OK, with much respect for an influential, brilliant scholar in Japanese studies, I will take this bait. https://twitter.com/johnwtreat/status/1251304583890001923

People are complaining about their children being at home not because they don’t love their children, and not because they don’t want their children, and certainly not because they never considered that caregiving can be unpleasant.

They are also not complaining because they are suffering more than others, or because they’re uniquely oppressed.

They are complaining for two (big) reasons. First, and most important, childcare (like other forms of caregiving) is labor. It’s grueling, exhausting labor - no matter how much you love your children.

We usually have systems in place to pool this labor (childcare, play dates) or share it (grandparents, babysitters). This is what enables many of us to hold *different* full time jobs, such as being professors of Japanese studies.

Doing both jobs at once is a serious labor problem - and the burden falls unevenly on women, mostly young, who, in the academic context, are often assistant professors.

Second, this is not a normal situation. Kids are scared and sad. They can’t go to the playground. They can’t see their friends. And they’re too young to really process it. That means misery for everyone - it’s not typical childcare.

And to speak to the larger point - is childbearing/childrearing really an individual choice? What would happen if we all *chose* not to do it?

As a feminist historian, it seems to be that childbearing often involves some degree coercion, precisely because it can be an extremely unpleasant form of labor.

Sometimes you can see this clearly - for example, the household system in Tokugawa Japan. Or restrictions on abortion in the contemporary United States.

And even when it’s not coerced, the labor of motherhood, in particular, is minimized and concealed through the constant invocation of “love.” As in, “If you love your children, it isn’t work.” Etc etc etc