In a study that seems almost designed to send a lot of people off in a defensive spin, the Institute for Social and Economic Research has released findings that stay-at-home mothers* tend to be less happy on average than women who have income-bearing work. Much less happy.
Of course, for those who think a woman’s place is in the home, this news is only relevant in the P.R. department. The idea that women should be “happy” performing their womanly functions only arose because of the demands made by feminists. So for your social conservatives, the idea is that women are made to mop, we’re all happier being ourselves, ergo, women are happiest pushing mops. Bona fide scientific evidence against this is mostly an attack on their P.R., not on any fundamental belief about women’s roles.
More problematic is what this means for people who accept that women have plenty of other roles to play in the world other than stay-at-home-mother, but nonetheless posit that it’s just another choice like any other, and they’re all perfectly fine and equal and don’t ask too many hard questions about why, if stay-at-home-parenting is a delight like any other, do men reject the opportunity? Yes, yes, there are men who stay at home—93,000 fathers compared to 5.4 million mothers in 2003. It’s kind of embarrassing, in the face of those statistics, to even get close to suggesting that the gendered nature of housewifery has changed one iota.
It’s not surprising that staying at home is correlated with lower levels of happiness, and it has nothing to do with devaluing the work or anything like that. The work is isolating, for one thing, and human beings are social animals. But I think it’s more than that—dependence can be debilitating to the ego, and so can doing work that is generally undervalued. While I have no doubt that a fraction of stay-at-home mothers are genuinely appreciated by their husbands and feel independent and valued, I suspect most families that resort to this model of family stick with the old-fashioned sexist frame that undervalues women and robs them of financial autonomy. After all, if you don’t bring in the money, you have to ask for it, and again, while there’s no doubt a fraction of husbands out there who are not going to abuse the power that comes with being the sole breadwinner, human nature dictates that power is corrupting and most men with that power will be less than perfectly benevolent dictators. Again, if these generalizations don’t fit you, calm down. Averages almost by definition require individual variation.
The survey found that part time workers with children did the best, probably because part time workers both had some financial autonomy and better-valued work outside the home, but also had more time freed up to attend to the plethora of at-home responsibilities that don’t dry up just because you get a job.
*I prefer the term “housewife”, which reminds people that men are in fact involved in the decision to pull a woman from the public workforce and keep her doing valuable, underpaid, and dependent work at home. It also gets us out of the media-preferred catfight “mommy wars” realm, which makes the staying at home vs. working thing sound like a battle between women that doesn’t involve men at all. But I understand and respect that some women would prefer to have themselves called stay-at-home mothers than housewives.
83 Responses to “Rethinking the happy homemakers”
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My mom was a quasi-SAHM for a long part of my childhood, in that she only worked crappy evening jobs when my dad was at home when she worked at all. She also had complete control of the money; my dad handed her an envelope with a paycheck in it and she took care of everything down to signing the thing. There was a time in the 80’s where he could not have honestly told you how much money he took home every week, and if he wanted something pricey he had to ask first because there was no way for him to hide purchases from her. This was standard operating procedure for families at that time and place. It seemed to make for a pretty good power balance and she probably could have stayed at home indefinitely if we’d stayed in that close-knit urban neighborhood.
But as soon as we got to the suburbs the loneliness drove her straight back to school and finally to work. Of course, the place was also more expensive to live in so she needed a better job than her normal cleaning gigs, but it was very clear that the lure of office work as opposed to assembly line work or housecleaning was the opportunity to socialize.
Here’s sort of a tangentially related item from an email that I get every Friday:
Kinda follows rather nicely, actually…
I was home with my children when they were little, and was a househusband. The combination of child care and housework is quite frustrating because they make conflicting demands on one’s time. Also, housework is generally uncreative, except for cooking, of course, and involves a low level of skill. Two interesting reads: Stuart Ewen’s CAPTAINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: ADVERTIZING AND THE ROOTS OF THE CONSUMER CULTURE, and Harry Braverman’s LABOR AND MONOPOLY CAPITAL. Braverman describes the loss of skill in housework at the turn of the twentieth century. Ewen shows how the deskilling of housework and its replacement with technology involved a change of the image of woman as desirable marriage prospect. Formerly a woman could market her skills in cooking, preparing reserves of food, cleaning the house under primitive conditions. This meant that women had a real role as producers in society. As the twentieth century advanced, women had to use their sexual attractiveness to attract husbands. Cosmetics became acceptable among respectable middle-class women. Formerly they had been the tools of the upper classes, and of prostitutes.
We can see the origins of the sexist notion of the woman as plaything and sex toy in this.
I know a lot of SAHMs feel denigrated, but I have to say, I hear a lot more vitriol directed the other way, and I think that part of it just has to be envy and disappointment. The SAHMs who *are* happy don’t make snide comments about how important it is to spend time with your children, etc., but the unhappy ones can be incredibly nasty about it.
I think one of the worst comments ever made to my face was from a friend who asked–completely serious–”who raised me,” since my mother worked and still does. I said, obviously, that my parents did; she said, “No, who *really* raised you? A nanny?” We don’t talk anymore.
So, yeah, on the whole I’m not that surprised. Given the tripe that’s used to make women who don’t want to be at home think they’re required to be (”Biblical womanhood,” general shaming, even aggressive varieties of attachment parenting), it only stands to reason that many women are very unhappy about the situation, or they wouldn’t need to be convinced that it’s “the right thing to do.”
Why is it always an either/or? I stayed sane by working part time and going to school when my kids were little and I was home much of the time. One large barrier to that was finding part-time child care.
What we really need is more flexible hours or part-time work and more childcare options to support that for BOTH parents, not just mothers. Many couples would split the work/childcare more reasonably if they could work 30 hour weeks each.
I think you nailed it with the dependence being the major factor. How can anyone deal with the insecurity that tomorrow you could potentially be without incme?
good god, Molly. Reminds me of a former friend of mine who said, “Yeah, well, at least I work” when I said something about being home with kids.
She wasn’t a mother, so I don’t know where her defensiveness came from. I just said, “Oh believe me, this is work,” and that’s the last thing I said to her except for “Good-bye” before we hung up.
This is just more patriarchal bullshit. The fact that we continue to frame the childcare/work debate in terms of how women have to bend over backwards to manage childrearing — whether by giving up an income or being the one to find the daycare — keeps the focus on the “mommy wars” and saves us from having to change the fundamental way we manage work and family and pleasure in this society. There are two things: work, and family. And women are in charge of managing family. And whichever way they choose to manage it, they’re doing it wrong.
One more example in the infinite number of how women are responsible for everything, and have authority over nothing.
I just wrote an essay about the Mommy fetish and how we fetishize the sacrifices moms make so we don’t have to pay them in actual money.
And Molly I agree about the SAHMs being more viscous. If you don’t give them proper respect for their sacrifice, you’re demeaning their choice. But really- they are doing the same thing the rest of us are doing (raising kids and taking care of a house) without the added pressure and time constraints of a paying job. I’m not giving anyone an extra special pat on the head for that.
I think Molly is right, there is a lot of vitriol coming from housewives, and it’s probably due to the fact that they hate wiping baby asses all day and don’t want to admit it. I’ve had people tell me my (future) children will turn out to be criminals because (if we have any) I don’t plan to stay home with them. By that logic, I should also be a criminal because my mom did not stay home with me. Annoying.
Which is why I support rearranging the economy so that it’s possible for everybody to work part time, or at least less than they do.
Kyso, your parents’ model sounds a lot more like what I am familiar with. Not that I don’t believe that the average family isn’t like that, but it is still shocking to me that non-ultra conservative families wouldn’t have that attitude. There have been times in my marriage where I have been the primary breadwinner, and times when my husband has been, but at no time did either of us feel like we had more ownership of the money coming in or more control over how it was spent. It just went in the pot, and figured out together how it would be spent (with some equal amount that we could each spend that we didn’t have to be answerable to the other one too).
A lot of commenters are saying that SAHM are the nastier, but as a neutral observer (childless until next week or so when I am due), the nastiness really seems to go both wasy (there seems like quite a bit of SAHM dislike here. Like saying they are “doing the same thing the rest of us are doing but without a job” just does not seem fair. I watched my mother nearly lose her mind with the demands of being at home. There is the never getting a break from the constant demands of kids, the total lack of respect as people assume you are not too bright or too interesting. Also, if your kids are in your home all day instead of at day care, that is a lot more mess produced in your house. Which is not to say that SAHM have it harder than other people, just that it is not that simple as to say they are doing less work than parents who work outside the home.
I think our plan is for me to cut back to part time after the baby is due (I have a wonderful woman boss who is being very accomodating), and my husband (he’s a prof) is rearranging his schedule so that he can work from home half the day. We’ll see how that works.
Okay, Red Queen. What is it about YOUR comment that was not nasty to SAHMs, again? Damn, but those SAHMs are VICIOUS! Because no SAHM has ever heard, “But what do you do all day?” from a mother who gets paid to work outside the home.
One answer is, “I do what you pay your child care people to do, and since you find it valuable enough to pay someone to do it, I trust you won’t denigrate me for doing it.”
Why is it always an either/or?
Well, there was a distinct difference between women who worked, full or part time, and women who had no income-bearing employment. So why the distinction? I’d say because it does exist.
That said, we could probably erase the distinctions by making housewifery a job like any other. For instance, if it was paid, which sound ridiculous but is not, if we were willing to put our minds to it. If housewives had access to childcare—one of the reasons that children can tax one’s personal happiness so much is they are very emotionally draining, and everyone deserves a break. If there was vacation time and other benefits. We don’t treat housewives like everyone else, no matter what some people might defensively say, and it’s showing in their average happiness.
I bet we could remake the tax system so that people couldn’t have dependent spouses anymore but had to claim their spouses as employees, and pay them a minimum wage.
There’s a strange conversation going in men’s circles also. I’ve heard it from men who have a job outside of the house, and their wives are SAHMs.
The home is her office, for lack of a better word, and the mom/wife is the boss. Whatever goes on there, from the decorating, to the children, to the sock drawer is her pervue. These men I mention, are feeling that they go to a place of work, where they are an employee with a boss who has the final say. Then, when coming home, they are again at a place of work, with a boss who has the final say.
Whenever I hear this, I always wonder what kind of marriage they were hoping for? I should ask that sometime, of either side. I wonder if the answer will show some kind of insecurity or whether it was partnership to begin with or a power struggle?
While I go to school my wife stays home during the day, then works at night (though only 3 hours at a good rate) while I look after our daughter. It’s crazy and more than a little stupid.
I was raised by a stay-at-home dad, and that worked pretty well. He was forced by my brother and I to take over cooking (long and humorous story there… another time), and worked from home. A great arrangement all around, though he missed the social contact. Still does, as he’s still working from home but doesn’t usually have my brother or me around for company.
Housewives are like house-elves!
Ya know, the ones in Harry Potter?
There was Dobby, who was abused by the Malfoys, but even after he left, he didn’t want to just find a nice family, he wants to be paid, and door after door was slammed on him as he was told that the point of an house-elf is that you don’t pay them!
There was Winky, who does seem to love taking care of the Crouch family, who is cold to her.
There is Stockholm-ish Kreacher, set in his ways.
In the HP world, house-elves, whether they like it or not, are forcefully bound to their houses by magic, and they have no right to leave, or use wands.
In the last book, Dumbledore derided Voldemort’s view of the house-elves, that because they want to care for people, doesn’t make them lesser being. …and it is the wickedness of wizards that have taken advantage of the house elves’s kindness.
The Patriarchy is wicked;
- Whenever the natives of a country is so soft-hearted as to not have a capitalist society yet, they are called primitive. When the European party came down with scurvy, the natives of North America taught them the cure, and then the native’s land was stolen.
- The black slaves could have killed their white owners, the way my Hans ancestor did one moon festival long ago. They didn’t have that revolution, it could be because it’s difficult, physically, or difficult emotionally. It is a harsh thing to kill someone. It could be partly the result of brainwashing that made it hard for the black slaves to kill their white owners when the white owners have no qualms, or maybe, they have the decency their owners have lost to the corrupting influence of power.
- Women: It is a good thing to care, but the patriarchy has taken advantage of that, corrupted that. Even sexual intimacy has been corrupted, the patriarchy doesn’t view it as an act of sharing, it is the women ‘giving up’.
In the patriarchy, nothing beautiful can thrive, there is no room for anyone but those with power and the ruthlessness and apathy required to maintain it. If you were ever so primitive, so foolish, so /soft/ as to be concern for anyone other than yourself, you will be used.
Unfortunately, in this corrupted world, it is necessary for the oppressed to /fight/, asking politely isn’t enough. I think, in addition to bringing down the patriarchy though, we should also aim to bring back what the patriarchy has corrupted. Nourish the needy, /enable choice/.
I’m for social welfare as well as feminism, because it is the decent thing to do, and because it is connected. Children needs to be care for, and a depressed mother trapped in, or an absent father weighted down by work, is not fair to all of them. Daycare should be provided, but it should NOT be the only thing available. We NEED a higher minimum wage, and less work hours. Less work hours for EVERYONE, or parents will be discriminate against. …and hey, maybe the single people will use their spare hours to volunteer.
Marriage is a legal contract, perhaps, unless stated in a pre-nup agreement, any income is divided between the two of them? The housewife does do work, the problem is, the work has no guarantee compensation
Amen to that.
It’s hard enough to find part time work, but part time child care is damn near impossible to find. The day cares provide either a few hours worth of “Mother’s Morning Out” from 9:00 to 12:00 or full day care, which will eat a part time paycheck, and will probably exceed it if multiple children are involved.
So hang on, who performs all this childcare for those happy working mothers? It’s other women. Underpaid, undervalued women. Caring for children is an undervalued role whether you’re paying for it or not. It’s ridiculous, really; like working mums are buying their freedom to get away from kids and earn some serious money - buying it from another woman, who now gets saddled with kids and earns shitty money.
Childcare isn’t feminist. Feminism is when you make men take as much responsibility for their own children as women do.
I’m going to weigh in as a SAHM here. First, I know that SAHMs can be vicious, but so can working moms. Believe me, I’ve heard it.
Second, I completely believe this study. I love my kid and I know I’m making the right choice for my family. But I also think I’m missing out on something because for me, my child is a job. I think his father (who really does do an awesome amount of housework and childcare) gets more pure pleasure out of him. For me, childcare is about making sure I’m talking to him enough for language development and reading enough for pre-reading skills and walking around enough and spending enough time outside and eating the right foods and . . . If I want my child to have something or experience something then I’m responsible for it because most of the time I’m all he has. I think I lose some of the “just have fun” factor his father has. The other factor is lack of happiness is that where my success used to be measured in dollar amounts and other easily judged empirical data, now there’s no measure. How can I know that I’m a success? Maybe that will be easier when he starts school (at which point I’ll be working again anyway) but right now, I have no simple evidence that I’m doing a good job. And I think people need that.
Third. while I don’t worry about the power balance in my relationship (like Kyso’s mom, I’ve always controlled the money, and in the end I’m just a much more agressive, type-A, take control sort of person than my husband) there’s still a basic unfairness to this arrangement. It’s not really fair that I get to see every milestone and smile and my husband has to miss 35-40 hours a week of that. And it’s not fair that my job is the same for 24 hours a day and my husband gets to go do something different five days a week. For the first six months, we really struggled with resenting each other. It’s better now - we had a discussion about it and agreed that it sucked for both of us in some way and we had to remember that. But agreeing to respect each other’s pain doesn’t change the fact that this isn’t ideal for either of us.
Forth, I may end up being the best mom on the planet. I may provide gourmet meals for my whole family. But nothing will ever convince me that there is any reason I should find cleaning satisfying on any level. And anyone who says otherwise is either obsessive compulsive or lying.
Um, wow. As a woman who works from home, I’ve got to say I get a lot more vitriol from those who work outside the home than I’ve heard from other SAHMs. Now, granted, I’m in a slightly different position in that I generate my own income, just at home rather than outside, but I’ve never said to someone “Well, who’s raising your kids?” or been obnoxious about the privilege I have, being able to stay home.
No one *forced* me to stay home. I chose it. It’s not sunshine and lollipops all the time (and it’s certainly easier now that the kids are at school — gives me more time to work), but it was my choice and I enjoy it. My husband happens to have greater earning potential than me, due to choices we made in college (I was on the teaching track, found it wasn’t for me, and flailed around trying to figure out what to do next…) so it makes more sense for him to work outside the home than it does for me to. If it were the other way around, he’d probably still work, because he doesn’t enjoy dealing with the kids all day, and that’s fine by me; not everyone is good with kids 24/7.
Look at it this way. In the current economy, it’s really a luxury to be able to stay home and not work at all. *All* of the SAHMs I know (and I know a lot, because my job is sewing baby slings and the community that uses them skews SAHM) are able to do so only because their spouse makes enough money for them to be able to do so. If they don’t, then the mom works, too, whether she’d rather be at home or not. I think that your characterization of women who are at home and also appreciated by their mates as “a fraction” of those who are not is pretty far off-base, given financial realities. You really have to want to stay home to make it work, and it can take a lot of sacrifice if the spouse’s income isn’t enough, and both partners have to agree that it’s best for the household. I would guess that the patriarchal “You’re staying home because I said so and want to dominate you” crowd is by far the smaller fraction, rather than the reverse.
But what do I know — I’m just a SAHM who talks with a lot of other SAHMs :/
Thene, you seem to be buying into the notion still that working dads are orthogonal to childcare–that if a woman who works outside the home (SAHMs are “working mums”, for fuck’s sake) hires out childcare, why, it’s her choice and her husband isn’t involve at all. Nobody points out that he benefits from it.
Women with jobs outside the home who do the “Oh, you don’t work, do you” thing are agreeing with the patriarchal notion that childrearing isn’t real work and isn’t valuable; only things men are supposed to do have value. And, just as many SAHMs are insecure, many non-SAHMs are. If you have guilt because you feel that you’re “supposed to be” home with your children full-time, it can be annoying to see somebody else doing that.
We do have a tension around deserving. Not just with the stay at home wives and working childless women, but with the men.
People want a sort of socialism when it comes to subsidizing stay at home wives in the form of raises and better consideration at layoffs. Ironically, these are often the more conservative people who would argue against government supported child care and health care and so forth. Women who work, especially if they are childless or married with working husband, take the brunt of losses because people figure they can take it, while the true breadwinners need the prizes and promotions. I see it everyday.
Also, there can be an arrogance of parents that think that they should have flex time, yet are angry when the ones who are on call, working more hours than them or achieving more get more. They think there should be a prorate in raises for them having children like they get a tax writeoff for a child. In a meritocracy, it’s often going to be the one who can devote more time to their work and education that will achieve more.
This isn’t so much about a cat fight. It’s about real discrimination.
See, and the patriarchal system has us arguing with one another, here, on a board where all of us (well, except for our favorite troll visitors) agree that women need choices, opportunities, and freedom equal to men’s. And even that statement is problematic, because men are the default, and women need “as much as” them.
Patriarchy. Hate it.
It still disguises the real question here: How do we, as a society, manage child-rearing and home chores and earning power and health care and — holy toledo! — fun and personal fulfillment? And how do we do so without marginalizing or denigrating anyone, including single and/or childless people? (Who, in my experience, don’t even get to come to the table in this discussion, because, you know, they’re…single! Or childless! So they can’t possibly have any workable ideas, right?)
Revolution! Now! (pumps fist in air)
After all, if you don’t bring in the money, you have to ask for it
My parents and grandparents had joint bank accounts. Isn’t that the point of marriage? What’s mine is yours? I agree though that a large part of it is that housekeeping and childcare is undervalued work. And I think parents need to get away from their children once in a while, and go do stuff with other adults. And moms who don’t work often don’t get that opportunity.
Have you seen this? It is a small online study, not a piece of peer-reviewed research, but it is quite suggestive.
See, and the patriarchal system has us arguing with one another, here, on a board where all of us (well, except for our favorite troll visitors) agree that women need choices, opportunities, and freedom equal to men’s.
Ahem.
“Pregnancy”.
Uh, that would be “not work for pay”.
The job I know that comes to mind as being closest to that of a SAHP is on-call sysadmin: you have to know a bunch of different arcane stuff that keeps changing, but you can never develop really deep expertise in any single piece of it. Whatever you’re doing gets interrupted by some crisis or other, and when you do your job absolutely perfectly, it’s invisible to anyone but another sysadmin. Oh, and it doesn’t matter whose fault it was that the machine fell over, when the call comes at 330 in the morning for four mornings in a row, you have to fix everything and still show up bright-eyed for the meeting with your boss. That’s why they pay you the big bucks. Uh.
I think that the social isolation and the dependency really play into each other in nasty ways, because being isolated means having far fewer chances to compare notes, and more chances that you’ll be comparing notes with someone who doesn’t have a clue what your life is like.
There have been several studies recently showing that people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. For example, when asked what kind of house they want to live in, people say a house with a big yard in the suburbs. When asked how much they like where they live, people in cities report liking their housing situation much more than people in suburbia do.
I’m not surprised that lots of women think that staying home with their children will make them happy, should make them happy, but “why aren’t I happy?” And because the choice is such a large one, and requires a great deal up front justification. So you told everyone that you were staying home because you didn’t want anyone else “raising your child,” how are you going to explain putting the squib in daycare and going back to work?
Tinfoil Hattie- I don’t know that other moms are giving the SAHMs the “but what do you do all day” line, cause we pretty much know that it’s a job.
But it’s a job, it’s not a giant cross. And it’s a job the most women through history have done with some success- otherwise the human race wouldn’t have continued. But from the way motherhood is treated, especially by SAHMs and those that glorify traditional roles, you would think women who choose to work outside the home (or who don’t have a choice because someone has to bring in money) have children running wild in the streets, addicted to drugs or being teenage prostitutes and generally creating the downfall of society.
So I call bullshit on the “Motherhood is my greatest accomplishment” people. Yes, being a mom is a tough and thankless job, but it’s not curing cancer or bringing about world peace and billions of women have done it already.I think we should be our own greatest accomplishment and give our kids something to look up to.
Sorry for the long rant.
I am with Miss Kate - it makes no sense that our system so drastically over-rewards one partner working 40+ hours per week and the other partner doing no paid work at all.
For years my wife and I were able to split childcare because I was able to get benefits working 30ish hours per week, but once I decided to leave that job we really had no viable choices other than for one of us to stay home or to use more paid child care than we were comfortable with.
It so happens that I am very happy as a SAHD, but it’s not for everybody and it’s stupid that so many families are forced into an arrangement that isn’t what they would choose if they had more options.
APS
I have to interject something in response to the earlier statement about parents resenting being docked advancement for not putting in extra hours. That assumes that simply being on premises actually adds something to the enterprise. I’m a lawyer, and no profession on Earth worships the idol of HOURS like mine does. I work for the state, and routinely beat people who work 90 hours a week for giant firms. In most cases, simple presence does not equal value. Quite stupid people can stay at an office 15 hours per day. Businesses need to base their reward system on something more than just desk-warming. Once that happens, then maybe mothers will get a fair shake.
I’ve been on both sides of this fence. I stayed home with each of my kids until they were three. My first day of work was my 16th birthday and I worked for 4 yrs, then home for 3, worked for 6, home for three, now worked for another three.
I’ve been happier but more stressed out working. The whole “second shift” things gets on my nerves big time. I still do most of the stuff I did when I was home all day. Now, I just have less time to do it. But I do like seeing other people everyday and the sense of concrete contribution to the struggle to survive that I get from bring home my pink collar paycheck. It isn’t much but we couldn’t make it without it.
I was less happy but also less stressed while being at home. I only had one job. Yet, I felt my brain melting and leaking out of my ears from only speaking with 2 yr olds all day. They are less than brilliant conversationalists. I hate cleaning and have yet to understand why men insist on standing up when they can’t help but pee on the floor and everywhere else (that stray mini-stream that goes straight in the air? Yeah, guys, it doesn’t evaporate. It eventually lands somewhere.) and then mine don’t clean it up. “Mom’ll do it.” There are expectations of servitude for SAHMs that won’t fly with a working mom. When I was home, I was expected to get up at 4 am with the hubby and send him off to work with a hot breakfast. My MIL, my own grandmother and mother, and hence my husband got this crazy notion. When you have a kid who does not sleep through the night and then are expected to do this, well, it makes for some unhappiness. I made some vicious remarks and the commenter above had it dead right–it was envy. I felt like a prisoner and a slave and I was desperately unhappy. I knew I was doing what was best for my children developmentally (not to mention safety. I did not like the idea of handing my child over to strangers when they couldn’t tell me what had happened to them that day.) but it wasn’t what was best for me. I have always been able to make that distinction between myself and my children. I sometimes wonder if that self-awareness didn’t exacerbate my misery.
Pablo said “I think you nailed it with the dependence being the major factor. How can anyone deal with the insecurity that tomorrow you could potentially be without income?”
I can’t imagine what it would be like for my marriage to feel less secure than my job. I could so easily be fired tomorrow (well, not *tomorrow*, they’d probably wait until Monday morning) or laid off or my company could get bought, etc. Maybe this isn’t the case for y’all with successful high-powered careers, but I’m hardly the pick of the candidate market; I would absolutely give myself better odds at effecting a reconciliation through marital counseling in the event of an estrangement than on being able to get hired again somewhere within, say, 4 months.
Relatedly, I would be very curious to see how women’s feelings about their jobs *before* having kids relate to their happiness about working/staying home. It’s scary to think I’d be even more miserable staying home than I am at work… I can’t imagine anything better than not having to talk to anyone all day.
tedious-
when you are a SAHM you dont have the luxury of sitting on your ass and relaxing or not talking to anyone …I dont have kids but I did baby sit a younger cousin (I was 21 he was 9 ) for a whole week. And that left me drained. You have to constant entertain/interact with someone much less mentally and emotionally mature. They expect you to hangout with them and play with them and keep them company. And it is less fulfilling than interact with adults since you dont have to also be their keeper.
And while I am sure the power dynamics for my experience are different than for people with kids the experience at least has taught me that I cant handle more or less 24/7 with a kid.
Women with jobs outside the home who do the “Oh, you don’t work, do you” thing are agreeing with the patriarchal notion that childrearing isn’t real work and isn’t valuable; only things men are supposed to do have value.
I’m not sure. It is not just a patriarchal notion that childrearing isn’t real work and isn’t valuable: it is a brute fact. We live in a capitalist society. Unless you’re a capitalist, the only way to support yourself is to sell your labour. If you don’t you are essentially just living off of someone else.
Being a SAHM is just not an economically respectable position for people who are not capitalists. Able bodied people should look after themselves. I don’t think the “Oh, you don’t work, do you” comment has much to to do with childcare not being valued under patriarchy. It’s a totally justifiable criticism of voluntary worklessness by people who can’t support themselves economically. You can tell this is the case because no-one criticises capitalists for raising children instead of working.
So here’s something I’ve been wondering: If the both people decide that one person should stay home with the kids,why not open a savings account for that person and pay the stay-at-home parents “salary” into it? Why not open a separate retirement fund account (like a Roth IRA) for the stay-at-home parent and pay into regularly? It doesn’t address all the concerns raised, and not one-size-fits-all solution but it’s a start in validating the work stay-home-mothers do as something that should be fully recognized and compensated as “real” work.
Seriously? Voluntary worklessness? Are you going to criticize students too? After all, I worked while my husband earned his PhD. Was he just being a leech? Was it not economically respectable? And does the fact that child care outside the home costs money not matter? I’ve heard a lot of vitriol from both sides of the stay at home/work aisle, but I think this is the most disgustingly insulting thing I’ve heard from anyone on the subject.
Shasta, you can do a retirement account for a non-working spouse. And everyone who can afford it should.
“It is not just a patriarchal notion that childrearing isn’t real work and isn’t valuable: it is a brute fact. We live in a capitalist society.”
Not valued does not equal not valuable.
Since many people are being paid to care for children full time, clearly childrearing is considered “real work” – except, apparently, when the parents themselves are doing it.
So, you’re saying that only non-capitalists exchange their labor for profit.
Oookay, then.
Oh yes, because it’s far more “economically respectable” for a minimum-wage earning parent to pay someone else for child care.
Oookay, then.
Childcare is work – tedious, thankless, and totally fucking necessary if the species is to survive.
You appear to think that laundry is only work if it’s done by the employees of a linen service; education is only work if provided by paid teachers; childcare is only work if it’s being provided by a babysitter, nanny, or daycare; and dishes are only work if they’re done by a professional dishwasher.
If a parent – usually the mother – is not being paid for these things, such services are no longer considered work.
Reading your post is like looking at the sun, if the sun were made out of pure stupidity.
It is not clear to me, james, whether you realize or not that while you’ve put capitalists in the same objective position as slackers, you’ve also pointed out that we treat capitalists differently. I get the impression you accept that we should apply different moral standards to them. That wealth is its own justification, entitling those who hold sufficient quantities of it to be exempt from standards that should be applied to everyone else.
It’s just not clear to me whether you are protesting or praising this aspect of our capitalist society as it exists today.
If we look at the general problem of childrearing versus competitive success in a capitalist society, clearly either we must perpetuate systematic and massive discrimination against women all across the board in the name of capitalist values, or we must junk capitalist values–at the very least, encapsulate capitalism as a subsystem of a larger, socialist, society.
As a frankly socialist egalitarian, I think that not only should the particular men who bear individual responsibility for particular children have a much greater share of the day-to-day work involved in caring for them demanded of them, but that society at large should be much more supportive of all children. Arriving at this result by any of many possible paths would, by any of them, undermine capitalism; any perpetuating it under some kind of “encapsulation” would be as much to sustain it for the sake of its purported benefits as to protect people from its clear dangerous potentials, so often realized in life as we know it.
Devil’s Advocate, I think you’re confusing capitalist = someone who favours capitalism with capitalist = a member of the ruling class who does not work because they can live off the profit generated by the labour of their workers. james was clearly using the word in the latter sense.
Another thing that isn’t addressed is that some women can’t make enough for it to be cost effective to work. For a married woman with multiple young children in a low paying job, taxes, childcare, and job related expenses will eat her entire paycheck and then some.
“was clearly using the word in the latter sense. ”
I agree, Thene.
But he was doing it in a pretty assinine way.
The reasons I told james I thought he was being unclear were that first of all, I really don’t think he was being clear. And secondly, that I agree with y’all that the general tone seemed dismissive, condescending, and this favored my interpreting the ambiguity by reading in the sense of his being an apologist for both capitalism and patriarchy. “Unless you’re rich, in which case one is entitled to anything, everyone should look busy; too bad this means the double shift for you ladies, and don’t try shifting your load onto some other poor woman either.” That’s how I tended to read it.
So by saying he was being unclear I was giving the benefit of the doubt. It is rare for apologists for capitalism to use that term to describe what they are advocating for, or to point out that sufficient wealth is indeed, in our society, an entitlement to shirk obligations others are strictly held to. So I was honestly confused.
Why it should be unthinkable that the load might be shared with other poor people who happen to be men, or (far better in my view, especially in conjunction with all men sharing with all women) that the potentially idle rich should be hit up for a share of their excess largesse to finance compensating all childcare to a helpful degree, I leave up to james to explain, or show how he did say that.
I’m pretty tired and running behind tonight/today, so I might just be blithering complete nonsense here.
Shasta is right. All parenting should be paid. Even if the money goes into the same damn account from which it was paid, any dad or mom who stays home should get a salary for childcare, housework, etc. This salary should be negotiated before the situation begins.
I guess I’m one of those naive feminists who believe staying at home is a choice, just like any other. Women who work or women who stay at home both have to make sacrifices. I thought one of the points of feminism is to say that certain kinds of work should not be valued over others. We fall into the same trap if we use the thinking on who is more “valuable.”
Phoenician, I don’t get the cryptic “pregnancy” comment.
James, read Nobel-nominated economist Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood regarding whether or not all the unpaid work of women in this country really does contribute to the GDP, and then get back to me. You smug, ignorant jackass.
Commenters who talk about the way those awful straw-SAHMs want medals and special recognition: check your projection at the door. SAHMs are hardly a cohesive, powerful lobby garnering societal recognition for the job they do. No, what they really are is invisible, isolated, and considered “privileged” because they (gasp!) take care of their own children. You have no idea how/why people stay home with their kids. Just as I have no idea why you work(ed) for pay. I always figured it was the best arrangement you made for your own family.
The same courtesy is all I request.
UI, I for one don’t expect everything to be fair and certainly not equal–but there is such a thing as unacceptably bad, and Amanda’s original point was that by objective criteria, “housewives” are in a bad place. As long as they are so clearly suffering to such an unacceptable degree, it is the time to push for more fairness and more equality, by whatever means are effective. If the absolute problem eventually becomes small compared to other problems, we’ll forget about that push and focus on the other issues.
No Levelling required, just pragmatic decency.
But the Leveller’s battlecry is often needed just to approach workable decency.
Another thing that should be considered is that as (US at least) society has converted more and more thoroughly to a buy-don’t-make model, the job of stay-at-home parents gets harder and harder (this is the flip side of positive feedback). In communities where the vast majority of kids have a stay-at-home parent, you get shared experiences for validation and a sufficient density that there’s always a neighbor to call on if the stay-at-home parent really has to get something done. You have marketing systems geared to stay-at-home parents (think door-to-door sales, stores that deliver, blah blah blah). In communities that don’t scatter people around the country every few years, you have extended families to help take up the burdens of childcare and other jobs. But the more you expect that everything in the economy takes places as the result of a monetary transaction, the harder it’s going to be for people whose work doesn’t conform to that model.
The same forces that have made stay-at-home parenting harder have also made for a decline in countless other voluntary social and political organizations that used to be the backbone of US civil society. (Pretty much the only organizations of this sort left are churches, and precious few of those.) Obviously a model based on one person always staying at home sucks, but so does one that requires everyone to work but provides no support for raising the next generation while doing so.
Wasn’t this Betty Friedan’s thesis many, many years ago?
Hello?
The problem that has no name?
Since many people are being paid to care for children full time, clearly childrearing is considered “real work” – except, apparently, when the parents themselves are doing it.
People who make a living doing childcare do a lot more of it at one time than stay-at-home mothers do, unless those sahms are running an informal day-care co-op with other mothers on the block. Try running a day-care for exactly one child and see how well that works out, money-wise.
If you want looking after your one, perhaps two or three children to be considered “real work” in an economic sense and recompensed accordingly, you will have to content yourself with the salary of someone who does no more than that. Baby-sitting money, in other words. That’s no solution to the economic problem, and certainly no solution to the general humiliation of the SAHM position.
I’m not actually saying I should get paid for being a SAHM, but what about nannies? Sure, running an in-home day-care for one kid at in-home day care prices wouldn’t be profitable. But nannies charge more, and do work that is more like a SAHM.
Ms. Kate has it. My husband nearly went nuts as an at-home dad, mostly because a toddler is both demanding and an extremely unrewarding person to spend time with, conversationally. He actually stayed home longer than I wanted him to…but then, he was raised by a stay at home mom. I wasn’t; neither my mom or I are tempermentally suited to that gig.
I think saner work policies could easily abolish this dichotomy, let parents raise happy kids and have rewarding adult interaction, and actually benefit the business bottom line in the long run. But on-premise daycare, work at home options, and flextime are still considered communist plots by your average CEO.
But on-premise daycare, work at home options, and flextime are still considered communist plots by your average CEO.
So how do we make this usable for everyone? I’m spouse- and child-free working in a corporate hourly position. Virtual and flextime/alternative work patterns are available to salaried employees already. But it’s those of us that earn an hourly wage that have the least amount of flexibility.
Problem is, taking care of kids and housework is considered valueless because “anyone (female) can do it.”
I wonder how taking care of kids has changed over the years–it certainly hasn’t been true that every mother has always “stayed home and took care of her child”. Certainly not with the intensity we now have.
In societies/economies where much of business is done “at home” and in conjunction with extended families, other people, etc., I bet kids were integrated very early on into the work flow (as we know they were in agricultural societies), plus the chore of “taking care of them” was spread out over far more people. Grandma takes care of kid for a bit, then passes kid off to Grandpa, who then passes kid off to Mom, who then has the kid’s older brother watch over for a while….
There’s also been changes due to parents’ worries about risk. Read Jane Jacobs about cities and sidewalks, and how the kids used to regularly do a lot of their playtime in a very unsupervised fashion, under the relatively watchful eye of the neighbors. (Kids start fighting, all adults in vicinity come down on them like the proverbial ton of rectangular-shaped-things.)
It used to be that “business” could be more easily fit in with child-raising because they were carried out under the same roof–now much more difficult.
Phoenician, I don’t get the cryptic “pregnancy” comment.
While agreeing that women need choices, opportunities, and freedom equal to men’s, and that men need choices, opportunities, and freedom equal to women’s, in most cases, the idea falls down when it comes to the brute fact of reproduction.
To take the most obvious case, women should have more choice with regards abortion. At the risk of displaying my own prejudices, pregnant women should also get special treatment - the ghost of my grandmother would come back and kick my ass if I didn’t give them my seat on a bus.
That leads to the complaint that males have no choice in a pregnancy proceeding or not, yet are expected to pay. There’s some legitimacy to that, but it’s up against the idea that opting out of child support leads to, well, a child not supported.
De jure, your statement is accurate and I have no problem applying it in most cases - I work in a female dominated occupation, my bosses are women, and I don’t have a problem with it (*). De facto, reproductive politics are always going to distinguish between the sexes.
(*) Apart from discovering that I’m allergic to a particular brand of perfume. It’s annoying to be spending time right next to an intelligent and attractive redhead as she’s training you in AACR2, and to find yourself tearing up and wheezing…
In a nation, and a world, so overpopulated, we should tax people who breed children, not enable them. The idea that it’s a job to have and raise children falls into the category of “create a need and then fill it” and since we can’t support all the children, let alone all the adults here now, it’s time that in any way glorifying breeding and raising more children even for the world as driving a Hummer. The ocean is rising, and 80% of the world’s population lives in coastal areas, where are we going to relocate all those people? Why add to the casualty list by breeding, when the only thing we can do to make the ecological, and then economic collapse less harmful is to BREED FEWER PEOPLE?
One thing that hasn’t really been discussed yet is how having a SAHM vs. a working mother affects the kids.
My mom stayed at home when my sister and I were little, then went back to work part-time. She was always there when I got home from school…and frankly, I wish she hadn’t been. Otherwise, we’d probably be closer. She didn’t really have much of a life besides us, even after she went back to work- not many friends, pretty much no hobbies. Now that we’re in our twenties, she’s begging us to come home for the weekend. But when I spend too much time with her, we end up fighting because very early, she got into the habit of having to know EVERYTHING about me. What this taught me is that there’s definitely such a thing as spending too much time with your kids- the end result is that they’ll grow up and not want to be around you, and because you made your kids your life, you’ll no longer have one.
To be fair, though, I don’t have kids. And now that I work full-time, I barely have time for myself, so I don’t know how people with kids manage it. I may feel differently when I do have kids, but I’ll try to remember this.
She was always there when I got home from school…and frankly, I wish she hadn’t been.
Heh… and here I was thinking I was the only one. That “someone’s always there for the kids” thing is always trotted out as a benefit of stay-at-home parenting, but I loved the freedom and quiet time that came after Mum went back to work and I became a latchkey kid.
“It’s not surprising that staying at home is correlated with lower levels of happiness, and it has nothing to do with devaluing the work or anything like that. The work is isolating, for one thing, and human beings are social animals.”
Exactly. Example: me and some friends have a web design firm, and rather than spend money on an office, we mostly just worked from home. The number #1 complaint was how isolating the work was. And we were/are making good money. Solution: now we usually all get together at one particular house, with our laptops, and work there. Moms, of course, often follow the same strategy (all get together at one house) for the same reasons.
Just fuck off with that bullshit already.
As a SAHM who runs a local support/non-profit organization for mothers (both working and SAH), I would like to agree with Amanda that, unfortunately, most women are not as valued by their spouses for their contribution to the household economy as they should be. Contra what another poster claimed, most men take for granted what women do all day and often belittle the job of a SAHM until they have to be left alone with the kids for any extended period. Even then, the lesson is short-lived.
In my group, I work hard to keep the tone respectful of the SAHM, the WAHM, and the WOHM because the truth is that, as women, any choice we make will be criticized by others– heck, simply the decision to have children apparently makes us suspect or worthy of derision by some misanthropic assholes. As feminists, we should not be spending our time deciding which women– working or stay-at-home– have it rougher or who is bitchier. Instead, we should be trying to figure out how to make the economy more family-friendly, thus enabling working parents to spend more quality time with their children, and give at-home parents the resources to be happier in their role (I like the idea of a salary paid by the working parent).
Why do these conversations always end up in a catfight between working and stay-at-home mothers? For fuck’s sake people.
One thing that hasn’t really been discussed yet is how having a SAHM vs. a working mother affects the kids.
It does teach them that childcare is women’s work and daddy needn’t be bothered, since nobody ever blathers about “working fathers” or “how does having Dad gone all day affect the kids?”
What faux capitalists like James prefer to ignore is the externality of unpaid labor. Daddy can spend more time at the office because he’s not worrying about childcare or homemaking; that is a benefit to his employer, and to his productivity. All that time Daddy might otherwise have to use doing his own laundry or being home with a sick kid is handled by somebody else.
James,
This comment is simply bizarre on a dozen levels at once.
Firstly, you’re confounding wage-labour and work. Just because the labour costs of childrearing are imposed as an unpaid obligation on women (primarily) of social reproduction does not mean that childrearing isn’t valuable (in the general sense) or that it isn’t clearly necessary to the social reproduction of the capitalist mode of production.
Nor does it mean that, where it can be organized in capitalist business, that same work can’t be conducted as wage-labour generating profit (surplus-value), such as, hypothetically, if nannies were organized under something like a temp agency that took a cut of their pay (I believe such businesses exist, in fact).
Secondly, there is a huge qualitative difference between SAHM’s rendered dependent upon their husband’s for their subsistence in order to engage full time in the work of social reproduction, and those of the capitalist class who are able to live off the labour of others dependent upon THEM for their subsistence. To treat these as equivalent is to wholly miss the forrest for the trees.
Thirdly, and even more bizarrely, you actually seem to suggest that it’s only morally acceptable for those who live off the labour of others dependent upon them (i.e. capitalists), while those made dependent upon others (SAHMs) in undertaking the socially necessary work of social reproduction are immoral. I cannot fathom that this is actually what you meant, it so completely inverts who really should be the target of your moral outrage. Perhaps before pointing the finger at SAHMs for not engaging in productive labour (even though they do engage in socially necessary labour for social reproduction, which you completely ignore), you might spare a few moments to point the finger at those capitalists first since they engage in neither productive labour nor socially necessary labour as capitalists.
I feel like there is a lot of pressure on working mothers to act like you only work because you need the money, and if you could, you’d stay home. The pressure, in my experience, isn’t from women who stay home, but just out there in the culture. And then it’s turned around again to say that women who work are just materialistic and if they cared about the important things, like “raising their own children,” all would be right in the world.
We do need the money my job brings in, but soon we won’t. (My husband just finished his master’s. And there was much rejoicing!) But I’m not going to stay home because I really like my job and lack whatever it is you need to stay at home every day with young children. But I feel like I’m not supposed to say that - that I like my job.
It would be great if I could work fewer hours and still do something I enjoy as much. That would be the ideal. But I’m not willing to give up the job satisfaction I have to get fewer hours. I think that’s how a lot of men feel - in theory it would be great to spend more time with the kids, but in the end they aren’t willing to take the job track with less prestige and less satisfaction (and less money) to do it.
So yeah, we need more work/life options.
What history_mom said.
And, some people like taking care of kids. Some do not. Some go crazy at home. Some love it at home.
Why are women generally assumed to “want” to stay home with their kids? I remember one friend of mine felt so guilty for putting her baby in daycare after she became so depressed she could barely care for him. She used the opportunity to start her own business. Finally I asked her, “So, you didn’t like being a SAHM as much as you thought you would? So where’s the crime in that?”
People who haven’t stayed home with their kids on an extended basis don’t know what it’s like. As for my staying home with my kids being like “baby-sitting,” and that’s all my time is worth, nice try. First of all, “baby-sitters” are woefully underpaid. Second, as someone mentioned above: nannies. Third, even daycare kids go home eventually, and the provider isn’t with all those children 24/7.
It’s not the same, it’s just that child care seems to be valued when you’re paying someone to do it, and not valued when it’s “just” a SAHM doing it.
SAHFs, of course, get written up in the newspaper and lauded for the big sacrifice they’re making.
The one thing that always gets me in this conversation is that it seems that there are only two choices, SAH/WOH and that those are set for life. Most women I know chose to stay home for a period of time and then returned to paid work. They did both.
My question. How long can you stay home before you’re considered a bon bon eating lazy fat ass? Conversely, how soon can you go back without being considered a money grubbing shrew who hates her children? Is there some magic line? Six weeks? Three years? Inquiring minds want to know.
I stayed home full time for 18 months and then worked part time. By two and half years I was back to mostly full time. When I was home I was berated by the WOHs, then when I returned to work by the SAHs. And IMHO they are both equally viscous.
I guess us women just cannot do anything right.
On the money front, I graduated a year before my husband and supported him for the last year of his doctorate. He supported me for the first year of our kids life. I just might disproportionately contribute for the next two while he changes positions to something he really loves. He may support me again someday if we decide to have another child. It’s a long term deal that ebbs and flows and I truly don’t understand this either/or mindset. What if one of you becomes ill or unemployed?
Let me just add that when I SAH I met some women who loved every minute of it. They were wicked smart women who for a variety of reasons wanted to stay home. I couldn’t do what they do personally but I still have a ton of respect for the energy, creativity and intelligence that put into raising their kids.
The one thing that always gets me in this conversation is that it seems that there are only two choices, SAH/WOH and that those are set for life.
And that they only apply to women. Men like your husband are neither expected nor asked to be home with their kids, and if they do they’re noble, self-sacrificing heroes.
Oh, my husband would get a kick out of that. We both wanted to stay home for the first year and I won out. My employer was much more flexible, I was at a more natural breaking point in my career path and my husband had just been offered a position with the type of freedom that would make my return to work in a year (it turned into eighteen months since the Montessori school in our neighborhood doesn’t take younger children) doable. We now have a very good life/work balance but I know that he was sad to miss out on so much of the first year stuff that I was lucky enough to experience.
But on-premise daycare, work at home options, and flextime are still considered communist plots by your average CEO.
So how do we make this usable for everyone? I’m spouse- and child-free working in a corporate hourly position. Virtual and flextime/alternative work patterns are available to salaried employees already. But it’s those of us that earn an hourly wage that have the least amount of flexibility.
Bring. Back. The. Labor. Movement. We have to agitate for the support that we need to raise healthy families. Corporate America is not going to solve this problem without an uprising.
Men like your husband are neither expected nor asked to be home with their kids, and if they do they’re noble, self-sacrificing heroes.
I suspect that the other side of that coin is true too, men who are SAHDs are perceived as less than manly.
So, what Tinfoil Hattie said: Revolution! Now! (pumps fist in air)
I also suspect that being a SAHD is even more isolating than being a SAHM.
I agree. Almost every working mom I know tells me how lucky I am and how they’d stay home if they could afford it. Even the ones whose husbands make more than mine, and the ones whose egos are completely based on their work. They just feel like it’s what they should want.
I think this depends a lot on the personality of the SAHM, and how she relates to both her kids and the outside world. For what it’s worth, I’m grateful my mom worked. If she’d been home when I got home once I turned 10 or 11, I’m not sure whether it would have been matricide or child-cide, but murder would have been done. But I know people who loved that their mom was there, baking and offering snacks.
Dearie, do you kiss your children with that potty mouth?
Overpopulation is a fact. YOUR children will pay for it, since they are the ones who will inherit a world that you chose to overpopulate. You are the sort of Entitlement Moocow who feels that because she CHOSE to breed, the rest of the world must enable her.
I’ve always thought that birth control was better than death control, but I guess you know best, it’s better to have your children choke on their own filth than to be sensible enough not to overbreed.
You use the logic of a cancer cell, dearie.
Elizabeth, you can’t possibly think (I hope) that everyone should stop breeding and the species should die out, right? And if some people have to breed, wouldn’t you rather that some of those people be the liberal, well-educated people who care about the environment? I mean, we could leave all the breeding to the Quiverfull movement and they could raise kids who think it’s their job to have as many of their own kids as possible and use up as many resources as they want with no consesquences. Or some of us could breed children who will understand that the environment is fragile and that we need problem-solvers.
I agree that overpopulation is a problem, but I reject the idea that anyone who has a child is irresponsible. People can be horribly destructive, but they can be pretty inventive and awesome too. I’m sorry that you only see the bad. It must be sad to hate yourself so much.
Can I get a t-shirt that says Entitlement Moocow?
Elizabeth: With your asinine comments, it is you who should be concerned about a lack of brain power. And don’t patronize me with the “dearie” crap, you misanthropic fucktard.
Given that reproduction is the default for the majority of people, your comments don’t even merit discussion. But if you want to have an actual discussion about overpopulation, instead of going on batshit insane rants, why don’t you address these issues:
1) Instead of taxing people for having children, make contraception and comprehensive sex education more widely accessible to the masses. Both have been shown to reduce unwanted pregnancies.
2) Provide a social support system that would increase the standards of living for the poorest in our society; improve the educational system so that more people can obtain work as skilled labor.
3) Figure out a way to resolve the extreme levels of poverty globally– y’know, the places where the birthrate is actually significantly higher than here.
4) Teach children the importance of green living.
5) Get your head out of your ass.
You are the sort of Entitlement Moocow
Proof that for some women, the label “childfree” is just one more way to be an exceptionalist.
I suspect that the other side of that coin is true too, men who are SAHDs are perceived as less than manly.
By other men? Sure, they’re making the team look bad. By other women? There’s probably a local shrine somewhere. And don’t get started on how breadwinner wives are regarded. I’ve had to get more than a little shirty at school officials who can’t figure out that they should call home, not my work, if they need to reach a parent immediately, or who make comments about how nice it is to finally meet me at a parent conference. Because, you know, that’s a mommy’s job.
elizabeth, America itself is not overpopulated as a whole, if you want overpopulation look at India or China.
As far as a tax on people for having children that is utter rubbish. I will have made under 25k this year I have a wife that stays at home and is a college student and a son who is just over one year old. We paid cash for his entire birth from the OB, to the hospital an over 12k expense and ohh yeah we have no health insurance because rates for the selfemployed are insane. Are you saying that only the rich should be able to “Breed”? The result would be violent revolution.
Entitlement Moocow? What is she acting entitled to? Having a child? At least she isn’t proposing a Procreation Gestapo. With your “tax” America would become a Facist state! How else would you enforce it? There are too many who couldn’t afford to pay it.
To the main subject, I am sad to admit I am guilty of undervaluing my wife in many ways, she is a SAHM/WAHM, I say WAHM because she is working on her thesis. I have degraded her about her school goals because unfortunatly even with a degree she will not have great earning power. I have openly begrudged having to give her money, and done many of the typical “sexist husband” things that have been mentioned. However I do not think I am a misogynist by nature, just an idiot. My wife is horribly unhappy and I cannot blame her, after we got a hairsbreath away from divorce I finally saw what she was dealing with and I am now trying to open myself to the difficulties that she has to deal with on a day to day basis I am here to confront my own personal demons and to remind myself that she is my equal in every way and that she has a much harder job than I do.
I don’t know if I could be a full time SAHD. It is incredibly difficult to take care of a child for one day much less everyday.
From my personal experience I belive the study is valid.
elizabeth, America itself is not overpopulated as a whole, if you want overpopulation look at India or China.
As far as a tax on people for having children that is utter rubbish. I will have made under 25k this year I have a wife that stays at home and is a college student and a son who is just over one year old. We paid cash for his entire birth from the OB, to the hospital an over 12k expense and ohh yeah we have no health insurance because rates for the selfemployed are insane. Are you saying that only the rich should be able to “Breed”? The result would be violent revolution.
Entitlement Moocow? What is she acting entitled to? Having a child? At least she isn’t proposing a Procreation Gestapo. With your “tax” America would become a Facist state! How else would you enforce it? There are too many who couldn’t afford to pay it.
To the main subject, I am sad to admit I am guilty of undervaluing my wife in many ways, she is a SAHM/WAHM, I say WAHM because she is working on her thesis. I have degraded her about her school goals because unfortunatly even with a degree she will not have great earning power. I have openly begrudged having to give her money, and done many of the typical “sexist husband” things that have been mentioned. However I do not think I am a misogynist by nature, just an idiot. My wife is horribly unhappy and I cannot blame her, after we got a hairsbreath away from divorce I finally saw what she was dealing with and I am now trying to open myself to the difficulties that she has to deal with on a day to day basis I am here to confront my own personal demons and to remind myself that she is my equal in every way and that she has a much harder job than I do.
I don’t know if I could be a full time SAHD. It is incredibly difficult to take care of a child for one day much less everyday.
From my personal experience I belive the study is valid.
Sorry for the double post, and I also spelled Fascist. I need to not post at 2am
Meet the women who won’t have babies - because they’re not eco friendly
By NATASHA COURTENAY-SMITH and MORAG TURNER - More by this author »
Last updated at 22:05pm on 21st November 2007
Comments (30)
Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would
know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair
of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a
little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.
But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.
Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief
she was helping to save the planet.
Scroll down for more…
Desperate measures: Toni Vernelli was steralised at age 27 to reduce her
carbon footprint
Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible “mistake” of
pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who
performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time.
He refused, but Toni - who works for an environmental charity -
“relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible
surgery.
Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.
At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years
was sterilised to “protect the planet”.
Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that never was, her
boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a congratulations card.
While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and
denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious
zeal.
“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line
at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.
“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more
fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more
greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”
While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature,
Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=495495&in_page_id=1&in_page_id=1&expand=true
http://www.city-data.com/forum/politics-other-controversies/68190-political-towns-extreme-places-political-relocation.html
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.childfree/browse_thread/thread/433390c60614cc23/442c33182294bb85?hl=en
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/TurningPoints/story?id=3747045&page=1
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Why_breed/
http://freetownproject.com/
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2140483&page=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Exodus
http://christianexodus.org
http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1918592007
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3401106
http://www.projectprevention.org
I came accross a shocking statistic. In America, and by
inference in Buncombe County, 2 out of 3 parents are so environmentally
callous that they would turn down even subsidized contraception and
squeeze out babies anyway; which calls into question the ability of local
contraception funding to save the planet from overpopulation.
But in that case there is something else a county can do and that is to
stop susidizing parenthood. It is fundamental that the responsibility to
fund schools, childcare, playgrounds and ballfields lies exclusively with
parents.
So how is it fair that I, as a taxpaying nonparent, should be subsidizing
such reproductive activities? There is no ethical construct by which that
is fair. So since none of you seem to be funding contraception anyway, I
might as well vote for those who would defund parenthood, while
contraception and abortion are so cost effective that funds can be raised
privately. And of course that would, and does, switch me to the true
party of the environment, affordable housing and direct democracy, the
Republicans.
The Republicans help the environment by cutting or attempting to cut
parental subsidies like playgrounds, childcare, ballfields and public
schools, which is effective against overpopulation in a society in which
most babies are planned.
Local Republicans oppose zoning which is bad for affordable housing, and
Nathan Ramsey alone proposed a direct democratic referndum on zoning,
which makes the Republicans the party of direct democracy.
Alice: Please sell your bullshit elsewhere. Most of the posters here are socialist to some degree, so your Libertarian-inspired crap about “why should I have to pay taxes that benefit anybody but me” is pretty much unwelcome. You can pretend that it is because you are an environmentalist, but it’s thinly veiled crap we’ve seen in a dozen other packages.
Republicans=friends of the environment? Not in this reality.