Well… yeah, that’s always true. I can just hear people using this argument on other topics:
“Statistics might show that eating an all junk food diet is unhealthy, but you cannot predict an individual outcome from statistics. Who knows, these Doritos might actually be good for me.”
“I know that numerous studies have shown that smoking shortens your life, but population cannot be extrapolated to individuals. There is just no way to predict whether these Camels will do anything bad for me or not, so I’ll keep smoking.”
We can never say what will be best in the long term for each and every individual. But we can do research to be able to make more intellegent choices. Some people won’t be harmed by eating junk food all the time, some people will have great health while smoking, and some kids will do better in day care.
I don’t think it is possible to have a shopping trip with the only interaction being the mother saying “no”. Same goes for the other activities you describe.
You never went shopping with my mother. I was mandated to go with her but forbidden to speak a word while inside the store because she was adding the grocery total in her head. Any question or comment was answered with a glare or ‘shut up I’m busy adding.’ (the word no wasn’t used as per the quote but the sentiment remains that this was not a bonding type of shopping trip)
IMO, this is where the whole child care issue gets frustrating. Instead of focusing on stay-at-home vs. day care, we need to be focusing on ways to improve professional child care. There are plenty of parents who would love to stay home with their kids, and who would be great at it, but can’t, because they have to put food on the table. And with the economy the way it is, I think we’re likely to see fewer SAH parents in the near future rather than more. Are we just supposed to say, “Too bad you can’t do what’s best for your kids. Good luck finding decent day care”?
Instead of focusing exclusively on SAH parenting as the “best” thing for children, the debate should concentrate on how to raise standards for professional child care, so that parents who can’t stay home with their kids can be assured that their children are in a safe, stimulating, and loving environment. You can tell a single mom or a low-income family that parents should stay home with kids until the cows come home, but that doesn’t really help them or their kids in any practical way.
Perhaps, but a couple months ago there was an AP article claiming that the percentages of families with SAHPs have been rising the past few years. SAHD numbers are rising faster than moms at home, but more of both is currently happening. I’ll see if I can find it.
Other than that, I agree that there needs to be some kind of childcare improvement, since many people have no choice but to work, and it is usually those people who have to deal with bad childcare.
I’m not admonishing people for discussing the topic in this thread. I just think that the whole child care debate in general concentrates too much on the issue, which tends to pit SAH parents against WOH parents–not a particularly productive exercise to my mind.
I think it all depends on the parents and kids involved. I’m not talking about families where both parents must work outside the home to make ends meet, I’m talking about families where both parents choose to work outside of the home. Speaking from my own experience, my mother was not a very good mother. She worked outside the home, and I think we were all better off for it. She always took two weeks off at Christmas time, and when she went back to work after New Year, we were all happy about it!
I, myself, am a SAHM, and I believe I do pretty well. But I do well because this is what I want to be doing. My kids fare well because hubby and I are both happy with my decision to stay home and take care of the kids. If I wanted a career, but felt forced into staying home, I am certain that would translate into resentment and stress for all concerned, and my kids would probably be much better off in day care than in that situation!
To those of you who wonder about preschool for little kids: my younges is 3 and 1/2. She will start preschool in September; she’ll go 3 days a week, but she will go all day (8:45 til 3:15). This is because of a speech delay problem she has, and her speech therapist and IEP team think that an all-day program will help her speech. My “baby” (since she’s my last, she’ll always be my baby) is smart, beautiful and funny. I cherish the time I spend with her, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the few hours of free time this arrangement will afford me.
I read the Coontz article linked above. I am not terrible impressed. For starts, she is clearly an advocate as opposed to a dispassionate historian (I’ve seen her described elsewhere as an “activist”), which makes her assertions suspect without backup - perhaps in her book she provided these. But even from what I can tell, she seems to be skewing the data to make her case.
For starts, she states that “Families in which mothers spend as much time earning a living as they do raising children … were the norm throughout most of the last two millennia”. But the point she seems to have chosen for her comparison is the late 19th century, which was the height of the Industrial Revolution and the point of maximum outside work, after the growth of factories and before the Labor Reform movement took hold. This period cannot be used to typify the last two millennia.
But even here, she gives herself away.
The first half is significant here. Despite all this talk about how much women were working out of their homes in the early 1900s, fact apparently is that they did it less than they do now (I’d be interested in how much - she doesn’t say).
Second half of the sentence is also significant, but more for what it says about Coontz’s methodology than anything else. What she seems to be doing is trying to get around her admission by dividing up the number of hours by average number of children and getting a number of hours per child, which has declined. This is an absurd supposition - that spending an hour with three children is like spending 20 minutes with one child. Seems to me to show the lengths people will go to get things to fit their perspective more than anything else.
I am also skeptical of her data, as mentioned previously. I would the representation in places like this is more credible.
I would certainly agree that basic housework was a lot more time consuming than it is today. No one needs to prove this. But this is not the claim that I am challenging. I am challenging the claim that women worked outside the house. Basic housework was primarily done in and around the house.
The difference is that basic housework, however time-consuming, was something that could be integrated with child-care, as it is today. In fact, as soon as kids got old enough, they were themselves expected to help out with the housework with their parents. There is no basis for the notion that kids were primarily raised by grandparents.
It is for this reason that people like even sven feel the need to say that women were working in fields, away from their families - this would tend to support the notion that the kids were being raised by others.
(Beyond the simple falsity of the assertion, it just makes no sense if you think about it. What percentage of people could possibly have had grandparents living with them? Read about people’s lives just a bit - they did not all move in with their children as their children had children. And what if they had more than one child? Even older siblings were not common enough to make them the standard caretakers. A high percentage of children were themselves the older siblings - who took care of them? This whole thing is just silly).
Well I guess it’s possible. But it’s not what I would consider typical, which is more important. Again, we are dealing with broad averages and generalities - obviously there will be exceptions.
Typically, a shopping trip will involve taking the kid out and into the car, out again and into the store, answering all sorts of little-kid questions, letting the kid hold some of the groceries etc. etc. along with a few "no"s thrown in along the way.
A woman can bake a cake with her kids in another room. No one is claiming that a kid needs to spend every waking moment in the company of her parent. But if the kid takes an interest, there will typically be some interaction. “Now we put in the sugar…” and the like. Maybe even get to help.
Again this is not to say that it is impossible to have a kid at home and shut her out. But what I am saying is that there is NOT a choice between child-centered days and day-care - that the regular routine of housework can and typically will incorporate meaningful interaction for the child. So that setting up a dichotomy between child-centered days and completely shutting out the kid is a false choice and misses what is likely the most typical scenario.
Well I certainly agree about the previous norm for housewives. But I am skeptical about your claim about the current norm.
This is the point made originally by CrankyAsAnOldMan and it is a valid point. But it only goes so far. You are saying at most that for someone who would prefer not to be at home these studies are not valid indicators. There are many people who do not fit that category, but who work anyway.
Furthermore, I am very inclined to believe that many of the people who would prefer not to be at home came by that very preference as a result of the societal glamorization of “careers” and devaluation of childcare and housework, as discussed previously. There are undoubtedly many people who regard toiling all day in a law form as fulfilling and toiling all day at housework as drudgery because of society’s relative value of these respective tasks. If this would change, there might be a lot of people who would suddenly become more “talented” at taking care of children than they would have supposed.
I think what is important is for each family to find a solution that works for everyone involved, both parent and child. No one family member’s interests should dominate, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Would you agree with that IzzyR?
Okay, you’ve got a field. It needs harvesting. If you harvest enough, you get to live through the winter. Now, are you going to leave one of the few able-bodied members of your family back at home playing patty-cake. Nope. Out to the fields with ya. Farm work is very labor intensive, and nobody on a farm can afford not to be working the fields, tending the animals, or doing some other intense, most likely out-of-the-house task for most of the day. There are plenty of agrarian societies now. Just take a look at how they divide labor. Did you know that the preference for women having fair skin, small feet and slim builds is because those are all signs that you are so rich that you don’t need your woman to be out working the fields with you? Doesn’t that imply that women working in the fields was common enough to make not working in the fields something very special?
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Don’t you have any grandparents to tell you about the “good old days” on the farm with their crotechty grandma and eleven sisters? For most of human history, in almost every culture, grandparents choose a chid to move in with (or, alternatively, newlywed couples move in with them). What do you think all that fuss about having male children in India and China is? The old folks just want somewhere to live. Even the freaking Amish do it. Havn’t you ever heard the term "mother-in-law unit (synonomous with “granny unit”) Why do you think they had such large freaking estates back in the day? Why do you think in traditional Europe, most of the inhertence is given to one child, not spread evenly? Why do you think they were hauling their gradparents’ dead body around in The Grapes of Wrath? The rest of the world looks at our practice of abandoning our elders as repugnent. This is because modern day America is one of the only cultures in all of human history around the world where the elderly do not live with their extended family.
sven - I imagine most would agree that an agrarian wife had things plenty tough without buying into your notion of her constantly toiling in the fields at her man’s side. Yes, crops need to be harvested. Planted as well. But not 12 months out of the year.
Certainly wives - as well as children as soon as they were old enough - would pitch in and help whenever possible. Perhaps we should do away with daycare, and bring back child labor?! Heck - make those little buggers turn a profit!
Of course, we are presently tremendously wealthier in such terms as energy and leisure, than at any time in the past. Education is freely available, and vocational and economic mobility are realistic possibilities. We have, to large extent, the ability to choose how we wish to structure our lives and our societies. Just because things may have been done one way in the past, is neither proof of its present desireability nor in itself sufficient reason to continue doing so.
My little anecdote.
I live in a rather wealthy suburb of Chicago. I am surprised at the number of households where both parents work full time professional jobs, with very young children. These are not people who NEED 2 incomes to SURVIVE. They may, however, need 2 salaries to live in half million dollar + houses, and drive 2 or more luxury cars. Moreover, they support their lifestyle choice by paying for maid services and nannies.
Yes, it is greatly a matter of personal choice. But I personally cannot imagine why someone would have a kid, and then not want to spend as much time as possible with them during their developmental years. Even if it meant living in a 300 thousand dollar house, and driving a Honda instead of a BMW.
Please note, I am commenting only about my neighborhood, and not about anyone who supports a less luxurious lifestyle on two incomes.
And, no, I do not believe a stay at home parent ought to make the household revolve solely around the kids. (Although I have difficulty imagining what is more important to a family that chose to have kids, than working towards having those kids grow up well.) The kids can learn tremendous lessons by seeing that the house needs to be cleaned, shopping needs to be done, chores have to be completed, AND the stay at home parent gets to enjoy some occasional moments of personal leisure. Moreover, when kids have gotten to pre-school age, to whatever extent possible they need to learn how to entertain themselves.
True. This is why, in fact, men’s and women’s work has historically been divided in certain ways–women were nearly always the ones with jobs that could easily be interrupted and combined with watching and feeding children. Cooking, carrying water, and especially spinning (and often weaving) and sewing are tasks that are relatively safe for children and often fairly stationary. Small children can run and fetch things to help out. Once the kids were past 5 or 6, of course, they started to actively help with chores or tend their siblings.
Did you know that cloth-making often took up more time than food production in agrarian societies? Also, women in the fields traditionally took their babies with them. Small children could help with the work. And, as above, would soon be actively taking part themselves. In the days before we decided that child labor was wrong, it was mandatory, especially in the societies you’re talking about. Not that I’m saying that grandparents didn’t help out, because they did–but they also died sooner than we do, and they weren’t the only child tenders.
Source: Women’s work: the first 20,000 years, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. A great book and I highly recommend it.
At any rate, the topic under discussion isn’t really “how our ancestors took care of children,” it’s “how we’re going to do it.” If we really wanted history to tell us how to treat our children, we’d put them to work right away, and expose babies that weren’t healthy. (I had always wondered how handicapped babies–say, with cerebral palsy–were cared for in the old days. It turns out they weren’t–they were usually left alone in a room until they died.)
I do believe that having a parent at home is best for the child and for the whole family–provided that the parent is reasonably well-suited to the job. Norinew’s family seems to have been happier with mom at work, for example. There are infinite varieties of family arrangements for childcare, and many of them are great. Some others are not great, but necessary. Some are just bad.
I myself enjoy being at home with my kids and feel lucky that we can do it. The lack of stress in our family life is due to me being able to be with our kids and take care of a lot of things during the day that two-income families have to do in their small amount of free time. I wonder how they do it, to be honest–I’m not sure I’d have the energy or the ability. I think most families are doing their best with what they’ve got.
It been acknowledged here that some people have no option but to use daycare, whether because they can’t survive on one income or because there is only one parent to provide income. Those families pretty clearly aren’t going to use these studies to decide between home care or day care, because they have no options. You concede that this study really doesn’t say anything about the effects on children without a parent who prefers to stay home, so these studies doesn’t really provide any information to them. The only real information it provides is that children in home care with a parent who wants to be there in a family that can afford it do somewhat better on certain measures than children in day care. Even if the results were unambigious that children at home with a parent who wanted to be there and could afford it did better on all measures than children in daycare, who exactly would be using the results to make a decision? Not the people who can’t survive financially without it-they have no options. Not the people who don’t prefer to be at home- study doesn’t say anything about their kids. Only the people who prefer to be at home, can afford to be at home and have outside employment anyway. Who are these people who don’t want jobs and don’t need jobs but have them anyway?
That typical scenario may not be an option for a particular family-and that’s the level where the choice is made. Parents usually don’t (and IMO, shouldn’t) make decisions for their particular kid based on what’s best for the typical child, but rather on what’s best for their particular child.
And what exactly caused the glamorization of careers if childcare and housework was so valued before ? Why didn’t men commonly choose to remain at home and care for children? Why was it not unthinkable for a man to believe he controlled the money because he earned it? I suspect it was the other way around - that careers became glamorized because society already placed so little value on housework and childcare.