The benefits of my kids being with me full time are they get to see me crabby and irritable all times of the day and I get to impart my sarcasm and farting on them and watch it come back on me two fold. I know where they get their bad manners from.
I’m not paying someone else to teach my kids these things! I have no honor but I have integrity. It’s for sale on Ebay at a low starting bid of .99
When I was a teenager, due to the economy being in the dumper and having three kids of varying ages at home ( me being the youngest and in private school.)
my mom went back to work for the first time in 30+ years.
30 years. It’s not like she was sitting around eating bon-bons. But 30 years…
I was looking at her resume and it said her last job was at Grand Trunk Railroad in 1948. It was 1981ish. I said to my mom. " Ma! It’s been thirty years since your last job!"
“Yeah. They already know that I left GTR to have a baby. This resume is just a formality.”
“MA! Thirty years! How do they know you weren’t in prison or something!” 
And she carried back and forth with her every day to work a old Royale Typewriter, a manual with more metal in it than an SUV today. Because it was easier and faster than one of those darn electric typewriters.
She obviously never worked where I do. :dubious: I’m sorry for being snarky, but two people in the group of supposed adults I supervised the last couple of weeks was not entirely unlike dealing with the group of special needs preschool/k students I used to work with: like the kids they didn’t listen, kept my attention on them rather than the other six people who were doing better, couldn’t do anything without help, kept me busy fixing their mistakes, constantly needed reassurance that they were on the right track (not that the two of them often were) and wouldn’t even leave me in peace during breaks; at least the kids were adorable and I knew they’d be making positive strides in the furture. I’ve never so badly wanted to ask someone “How can you be so much older than me but be so much dumber?!” as I did around midweek. Thank god we’re done that project and they’ll be someone else’s problem the next one. Being around kids instead might have been a relief… sorry, sorry, I know I’ve gotten off track.
Stay at Home Parents are neat. My dad was laid off a couple of weeks before my brother was born, so for a few months he looked after my brother and I fulltime, since I had summer vacation. He seemed to enjoy it (he’d always been an involved parent, though, which I’m sure helps), and I know that I was bummed when he went back to work in the fall. I’ve always wondered if that experience might be one of the reasons I always got along better with my dad than most of my friends of both sexes got along with theirs. Still do, actually.
I’m not much interested in having kids, but if I were to marry someone with a damn good job, and I did have offspring, I’d like to stay home with them. Hey, at leven if they drive me insane with neediness, I’d have hope they’d mature. unlike some of my coworkers.
I am sure that SAHMs with very young children have a lot more housework to do than full-time working moms. Because yes, there is more housework when people are at home during the day. but that doesn’t mean that her hours spent doing housework add up to more than my hours going to work and doing housework. Somewhere towards the beginning of this thread, there was a statement that a study found that a SAHM works the equivalent of three full time jobs- that’s about 120 hours a week out of 168, leaving 48 hours for sleeping and any personal time. The only way that can work is if every waking hour is treated as “on call” time- and if it’s treated as on-call time for SAHM’s it should also be treated as on- call time for working moms. I may not have cooked five or six meals a day , or picked up seven times a day even when my kids were little- but I’ll bet I did as much clutter control , spill clean-up, etc between 5pm and bedtime and on weekends as you did. Having children home an extra forty hours results in more housework, but not more than forty hours worth of extra housework. Once the kids are in school full-time, there is less extra housework, and there may be no extra housework ( my high school age kids leave for school before I leave for work, and get home around the same time I do.)
I know SAHM’s do other things besides housework, like volunteering at schools, churches, etc. The thing is, first of all, moms with jobs also do these things ( and in my experience, which is probably unusual, it was the working moms and dads who tended to be Scout leaders, and coaches or volunteer drivers. SAHM’s didn’t volunteer to do much after school hours). Secondly, I know there are “SAHMs” who spend easily as many hours a week doing volunteer work as I spend at a paid job. Some of them are the very same people look down on moms with jobs.But what is the qualitative difference for a child if hs mother spends forty hours a week at a paid job or at unpaid volunteer work?
Before having children in tow, I never would have believed the extra time it takes to do the most simple tasks. While a working parent can spend less than 15 minutes picking up the dry cleaning and stopping quickly at the bank on his way to get the kids from the sitter’s, the care giving parent can spend over an hour accomplishing the same results with an infant/toddler combo in full snow gear, 5-point hitch carseat belting systems, and assorted sippy cups and snacks to manage. Add another 20 minutes if the toddler is learning to toilet.
There’s also the obvious: A sahp tends to do more things for the family which working parents pay others to do for them. Food preparation, for an easy example. I’m sure you’ll be able to cite plenty of anecdotal evidence of lazy sah parents who serve mac-n-cheese and tv dinners, but in my experience processed/fast/MRE food is standard fare in a two-parent-working household and is less so in a home run by a full time parent. When a family makes the decision to give up a sizeable chunk of its income to have a parent home with the children, usually the first thing to go is pricey convenience foods. We tend to make our own sauces, buy whole chickens and process the bird ourselves, and do more cooking from scratch instead of spending tons of money on jars, packets, and $4 a pound boneless breasts. It’s easy for someone who microwaves the family dinner 4 nights a week and orders out for pizza or brings home deli on busy nights to wonder what the heck that sahm is doing with her entire day. Living on roughly half the money they’re used to forces people to make tough choices and these often involve some very time consuming processes.
For the SAHM, the workload gets easier as the children get older. When they are all in school it gets considerably easier. This is not true for the working parent though. They have to bust their hump right up until retirement.
This is not a reason to ‘look down’ upon SAHMs, but still, you can’t deny that once the kids are older, some SAHMs have it pretty good. They may choose to fill the time with extra volunteer work, but they don’t have to.
Also I think the SAHM is in the position of deciding for themselves what level of ‘work’ they want. The extreme case being the bon-bon eating, Jerry Springer-watching parent who just let’s the kids run wild. That’s an extreme case, but everyone draws the line differently. It’s possible to go to the other extreme too, and work yourself to a frazzle.
My point is, the SAHM gets to decide for themselves how much work to do. Vacuum once a day or once a month? Nobody tells them what to do; they get to decide for themselves. Working parents don’t get that.
Farmwoman, that’s a lot of generalizations. I live in the 'burbs and am surrounded by SAHMs who live in half a million dollar houses. I’d bet none of these women debone their own chicken (they might have the housekeeper do it). And if they are making their own sauce, its with fresh storebought basil and the ingredients are a lot more than the jar of Ragu. On the other hand, I have friends who are working single parents - they know how to debone a chicken - and friends where two incomes don’t add up to half of what some of my neighbors make with one - they garden and can their own vegetables with the most productive SAHPs - fitting in a forty hour a week job along with weeding, canning and baking.
The effort required for either choice has a lot of variables. A big one, how much money is there? It does not follow that one income means less money - if that one income belongs to a cardiologist. Another, how much effort you put forth, the ages of the kids, and the independence level of the kids. For working parents, what kind of job they do outside the home makes a big difference. A physical or very intense job is going to be different than a job where there is little pressure, little physical labor and a lot of water cooler talk.
And I know how difficult it is to get kids in and out of the car in snowsuits, because, believe it or not, working parents do that all the time, too. I have lunch at my desk more days than not. By the time I commute home, its time to pick up kids - no time to run to the grocery store without them. As a working parent, I’d rather have them with me for errands at the end of the day anyway. I’ve done most of my kidless errand running over the years not during lunch or commute, but when my husband has the kids, or my mother, or they are off at birthday parties or playdates - probably just like you do.
My wife is a SAHM. It’s something she never thought she’d be doing, but here she is. She was ecstatic when our daughter was old enough for preschool last fall, that gave her two mornings a week without the kids! Money is a little tight occasionally, and she just mentioned this morning that an extra income would be nice. But it would also bring on a whole new range of stresses. Mornings are difficult enough now, and if she were “really” working, we’d need to get up earlier, get the kids to day care earlier (than school starts now), and then we’d have to squeeze in all day to day tasks she does during the day at night. And nights are bad enough now. There are certainly good days hen they have lots of fun or the kids are especially sweet, but my wife feels conflicted both ways, really. If she got lots of respect for being a mom maybe it would be different. Either way (SAHM mom or not, I mean), raising a fmaily is hard work and nothing prepares you for it. Except experience.
I have the utmost respect for SAHMs. My wife stays home with our 3 month old while I go to work for 11 hour days. She has no adult conversation, no breaks. Meanwhile, I get 2 mandatory 10 minute breaks and a 30 minute break where no one can ask me anything. And I get paid for this too. But I have to admit that I am occaisionally jealous of her since she gets to see most of the firsts while I’m off working. There are days I would switch gladly.
I don’t have problems with SAHMs, though I was a latch-key kid so I don’t know what its like to have one.
However, once the kids are grown and out of the house, I don’t see how anyone could just stay at home. I mean, how could you NOT get bored?
One thing I don’t think we’re acknowledging here - and I don’t want to offend people, so please keep in mind I don’t know how you live - is HOW can a woman possibly find the time and energy for both a career AND motherhood? How can you do that without one of them suffering? I could not. I don’t know how you can. Plain and simple. My interests and passions and desires will be taking a backseat to theirs for many, many years. I will not accomplish as much professionally as I otherwise would. Period.
Does this make me less of a woman, or more of a mother?
I don’t know the answer.
Well, in my opinion, you have to possibly scale back on your expectations. You can’t have the Martha Stewart house along with the 15 hour a day six figure salary career. You can have a somewhat cluttered house, and a flexible , 35- 40 hour a week career. It also helps to have a husband who is willing to do more than average.
And I say possibly for a reason- I don’t know that my house would be any less cluttered if I didn’t have a job. I don’t sew my own curtains, cook completely from scratch ,etc- but I wouldn’t have done those things if I didn’t have a job. I don’t know that would have spent more time actually engaged with my kids if I hadn’t been working - sure I would have spent more time physically in the same house, but I don’t know that I would have spent more time reading to them, playing games with them, taking them to their activities, talking to them etc. I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t have wanted a 15 hour a day job even if I hadn’t had children.
My mom did it. Worked from the time I was a baby until - well, she still hasn’t stopped. We had a healthy meal every night, my parents were our baseball and softball coaches, and I never felt like we were missing out on anything.
I don’t know how she did it, but she did.
Now, as I get closer to having my own child, I wonder if I want to do what she did. I had a fantastic role model, but I find myself wanting to be a SAHM more than I ever thought I would. And I will probably be like my mom, working full-time from the time my babies are born. And I have a feeling I’m going to resent it, just like I think my mom did. I don’t think all women would resent it - I know a few that work and wouldn’t choose anything different - but for some reason, I find this independent attitude that I’ve always had is somehow changing.
I don’t know if there’s an answer either.
E.
A lot depends on where you get your energy from. I find 16 hour days filled with chlidren exhausting. I’m a terrible stay at home mom without the energy to be a good mom. But I enjoy what I do outside the home, so for the four-five hours a weekday evening (and sixteen hours a day on weekends/vacations), I’m refreshed and reenergized from work and ready to shift gears into mom. Likewise, being at home with the kids all weekend gives me new appreciation for my job. You can be a full time half assed SAHM, or a full time half assed with no children worker.
I had a stay-at-home mother (desperately bitter and depressed about this fact but she couldn’t do much as we were living in remote Northern Quebec at the time) from age 2-11 and a stay-at-home father age 14+ (although he has a job…he’s an inventor but he does it on the couch) and even in those 3 years when my mom was working 40 hours a week and my father had to go in to a real office to do his job (40 hours a week) our house was pretty clean and I got a home-cooked healthy meal every single day so it’s not as though all of us latch-key kids sit around eating pizza getting tubby or anything. Personally, I wish beyond anything my mom could have had a job while we were growing up-the fact that she hated “sitting around the house” was made extremely clear to us. On the other hand, my father has no problem doing the exact same thing and aside from running the vacuum once a week, inventing random things and mixing the chapati dough 30 minutes before my mom gets home I don’t see him doing a whole lot.
Having a good husband helps.
Both of my parents worked very hard. But if my father hadn’t had a good-paying job with good hours (he was and still is an elementary school principal), my mother would not have been able to do the work-a-holic thing. I remember my father cooking dinner more than my mother did (mmm, fried rice and hot dogs with red soda!). He also did laundry in addition to the more traditional “fatherly” duties like mowing the yard, getting the cars fixed, etc. He was an equal partner.
And you know what? The kids in my family were not helpless beings either. When we came home from school, we frequently had a list of chores waiting for us. Clean the bathrooms. Dust the furniture. Vacuum the living room. We took turns doing the dishes. We had to clean our own bedrooms. Mommy slept while we made our own breakfasts and packed our own lunchboxes each morning. I remember doing these things as early as six. And of course, having older siblings helped.
It also helped that my parents weren’t trying to maintain an idyllic home or be uber-parents. For instance, my mother did not waste energy and time making beds in the morning, nor did she force the rest of us to. Each meal did not have to be perfectly nutritious, nor did the house have to be immaculate every day of the week. We were not scheduled in sixty million activities, and our parents did not feel like they had to know our every thought or emotion. They had realistic goals and expectations.
It wasn’t always good, though. I remember coming home upset a few times when I had problems with homework or just general stress, and having no mother to immediately hug me made it worse. I also remember the orchestra concerts that conflicted with meetings, or the times I was almost “forgotten” to be picked up from practices. And of course, I watched too much TV, ate too much junk food, and got locked out of the house way too many times. But I never felt neglected or deprived of either of my parents’ attention or love. When I look back on the things both of my parents did for their children, despite the long work hours they put in each day, I feel very blessed and grateful.
A mother can do it both, but she can’t do it well if she’s doing it by herself, IMHO.
Seems that if she is trying to do everything herself, then she can’t be a decent mother and have a good career. But that’s the thing: she shouldn’t be trying to do everything. Fathers have to step up to the plate.
Both my parents worked and both of them took care of the household. My mother probably would not have tolerated my father not being right next to her in the trenches. He did laundry, he cooked, he washed dishes, he did the yardwork, he woke the kids up in the morning. Whenever I hear about women doing all the housework while the men just “help”, as if they have less at stake, I am glad that my dad wasn’t the type of person that needed to be asked to pick up a broom and sweep the damn floor. He just did it.
Us kids were also taught self-sufficiency early on. Once my twin and I reached third grade or so, we made our own breakfasts, our own bag lunches, and got ourselves out the door to catch the school bus. We were latch-key kids and watched ourselves when we got home. I don’t feel like I suffered for not having 24 hour adult supervision.
That’s so weird, monstro. I hadn’t read your post before I made mine, but they say most of the same things.
Well, I guess there’s good reason for that.
My job isn’t a career, so that helps. I don’t take work home with me, in fact, work doesn’t cross my mind unless I’m in the building. Climbing the corporate ladder isn’t exactly on my agenda.
When I got pregnant, I had the misguided notion that my daughter’s dad would be around to help. I was wrong. Fortunately, I have a great family who has always been there when I’ve needed help.
So, in other words, many of us don’t have a choice. We don’t sit around thinking about how to find the time and energy, we just do it. It’s difficult, but I think a woman can be a good mother and also have a fulfilling career (which I hope to do someday).
It ain’t a competition. I think we’re all just doing what we can to raise our children the best we can. Perfection isn’t the goal.
My mother went to work when I was in 7th grade and my brothers were in 5th grade and kindergarten. Our house worked a lot like monstro’s. Dad, mom and all three kids were responsible for keeping things running. (We didn’t have to make breakfast, but we did have to make our beds.) Even before she went to work, all the kids had chores in addition to being expected to clean up after ourselves (when we were tiny, that just meant picking up our toys and putting dishes away after a meal; things like laundry came later). Shortly after returning to work, mom realized that the house was never going to be as spotless as it was when she was home. So she learned to accept a little bit of extra dirt, and she also hired a cleaning lady and yard service.