I think that’s definitely one challenge of being a stay-at-home parent: staying engaged and enjoying what you’re doing. By and large, the women I know who do stay at home and enjoy it are the ones who are involved in children’s and parents’ groups. It’s so easy to become a hermit and have the “four walls around you and the clock ticking.” But if you force yourself to get out and take your kids with you and get them involved in something you all enjoy, it’s much more fulfilling. At least, that’s my take from a very brief stint as a stay-at-home parent when I left my job a couple of years ago. (It wasn’t because I wanted to be a SAHM, it was because I hated my job and it just wasn’t worth it to me to stay.)
The women I know who stay at home and literally stay at home all day are miserable.
If I wanted to be a stay-at-home parent, I would be by now. I’m not doing a second university degree for fun, I’m doing it because I have a passion for a particular career and I want to spend the rest of my life working in that field. The fact that I’m a woman has nothing to do with it; he feels the same way about his schooling and career aspirations.
If/when we have kids, he’d actually be the better stay-at-home parent, but I would never ask or expect him to do so, nor would he ask or expect me to. I doubt I’d even take the maximum time off for maternity leave (assuming we could afford it); a year without working? Not going to happen. He can take his 17 weeks and I’ll go back to work!
I responded to the notion of having to work. We got married when I was in grad school, and of course she had to work, and made more than I did, and I never gave it a thought. After I graduated and got a good job, we decided to have a kid fairly quickly, and she didn’t work outside the home, which worked out nicely. The second place we lived had a very good support network of SAHMs. But kids don’t last forever, and the best thing about this option was that she was able to change careers into something that she enjoyed far more than her old one. She was able to ease into it, and able to work from home.
Female, and I did have to work when I was married because my husband was on disability. I knew this going in. I would do it again because, somebodys got to work. Though I would expect housework help.
Yes, there’s a ton of things to be done around the house, enough to keep a person occupied all their waking moments. But an awful lot of those things are tedious, repetitive, mind-bogglingly dull tasks–dishes, laundry, picking up, dusting, floors, errands. And that tends to be the bulk of your day. Every. single. day. of. your. life. It bored the tits right off me, and scheduling things to break up the tedium has the secondary effect of giving you far less time to get all the boring, tedious, PITA work done. I suspect it’s exactly the things that keep your wife from feeling like the walls are closing in that make her complain about not having enough time to get things done.
As for the original question, ime women under 40 or so are more likely to feel bad about staying home than about working. We’ve grown up with dual-income families being the norm, with moms who hammered it into us that we must be able and willing to support ourselves, with society measuring a person’s worth by how much money they make. You’ve seen the stuff people have said in this thread about housewives “not contributing” to the household–it can take some doing to get past that mindset.
I’d go nuts if I couldn’t work. By week 10 of maternity leave, I was climbing up the walls (didn’t help that I went on leave in late January, so I was pretty well housebound due to it being winter). I’m female, in my 30s.
I have no idea what this poll even means. Adults support themselves when possible. Able-bodied adults should be expected to work for their own upkeep (the current economic situation taken into consideration, as I am aware that it’s currently difficult for people to find work). The idea that a woman shouldn’t work if she’s married but has no kids is ludicrous.
If there are children, the parents determine FOR THEMSELVES whether or not one of them can be a stay-at-home parent, and if so, which one. If they both need to work, then they figure out a way to manage the rest of it.
Why on EARTH would a woman expect to not have to work after marriage?
One of the reasons polls like this interest me is to see how as an expatriate, how far my own experiences and attitudes I’ve adopted deviate from those had & held by people in my native country.
The thing about being alone in the house with nothing to keep you company but a ticking clock, a screaming baby and a sink full of dirty dishes, for example – yeah, I can see how that’d suck. But having lived here as long as I have, my first reaction is to think, where are the grandparents and uncles and aunties and why can’t they help out and keep one company at home? And then I remember – oh yeah, you guys are Americans, that’s not the way you roll.
ETA: not to say that it’s better or worse, just different.
(& for that matter, why not hire a Philippene maid? They’re not that expensive . . . I know, I know)
Just realized you said pretty much the same thing already. Yes, having the extended family around seems to make a big difference – sometimes I’ve come home and felt like my turning up was more of an interruption than anything else, if they’re all busy playing with the Wii or something.
I have to defend working to my mother. She’s 57 and has not worked since before I was born and thinks of that as the default. I can’t get it through to her that that simply isn’t the way the world is any more (it was scarcely like that when I was a child!). I wouldn’t put myself in any of the categories, really, because my mother has made the working/not working thing such a huge and stupid issue in my life.
I’m not American, and for many of my friends, relatives and acquaintances, one of the things that made stay at home periods worse was precisely the presence of relatives. For some reason, many of those relatives will stand in your kitchen and chat while you do dishes if you have a job, but if you don’t and they decide to grace your house with their presence, they expect a gracious hostess. If you don’t have a job, they assume you will be available to run their errands; if you do have a job, they ask whether you are available to run their errands. Others are helpful in ways you’d rather they didn’t: you’re doing whatever, wonder where did your mother go, and find her in the kitchen, scrubbing the self-cleaning oven which doesn’t need scrubbing but since hers does, she expects that yours will (not my mom, but yes it’s a real case).
My boyfriend and I live together with a cat, no kids, and jobs with hours that constitute part-time (I work 9-6 three days a week and teach 9 hours, he teaches Tues-Thurs). Our house is rarely as clean as it should be and the laundry basket always seems to overflow. I honestly don’t know how people with kids and full time jobs do it.
This is me, too. Depending on how well or how bad I’m doing at work, the idea of being a SAHM is more or less appealing. But I would really, really like more me-time then I have now. Screw feminism, that is how I feel. I also think I could find volunteer work that would be every bit as rewarding as the work I’m doing now. But I know that not-working would probably not be good for me. But maybe taht is just feminist guilt speaking.
I do all the housework, half of the care for our toddler, and work parttime (four days a week). Husband works 4 days a week too.
Yes, but was it the not woorking that drove you up the wall? Or the very demanding job of caring for a new-born while you are still recovering from birth?
That’s still the reality for a lot of women - you can’t have it all. Period. If you have kids, the woman is far more likely to do the majority of the child-oriented and household tasks, and if you don’t have kids, the woman is far more likely to do the majority of the household tasks.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a job that didn’t involve repetitive tasks - you enter all those invoices, and there’s a new pile waiting for you.
So, if there aren’t children that means the grown-ass adults don’t get to decide together who works and who doesn’t? Ridiculous. If there’s one person in the marriage that hates the 9-5 grind but loves doing all of the household things, the other person is comfortable or even happy with that situation, and they can afford to do it, why shouldn’t they? The house stays in good shape and spouse 2 doesn’t have to worry about any of it. Whether it’s the husband or wife that stays at home, I don’t see how it’s such a bad thing if both people are in agreement.
It was a great arrangement for me and my SO. The house was spotless and when he was done working at the end of the day, we had the rest of the day free to do whatever we wanted. No chores to worry about then.
Actually, I agree that a stay-at-home partner can be a good arrangement for many couples. I think the emphasis on the word “expect” here is important. The thread is whether women feel resentment at being forced to work, or whether men feel guilt that their partners work. A mutual agreement is one thing, a sense of entitlement is another, especially that your partner “owes” you some particular lifestyle by virtue of you owning a vagina. No way, man. Uncool.
As you say man has an equal right to be the stay-at-home, if such an arrangement benefits the couple. That said the partner in that position should be very careful that they are financially protected. In the event of a divorce – or if the working partner is hit by a bus one day – they can find themselves in a very tenuous financial position because of the difficulty of getting employment.
For me, it’s more about not contributing to society. You go to work every day, and with that you manage to both support your household and do whatever presumably useful thing your job does- be that building trade a wealth as a business, teaching, getting the mail delivered, creating art, solving disputes or whatever. You are making the world a better place.
But the housewife just contributes to the household. That’s all you do…keep one little household going. Keep two or three people in a nice house. Compared to what I’ve done career-wise (teaching a couple thousand kids, helping a company grow from two people to twenty) it seems like an awfully small contribution to the world and kind of a sad waste of the talents that god gave me.
I’d go equally crazy on an assembly line or in another job where it was just endless repetitive work with no progress or meaning. While all the jobs I’ve had have had some repetitive tasks, these tasks are part of a larger project that does give me a sense of progress and purpose.