You have to remember that you are living in a bubble, for most people, splitting the responsibility of childcare is not logistically possible.

The main issue with having kids, regardless of how care-giving is split among parents, is that they need almost full-time care for the first few years of their lives.

Most people are still forced to work typical “9 to 5” sort of jobs, I’m deeply sorry for their burden, but making society shift away from that will take a long time.

So splitting care could be an issue if the schedule of both parents overlap. Ideally they’d both work from home. Less ideally, they could afford to hire a nanny or be able to rely on their parents and be able to modify their work schedules by 3–4 hours.

In reality… this is not usually possible.

Rather than both parents dropping their 9 to 5 job, it’s economically preferable that one of them goes all in on the job (to cover some of the losses) and the other one focuses on child care and takes a part-time job or some remote gigs.

The question of which parent that should be is one open for debate. Usually couples end up deciding it’s better for the mother to stay with the kid[s]. I could see plenty of arguments as to why the father could be an equally good or even better choice.

But the reality remains, in the vast majority of cases, one of the parents has to sacrifice their careers.

The idea of “splitting work” is a good one, in the economically comfortable position where you and I stand. Where we can afford to set our own schedules, have savings that allow us to reduce our workload and experience & skills that give us a lot of bargaining power.

But that’s simply not the case for most people, not even in Western Europe and the US… even more so in less developed countries, where some people are literally 2 or 3 paychecks away from extreme poverty.