In many families, both parents now work full time.

In the past, usually only the father worked and the mother stayed at home with the children. Today in many families both parents work full time. In my opinion, this change has more advantages than disadvantages.

Firstly, two salaries give the family a much better life. The parents can pay for a bigger flat, for good food, for extra lessons and for holidays. If one parent loses his job, the family still has money from the other parent, so the situation is safer.

Secondly, it is good for women. Before, many women stayed at home even if they studied at university, and they were completely dependent on their husband. Now a woman can use her education, build her career and have her own money, which is much more fair.

On the other hand, there is one big problem: time. When both parents come home at seven o'clock, they are tired, and they have only one or two hours with their children before bedtime. Small children spend all day in a kindergarten or with a grandmother, and some of them feel that their parents are always busy.

In conclusion, although working parents have less time for their family, I believe this development is positive because it gives financial security and gives women the same opportunities as men.

Households in which both parents work full time are now the norm in most developed countries. I regard this as a positive development, although the arrangements surrounding it have not kept pace with it.

The clearest gains are financial and personal. Two incomes provide resilience: a redundancy or an illness that would once have been catastrophic becomes manageable, which matters more as employment has grown less secure. For women in particular the change is fundamental. Economic independence determines whether a person can leave an unhappy or dangerous relationship, and a woman who has remained in the labour market retains earning capacity, pension contributions and options that a long absence removes permanently. Children also grow up seeing both parents as workers and both as carers, which shapes what they assume is normal.

The difficulty is time, and it is genuine. Two full-time jobs remove roughly forty hours a week that were previously available for domestic work and childcare, and nothing has replaced them. Households absorb the shortfall through paid childcare where they can afford it, through grandparents where they are available, and through exhaustion where neither applies. Research consistently finds this shortfall is not shared evenly, with women continuing to perform the larger part of household work on top of full-time employment.

It is also worth noting that this is decreasingly a choice. Housing costs in particular now assume two incomes, so families are not selecting between one earner and two; they are meeting a requirement.

In conclusion, I consider the trend positive, since independence and financial security are substantial goods. The problem is that working hours, childcare provision and the division of domestic labour have not adjusted to a change that happened decades ago.

Two-earner households are now standard across most of the developed world. I regard the change itself as clearly positive — but almost all of the harm attributed to it comes from the fact that nothing else changed with it, and separating those two things is what makes the question answerable.

What has been gained is substantial. Financial resilience is the least of it, though it matters: a household with two incomes survives a redundancy or an illness that would once have been ruinous, which is increasingly relevant as employment has become less secure. Far more important is what economic independence means for the person who previously did not have it. Whether someone can leave a failing or abusive relationship is largely determined by whether they can support themselves, and a decade out of the labour market removes earning capacity, seniority and pension contributions that are never fully recovered. Children raised in such households also grow up without the assumption that earning and caring are allocated by sex, which is not a small inheritance.

The cost is time, and the arithmetic is unforgiving: roughly forty hours a week that were previously spent on domestic work and childcare have been transferred to employment, and no institution absorbed them. The working day did not shorten, school hours still assume an adult available in the afternoon, and public childcare in most countries covers a fraction of what is needed at a price that consumes much of a second salary. Households therefore meet the shortfall privately — through grandparents, through paid help, or through sheer exhaustion — and the evidence is consistent that the residue falls disproportionately on women, who take on what is often called the second shift.

There is a further consequence that is rarely stated plainly. When most households acquired a second income, the money did not simply raise living standards; a large part of it was bid into housing. Prices rose to what dual-income families could pay, and were then capitalised into what everyone must pay. The result is that two salaries have become the entry requirement rather than the upgrade, and a family wanting one parent at home frequently cannot choose it. A change that began as an expansion of options has partly closed the option it replaced.

My verdict, then, is positive but pointed. The movement of both parents into paid work reflects a genuine and hard-won expansion of freedom, and I would not reverse it. What deserves criticism is a forty-year institutional lag — working hours, school timetables, childcare and the domestic division of labour all still configured for a household that has largely ceased to exist.