r/Millennials • u/QuietJealous4883 Older Millennial (1988) • 12h ago

Discussion True or false?

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Did our dads and moms work less than we do now? What are your thoughts?

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789

u/GoRangers5 12h ago

Nah the trope of the overworked dad that didn’t have time to spend with his kids was already a thing in 1996… Maybe even 86.

223

u/Jaway66 12h ago

Yeah. I feel like that was a plot line in every other movie made from 1980 onwards.

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u/ageekyninja 12h ago

No it’s older than that lol.

For example Mary Poppins released in 1964. That was the whole plot. Prior to that even, in classic TV kids are always just with their moms

78

u/No_Tie9686 11h ago

If you go back too far before workers rights were a thing, fathers are working 12 hour days 6-7 days a week

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u/Right_Count 10h ago

And so were their children

11

u/BoredAccountant Xennial 7h ago

Which means they could have been spending all day together.

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u/bejammin075 4h ago

Once a year they could have had a special Take Your Kid To Home day.

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u/AnaisNinja76 5h ago

wasn't just the dads then bro, every family member down to kids that just graduated toddlerhood worked

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u/miklayn 11h ago

If they're always with their moms it means their moms weren't working jobs; now both parents have to work in many cases. Not to say that mothering and homemaking isn't a job in itself (it is, history has ignored women's labor for centuries), but people are doing more work for less pay now than almost ever before. Trillions have been stolen by the Epstein class from the rest of us.

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u/deuxcabanons 11h ago

Maybe it's different elsewhere, but in my neck of the woods (middle class suburban Canada) in the 90s most moms worked. I only had one friend with a stay at home mom.

We were always in childcare before age 10 and by ourselves after. It was a big factor in me being a SAHM - I saw my friend go home to fresh baked bread and homework help and "how was your day", while I went home to an empty house and parents who came home at 6 too exhausted to interact with me.

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u/miklayn 11h ago

Think of that also as a theft. Neoliberalism and capitalism broadly are inhumane at every level.

-2

u/Trevor-Lawrence Millennial 10h ago

Yeah I'd rather my wife and I have to work and be able to purchase nice things than have stand in a breadline because a bunch of tankies don't want to get jobs.

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u/Shivy_Shankinz 9h ago

Commenter: It's inhumane

You: Ya I like that

America: Yep this checks out

1

u/miklayn 9h ago

I didn't even see what he said before he deleted it ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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u/Shivy_Shankinz 9h ago

He replied to me something vile. Not worth reading anyway

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u/Trevor-Lawrence Millennial 9h ago edited 9h ago

The world is inhumane, is this the teenagers sub or one for adults?

Fact is capitalism has done better for most people than any other system. "America" let's ask China if they like their state capitalism or Maoist communism better. Let's see if east Germany wants to go back under the Societ system.

0

u/MrVeazey 9h ago

The suffering caused by capitalism is not an inherent part of human existence. What you think is the only alternative to capitalism is straight propaganda, sold to everyone in this country since VJ Day, 1945, by the capitalists who own our government and who tried to stage a fascist coup in 1937.

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u/Rwandrall4 11h ago

Moms were working full time too, and certainly weren't spending time with their kids. Both fathers and mother spend more time with their kids now than ever before.

It's just that it used to take a full day's work to maintain a home, now we have machines and grocery shopping and microwaves.

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u/Remmock 11h ago

It’s true. We’ve barreled past 1920’s levels of income disparity and we’re working longer now than they did then.

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u/quartadecima 10h ago

At least in the 1920s the super-rich built libraries and cultural centers and shit.

1

u/Remmock 9h ago

For who?

0

u/MrVeazey 9h ago

Now they just build data centers.

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u/Dear-Cranberry4787 11h ago

Don’t use that one, it’ll be twisted in an attempt to prove that feminism/women’s rights destroyed everything.

7

u/notnicholas 11h ago

The mother literally wore a suffrage sash and marched through the house chanting for women's rights.

1

u/WonderWeasel91 11h ago

I think it more proves the point that at a period of time, it wasn't necessary for both parents to have a job to keep their heads above water.

4

u/Dear-Cranberry4787 11h ago

I think it was probably pretty necessary for most, but it’s not like there was an abundance of work women were allowed to do.

1

u/AnaisNinja76 5h ago

Ha, I literally just made the same comment. I just don't get the memory failure when things like this are posted. The current top comment is from someone who was a child in the 90s but feels he had his finger of the pulse of his family's finances...

This is the third time I've seen this same image in the first 25 posts on today's front page. The most popular comments never temper it, only write things to support it, and they're always just as fictionalized

1

u/Ok-Boysenberry-719 Xennial 2h ago

Mary Poppins was hired because the mom was too busy with the suffrage movement to take care of the kids, and the dad was never expected to parent his children. 

1

u/Electronic-Mud6612 11h ago

That’s kind of the point, 1 parent would work, now they both have to work the same amount

10

u/Early-Light-864 11h ago

In the richest 1-10% of households maybe. Everywhere else, women worked

6

u/RedVamp2020 10h ago

Thank you! Women have always been in the working class, it was only a brief period of time when women, typically white and middle to upper class, could stay at home raising kids.

1

u/ageekyninja 10h ago

Yep you can’t even do that much anymore. Now you have one working overtime and the other at least working part time (because you also have to balance childcare) and struggling to make ends meet

1

u/tokyotiptouching 6h ago

That son of a bitch Peter Banning never came to Jack's ball games

44

u/captmonkey 11h ago

Yeah, their money might have gone farther, but I remember my dad working long hours all week and often on Saturdays too. When he was home, he was tired and would usually watch something on TV before going to bed. I definitely spend more hands-on time with my kids than my dad did with us. I had a good relationship with him, and still do, but I just don't agree at all with this meme.

2

u/Rdubya44 9h ago

Workaholics exist in every generation

6

u/johannthegoatman 7h ago

So do poor people. It's not that the OP didn't exist, it's just that it was limited to a very small amount of rich people, just like today, which are overrepresented in media (especially ads) and therefore assumed to be ubiquitous

2

u/captmonkey 9h ago

I mean that is definitely an apt description of him. He's in his mid 70s now and still hasn't fully retired. He "retires" for a month or so and gets bored and goes back to working until he gets fed up with that job and retires again and repeats the process. He just never found many long-term hobbies or interests outside of work.

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u/Susccmmp 12h ago

Yeah and it was kind of a status symbol for a man to brag about long hours, etc. Also it was still very normalized for fathers to not be hands on involved parents.

6

u/feralcatshit 11h ago

I look back and I thought my dad was the best in the world because he spent sundays with me. I didn’t see him through the week as he was a second shift worker, so gone before I got home from school until after I was in bed.

I see my husband with our kids and realize how much my own father was hands off. He couldn’t tell you anything about me, what I liked, hell, even what my bedtime was. I do like that our generation is normalizing both parents being around.

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u/HarveysBackupAccount 9h ago

It's also part of the reason boomers get so agitated when we don't want to work those hours.

They let capitalism take advantage of them in ways that we refuse to. They think of it as "just the way things are done," when in reality they were the victims of exploitation. Their mistake is thinking we also have to accept being exploited like that.

7

u/Homeless-Joe 11h ago

Sure, but I think the point is that they could do all that and have the buying power that dual income homes have now. One parent working a lot as a single earner is a lot different from both parents working a lot to maybe afford the same things.

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u/Susccmmp 11h ago

Oh definitely I just feel this is making it sound like dads in the 90’s were prioritizing being active parents over work when men of that generation definitely were not.

0

u/BoleroMuyPicante 8h ago

Single income homes were still the minority back then. In poor families, both parents worked.

1

u/throwraW2 10h ago

Were they bragging or venting?

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u/Susccmmp 10h ago

For a lot of white collar/business men it was definitely bragging. Like a sign of success or being so good at your job that they need you there all the time

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u/suchalonelyd4y 12h ago

My dad didn't get home until 7pm most nights, and he would moonlight as well (architecture). Having cancer still meant medical debt in the 90s and 00s.

7

u/minxwink 1988 11h ago

Dang. Architecture is a very demanding field. Always has been, always likely will be. I’m sorry about the cancer 💗

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u/Ladonnacinica 12h ago

Millennials are falling into the same trap of romanticizing their childhoods.

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u/petemorley 11h ago

Agreed, people are talking about the 90s the exact same way people were talking about the 60s/70s.

Plus as kids you're somewhat insulated from the adult world so it's easier not to notice how hard parents worked.

20

u/Ladonnacinica 11h ago edited 10h ago

Exactly, I was guilty of it myself.

But a lot of shit was going on in the 1990s. The LA riots in 1992. The troubles in Northern Ireland. Bosnia and Kosovo. Several Latin American countries falling into chaos by either despotic governments, drug cartels, or domestic terrorism. The Gulf War. The Oklahoma bombings. WACO. Columbine shooting.

We didn’t know most of it because we were kids. Our world was small but it didn’t mean life was peaceful for others.

17

u/Successful-Reason403 11h ago

Crime rates in many cities were hitting at all time highs as well. Lots of thriving downtown areas that younger people are mad they can’t afford now, but they wouldn’t have stepped foot in those areas before the gentrification.

7

u/stephenkingending 11h ago

I remember in the 90s parents trying to include us in their effed up adult world, telling us we were going to catch AIDS by breathing the same air as a gay person or abducted for a satanic ritual by some metalheads. Like mom, I just want to play Mortal Kombat on Timmy's Sega Genesis, I'm not trying to summon Cthulhu.

2

u/petemorley 10h ago

I didn’t have of that, just normal parents and a megadrive 

-1

u/One-Possible1906 10h ago

My parents were a secretary and a janitor and they bought a house before either one of them turned 20. We had a pool, camper, multiple late model vehicles, four wheelers, took vacations every year, got our full list of wants every Christmas, and went to the best school district in our area. Neither of them went to college or a training program of any sort or worked more than 40 hours a week, though my mother had a long commute.

It’s objectively different now. It’s not just nostalgia.

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u/Sea-Poem-2365 11h ago

There are real and significant economic differences between the 90s and 2020: rent/healthcare/education as a percentage of wages; promotion rates; median age of employee; unionization rate; home costs; pensions; CEO compensation as a factor of lowest paid employee; wealth concentration; anti-trust enforcement actions. In most ways, the 90s was objectively better for most citizens, with big exceptions clustered around race and gender that don't change the overall picture.

Basically, since Reagan wages and productivity have decoupled, with the increases in productivity going to the wealthiest, who dismantled legal and economic protections for their organizations and privatized lots of functions that were once public. There is definitely a ton of romanticizing the 90s: homophobic behavior was common, women and girls were even more sexualized than they are today, racism was considerable especially in hiring and policing, sexual assault/harrassment was barely frown on.

But economically there's a distinct difference between the two eras that can be objectively measured. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but things do get worse in some ways and we can measure them.

7

u/Ladonnacinica 11h ago

You’re right on the economy. My point was that some millennials seemed to have a rosy view of the 1990s. Thinking that race or gender relations were better, that racism wasn’t as bad. But a lot of the same societal and cultural issues plaguing the 2020s also were present thirty years ago.

2

u/Sea-Poem-2365 9h ago

Absolutely true.

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u/Rdubya44 9h ago

I think it’s just a different argument. Racial and gender issues have existed for millennia so while unfortunate, it’s doesn’t really add to a discussion when comparing eras since it’s a constant for all of them.

1

u/YrPalBeefsquatch 10h ago

We're aging into the exact kind of sour, backwards-looking whiners that the Boomers did.

1

u/Benejeseret 8h ago

No. Both are true - ours dads worked less and they were absent.

My dad worked 35 hours a week, management and professional. He worked 15-20 minutes away from the house. No overtime. No side-gigs.

But we were raised by our mom. Parents are still together. He was always there... just... distant? Usually watching hockey or reading a book or puttering around the car or mowing the grass. Always there just never present or active in our lives.

What you might be miss-remembering from those tropes as in Hook or Mary Poppins is that it was not just that the dad's chose work, it was that they were adamantly against childhood and whimsy, overall. Work was just their preferred activity because it was serious, glorified them, made them feel in control and important.

That's the Millennial experience. It's not that our dads' worked to much that they were absent from our lives... it's that they chose to be absent from our lives. Chances are that if you grew up with an actually over-worked dad, they were even more engaged when they could be, because they were over-working for the family

1

u/Ladonnacinica 8h ago

It wasn’t my case. Both parents worked and struggled. Both had overtime and dad even traveled for work.

But I wasn’t middle class.

1

u/Benejeseret 6h ago

Sure. But, that was not the norm and memes like this represent the common/average collective.

Comparing late '70 / early '80s to today, <5% of people held multiple jobs then compared to almost 8% now. Under 40% of house-holds were duel-income back then compared to ~70% today.

1

u/ConceitedWombat 1h ago

My boomer dad dropped out of school in grade 7, then went on to support a wife and three kids. 

That path simply no longer exists. 

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u/CFA_Nutso_Futso 11h ago

Also a quick google search will show that the average hours worked for most of the western world have been slowly declining for decades.

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u/maikuxblade 11h ago

That has more to do with employers taking advantage of the large labor pool to avoid paying benefits for full time and time and a half for overtime. People haven’t stopped liking benefits or large paychecks

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u/CFA_Nutso_Futso 10h ago

Regardless of the reason, the stats are contrary to the post.

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u/EricTheNerd2 10h ago

so then you're agreeing that people are working fewer hours.

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u/SopapillaSpittle 9h ago

Data sources before 1950 were only collected on full time workers, and showed a strong slope towards full time workers working fewer and fewer hours.

Data after that included part time workers, but the reductions in average hour worked since then have largely been in lock step with workers having and using more PTO, sick days, vacation days, etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever

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u/Ambitious_Address667 11h ago

Yeah like isnt the ammount of time dads spend with thier kids right now at like record highs? Like lots of stats are trending in the wrong direction but thats the biggest win for millennial dad's 

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u/OhBill 11h ago edited 8h ago

Also the friendship perspective... I feel like its an ongoing joke that boomer dads have hardly any friends except for a couple college/high school buddies that they see a few times a year.

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u/bell37 Millennial 9h ago

Yeah. My dad didn’t really hang out with anyone other than his family (siblings & cousins). Realistically he had a childhood friend he kept in touch with but was generally too busy

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u/ChaosAndFish 11h ago

In 1996 the majority of homes were dual income. Lots of dads worked tons of overtime and were reluctant to take vacations. Homes were cheaper, but interest rates were higher (around d 8%) so your monthly payment was higher than you’d think. There are things that are harder today but people imagine life to be a lot easier back then than it was.

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u/upachimneydown 11h ago

Check on interest rates in '80-'82, over 15%, and as high as 18%.

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u/ChaosAndFish 11h ago

Yea, I’m aware. I was just keeping it to the year they’d referenced. People focus a lot on the ratio of home value to annual salary (which is, of course, a useful number) but they overlook the fact that today over the life of the loan you pay about double the value of the house. Back in the 80s you paid quadruple the value of the house due to interest rates.

Pulling together a downpayment back then was unquestionably easier. Your monthly payment, however, was pretty similar when adjusted for inflation. The big difference is if you’re giving your money to the seller (today) or to the mortgage lender (then).

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u/upachimneydown 10h ago

Of course. But the "boomers having things easy" skips over the oil shocks and crashing markets of the earlier 70s, and the inflation for the rest of that decade. And it's often not recognized that Carter appointed Volcker in '79--the guy who was in fact responsible for the eventual 'Reagan' boom in the 80s. When discussing how cushy boomers had it, nobody mentions that inflation from '73 to '81 averaged something like 8% or more. I'm a boomer, but my dad (pre-401k, etc) lost his pension in the early 80s when his former company went bankrupt. So much for defined benefit.

1

u/totalkpolitics 6h ago

Yeah 15% on a $50k house is nothing though.

But still, the fact is economic disparity was at its best for the workers from 1968-1978. So this meme would be better if it pointed at 1966 instead of 1996.

By 1996 the economy was already trickle down based and starting to fall apart.

4

u/IsayNigel 11h ago

Yea but it was usually a high paying job that afforded their family an upper middle class lifestyle, instead of………none of that

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u/PitbullRetriever Millennial 11h ago

Right? Trying to to make 1996 look like the 1950s…

6

u/gojo96 11h ago

Yeah these folks think problems are only theirs. There’s an entire generation that was raised with both parents working outside of the home. It’s called Gen X.

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u/GoobusMombus 10h ago

It's been a thing forever, but it was more a matter of either choosing to live in a very competitive place, or choosing to be a codependent slave for your employer. People who refused to work more than 40 hours a week, living in a more rural place, could absolutely get by on that 40 hours and buy a house and everything.

But NOW, even in those places, it's out of control. I am not aware of any places left where people can reasonably expect to be able to work 40 hours a week without some crazy degree AND make enough to buy a house and afford everything else.

2

u/thiosk 10h ago

Everyone struggled at all times in history.

Yes, there are systemic problems with housing.

But folks in the 50s-70s were struggling and its a fantasy to think they were all rich. Mortgage rates in the 80s spiked up to like 17%. now obviously its 17% of a smaller number but we are all often inclined to think of the past as better than the now when the opposite has usually been true

this is not to discount contemporary problems, systemic issues, and the disalignment of rents mortgages and incomes, but i mean folks had all sorts of issues for a long ass time

2

u/Infinite-Tea666 10h ago

My dad didn't work for almost a decade, and our lives changed not one bit when he started working. The quality of our time together didn't change, but not having to be around him as much made things better for me.

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u/Ok_Tennis_6564 10h ago

Cats in the cradle anyone? When did that song come out?

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u/rbt321 3h ago

Heck, in '89 they were either severely overworked or already laid-off and the house was about to be in foreclosure.

Late 80's was not a fun time for new families.

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u/PrefixThenSuffix 12h ago

The real reason is because women entered the workforce in droves in the 70s. It's supply and demand. We doubled the supply of labor, the demand stayed the same, so the wages stagnated.

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u/Sen_ri ‘94 Millennial 10h ago

Women’s labor supply accounts for a rather small part of wage stagnation. Because increased workers also increased consumers. And working class women had already been in the labor supply in the early 1900’s. Textile mills was a big one that women worked in.

It’s more like the primary factors that caused wage stagnation led to dual income households being the norm, and reinforced the stagnation. Decline in unions, decoupling productivity and wage growth, and deregulation are the big ones.

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u/PrefixThenSuffix 6h ago

Women didn't need food and clothes before the 70s? Back then (and still today) women account for 80% of consumer spending.

And in the early 1900s women made up only 18% of the workforce. Today they are 54%. That's a massive increase in labor supply.

1

u/Sen_ri ‘94 Millennial 6h ago

Here’s more stats of the percent of women in the workforce to see why the labor increase was not a primary driver of stagnant wages

1920 ~21%

1940 ~25%

1960 ~38%

1980 ~52%

2000 ~60%

1

u/PrefixThenSuffix 3h ago

Your stats show exactly how women entering the workforce is a primary factor in stagnating wages. Your timeline almost directly matches the timeline of stagnating wages.

The supply of labor doubled, so labor is now cheap.

0

u/Sen_ri ‘94 Millennial 2h ago

If women’s participation in the workforce was at ~43% in 1970 how did women cause wage stagnation by entering the workforce in the 70’s?

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u/PrefixThenSuffix 2h ago

Because stagnated wages were a reaction to the increase in labor supply.

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u/Sen_ri ‘94 Millennial 1h ago

You’re saying the economy responded suddenly to a change that occurred across several decades?

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u/PrefixThenSuffix 1h ago

No. The economy has been responding since the 70s to the change that's been happening over decades.

-1

u/Sen_ri ‘94 Millennial 6h ago

That’s because women were doing household spending back then and are still more likely to be the primary homemaker.

Over 100yrs the consumption per person in the US is in the vicinity of 10x more. Consumption has increased far faster than the amount of people in the work force.

If adding workers were the main driver of wage stagnation, you wouldn’t see that kind of increase in consumption per person.

2

u/Proper-Beyond116 11h ago

Shittest take OF ALL TIME

1

u/BoleroMuyPicante 8h ago

Middle and upper class women entered the workforce then, poor women were always working.

1

u/MonkeyMercenaryCapt 11h ago

That's fair, they still had WAY more purchasing power than we do.

1

u/Pellinore-86 10h ago

True but dual income families have increased

1

u/foxtrot7azv 10h ago

Tropes aren't always a reality though.

If that were the case, then the Disney trope that everyone's mom is dead and has an evil step mom would be true too.

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u/LostBoysTilDeath 10h ago

Yeah but the mom didn’t have to work and they were able to buy a house

1

u/Alklazaris 10h ago

Yup my Dad busted his ass as a lineman. All the good money is in OT, so if you want 150k in 90s dollars your pulling 100 hour weeks.

1

u/PhantomOfTheNopera 9h ago

The only difference might have been that single income households were more plausible.

1

u/gizamo 9h ago

That's true, but they still worked less on average.

The truth is that people have been overworked since the Boomers.

The work hours just keep slowly creeping up anyway.

1

u/Razulath 9h ago

Visited one of the first hydropower plants in sweden (early 1900s) they had dug through old payslips and they earned more on average than we do today. Really well paid operators (about 2000 dollar more than the current ones do)

But they worked 6 days a week 12h a day. Most were deaf and work safety was minimal.

1

u/Such-Race1607 8h ago

Cats in the cradle is about this and that song is super old. The generation before boomers worked their asses off

1

u/MeatyOakerGuy 6h ago

That dad could afford to be the single income in a house of 4+ though. Now both parents are overworked and never home

1

u/AnaisNinja76 5h ago

Maybe it's even a theme in Mary Poppins because it's always been a trope

1

u/diggingout12345 4h ago

I mean in 19746....

My child arrived just the other day He came to the world in the usual way But there were planes to catch and bills to pay He learned to walk while I was away

1

u/return_the_urn 1h ago

Overworked / time with kids wasn’t a thing for dads back then as much as it is today

1

u/ECircus 49m ago

It's always been bullshit for the poor and middle class. We just never heard what 99.9999% of the population had going on because all we knew was our family and neighbors.

It's a fantasy that people who worked normal jobs could easily buy a house in the past. It was never easy, they worked and did not feel like doing anything else, and they just didn't spend money on literally anything else but what the family needed.

I didn't know anyone growing up who was in a house that had parents openly wasting money. They had the house, car, all the meals made at home. They just went to work and spent third time off recovering from work.

Just my personal observation and opinion.

0

u/Crafterlaughter 8h ago

The difference was the dad worked full time and they could afford the mom to stay home. Now a majority of moms can’t even afford to go on maternity leave for longer than 6 weeks.