If I believed this assumption, I would not be where I am right now.

EDITED IN 2026: See an update at the bottom of the post for some context!

Common assumption:

“A mother who cares for her own children is isolated in her house with them all day, the monotony broken only by swim class and music lessons.”

Common corollary:

“A parent (mother or father) who works to provide for the family’s material needs is away from the home and the children all day.”

Common conclusion made by folks who believe it’s natural, normal, and right for mothers to care for their own children:

“It’s natural, normal, and right for moms to be isolated in their houses with their own kids all day, the monotony broken only by swim class and music lessons.”

Common conclusion from the corollary:

“It’s natural, normal and right for dads to be away from the home and children all day.”

Challenge the first common assumption and the rest falls to pieces — even in the worldview that sees mothers-as-primary-caregiver as a preference in most cases where it’s possible.

And why should all of that hold?  It hasn’t always.  The “farm family” paradigm didn’t fit that assumption.  The “nomadic family” didn’t fit that assumption.

In other words, it takes a short memory and a simple mind to look to the 1950s for an idea of the “traditional family structure.”  Why not look back before the Industrial Revolution?  Why not look back, even, before the Agricultural Revolution?   I don’t mean that we should become farmers or nomads, but that we should look at our lives and think how to structure our family roles, at least if we seek what’s natural, normal, and right for human beings (all of us—mother, father, children, elders) to thrive.

Women care for babies, sure—look at our bodies and you can see that that’s what we’re evolved to do, while we have babies.  But are we evolved to be totally in charge of older children?  In a simplistic pre-agricultural family model, women might be (mostly) in charge of the care of babies and the supervision and training of daughters, not necessarily just their own daughters. Men might be in charge of the supervision/training of sons, not necessarily just their own sons.

Surely there was a lot more diversity of family economics in the pre-agricultural world than this simplistic model captures!  But in any case, not just because it is simplistic, this isn’t what happens today, for a lot of good reasons.

It is superficially impossible to return to this older (and hypothetical) tradition.  Modern schooling and even homeschooling is at odds with it.  And Dad can’t bring his boys (or girls) to the office to start their apprenticeships as fresh-faced young patent attorneys, nor can he ask his employer to flout child labor laws and let them learn a manual trade at his side.  Besides, children in a complex society have the opportunity to live a life that’s different from their parents, which is not something I want to give up!

But we can return to it in spirit by following a key principle:  Question, confront, and minimize modes of thought and behavior that isolate us.  Replace them with mode of thought and behaviors that integrate us.

Must our hypothetical breadwinner Dad be isolated from his family in a cubicle or a shop ALL DAY?  Can the family come back together for lunch?  Surely many such dads can take care of some of the “homey” responsibilities, e.g. do the grocery shopping with the kids in the evening (a tradition in our home)?

Can our hypothetical Mom-working-at-home share her daily work with other sets of moms-and-kids during the day?  Can older kids shadow Dad, working with him and learn from him when he does home-work on weekends and evenings?  Later can those older kids work with Mom and/or Dad doing practical service work in the community?

What else is possible in an essentially one-earner family?

UPDATE IN 2026:  I hope it’s obvious that the assigned gender roles I wrote about here came about in a particular context of blog discourse!  Writing them today, much of the last bit could refer simply to parent-at-home and parent-breadwinner.  At the time, though, there was a strong element of the homeschooling blogosphere that took it for granted that homeschooling was essentially a job for mothers.  I was writing within that atmosphere and pushing back only gently on a lot of the assumptions that came along with it, trying not to come across as disrespectful of choices and of faiths.