Having children has in recent years become increasingly problematic, despite its

centrality to the human condition. Caring for and raising children has not been

adequately integrated into the social shifts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

in particular the fact that women earning money now requires them to commit time

away from home. When women are housewives time devoted to children is not

independent from their other duties. Now that more women are gaining an education

and joining the paid labour force, time devoted to child care has become a major

discrete cost of raising children. While this has markedly increased the cost to women

of having children, there has been inadequate compensatory adjustment in either the

public or the private sphere. The labour market has made little accommodation to

women’s unequal responsibility for children and, while women have gained some

domestic gender equity by unilaterally reducing the time they devote to housework,

they have not applied the same strategy to child care. This means the sex revolution

has stalled mid-cycle. It has foundered on the issue of who takes care of the

children.