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Notes -
Or, more specifically, the norm of both parents working at jobs that do not allow children to be present, and requiring childcare until they are nearly adults.
There are plenty of traditional arrangements featuring what one might call a small scale women's cooperative growing and processing food and textiles, and I'm not exactly sure what the arrangement for babies and small children usually looked like, but it was almost certainly not the current model where three or so women tend them full time in one building, while their mothers do their own work for 8 hrs straight far enough away they can't stop back in and visit/nurse them periodically. This is very convenient if you're trying to run a factory or something.
Now that preparing food and textiles at a small scale is not so essential, I would like to see a resurgence of child tolerant work that is actually productive -- work from home seems a bit more flexible. I'm not exactly sure what that would look like, but I find it kind of absurd that my own job is all working with children all day, but there's no possible way to bring my own children if daycare falls through. This is certainly convenient for employers, but at the expense of other values, like encouraging family formation.
Ideally there would be some tolerance for kids in the workplace. Working from home may fix this, but presuming a work environment where the parents need to be in the office, I don't see the issue with having a creche or creche-like area that is near at hand. Perhaps have a 'parents' section within the office space to keep potentially noisy children to an area that causes the least disruption.
Meetings, where serious discussion needs to take place uninterrupted, only take up a portion of the typical office workers activities. Granted some office work requires a high degree of concentration and there should absolutely also be 'quiet spaces' dedicated for this type of work.
None of the above would be perfect though. Having kids in the workplace would reduce net-efficiency of office workers on some level, at the benefit of better work/life/family balance.
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