair amount of the time.  For me, I find that it's worth it (maybe because I'm pretty sure that I'd be less happy if I won the lottery).

To the extent that there is a solution, it's fatalism, if you ask me.  Which is hard to legislate.  

Now, whether there are things we can do to make work more flexible, I think we can and we should.  But as your workplace shows, making work more accommodating doesn't necessarily mean happy workers.  For that, I guess what you need is: happy workers. 

Well said

For some reason when it comes to parenting many people seem unwilling to accept the tradeoffs. I wonder if part of that is not just the American way. It is possible to eliminate some of the financial strains with a better a social safety net and better paying part-time jobs, but in terms of job satisfaction I have a feeling the people who are happy at thier jobs are always going to be the people who live for their job and a family just gets in the way of that.

CVille Dem, while we may have differed on other topics, I just wanted to tell you that after reading what you've been through, and the way you've handled it, I'd be proud to count you among friends, relations or colleagues. And yet, you see where our points of view have differed in the past, which likely have something to do with mutual perceptions that are unknown. The political partitioning that we do in our minds sometimes bars us from acting as a diverse viewpoint holders to accomplish a common good wherein new routes to solving long held divisions could await.

Your post made me wonder if we could have an anti-partisan compromise between Clinton and Santorum: "It takes a village of families who share a basic belief in a common purpose, and who like working together to see it through." Drop the rhetoric, insults, Freudian analyses etc. and undermine those who use such tools to marginalize those who do their politics in good faith and not just to perpetuate advantage. Party politics *within* parties is "divide and conquer" politics by those with money, social influence, previous arrangements and connections within the respective parties, so that conventions sway in their direction.

On anti-abortion and choice politics, for example, I like approaches such as Prof. Mary Ann Glendon's who pointed out how the hard line ideologies on both sides of the politicized debate do not realistically deal with resolving the problem, i.e. reducing and eliminating both abortions and their real and perceived causes.

As for expensive foreign policies that both parties undertake in office that often militate against more spending on universal health or on educational equality, it is part of the partisan environment that one would perceive the need to commit breaches of the system to actually get anything valuable done. This was the premise of Robert Kaplan's 2002 book "Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos," which I believe helped form up much of the Neocon approach on the Defense Department advisory councils to a comprehensive amoral foreign policy that is more like that of other nations who aren't criticized for amoral policy near as much because they're not the big guy on the block. This is one reason why I have made a point to balance out criticism of Russia of late, is that folks are forgetting that Russia is still a world power with the military capability to destroy the world. Russian nuclear subs still cruise the Atlantic armed with nuclear missiles. I would suggest that this is not because they fear France.

Have you read Kaplan's book? If you do, I'd be interested to see your thoughts on it when you compare its prescriptions with what has been happening of late.

I agree with you, except to the degree that maybe I don't.

First, it's worth noting that the nonprofit sector is one of the fastest growing elements of the American economy in the past decade or so - not to say that there aren't crappy, unfulfilling and ultimately pointless jobs in nonprofits (I've had at least one), but it does go to show that more Americans are seeking jobs with some kind of meaning.  There are limits on how large this sector can grow, since it is in a sense parasitic on the for-profit sector, but it's an interesting development.

On an unrelated line, I also find myself thinking, more and more as I get older, that satisfaction isn't so much about external circumstance as it is about internal dispositions.  The people I know who are dissatisfied with one area of their lives very often are dissatisfied with many.  Conversely, the people who are satisfied with their jobs are generally of two sorts: those who find a way to like whatever it is they do, and those who find something to do that they can like.  Both strategies, I'd venture to guess, are generalizable, and those who use them have that approach to other elements of their lives.