Mothers at home matter

Lollipop Your post just shows how ignorant you are of the world of work and most working mothers.

Lollipop1

I brought up my own children, the extra money had I worked would have been very handy but had I not been able to stay at home, I would never have brought children into the world.

And what if you had had your children and then found yourself in circumstances where you needed to go to work?

biglouis, thanks for telling your experience. It broadens the discussion to be reminded that in many families across the classes, having mothers / wives was seen to reflect badly on the fathers ability to provide for his family. It also gave men control over their families.
Both my grandmothers worked in the mills, alongside other married women/mothers. My paternal grandfather shared the cooking and cleaning with grannie. His own father had been a poor father and husband, something grandpa and his brothers didn’t repeat.

I dislike the polarised views so often expressed in these discussions. I’m with Doodledog in believing we need a calm research based review of the costs and benefits of work and child care. My social work team would have been devastated and less effective if the women hadn’t returned after mat leave.

I didn’t like the idea of childcare for young children ( there wasn’t much around then, anyway)so I stayed home until mine went to school and then worked part time until they were around high school age when I went full time. It was very difficult and in the end I dropped a day a week and it was so much easier and I was more relaxed. Sometimes I worked weekends and nights and my husband was the caregiver then. I enjoyed meeting other adults and the to and fro of working life, I must admit. We were so lucky,looking back, because mortgages were affordable and we paid ours off by the time the children were mid- late teens. The huge mortgages that the young ones have to pay off now are dreadful, they have no choice but to both work.Life gets worse and harder as the years go by.

The logic is that the economy needs workers (more so since Brexit) so that it can grow.

Is our sole role in life to make the economy grow? A worthwhile job is a worthwhile job whether it be paid or unpaid, as in raising children.

Raising children should be valued, whether the person doing it is a nursery worker/child minder or a parent.

Luckygirl3

*The logic is that the economy needs workers (more so since Brexit) so that it can grow.*

Is our sole role in life to make the economy grow? A worthwhile job is a worthwhile job whether it be paid or unpaid, as in raising children.

Raising children should be valued, whether the person doing it is a nursery worker/child minder or a parent.

I just knew someone was going to come back with that, which is why I pointed out for avoidance of doubt that I was talking about financial contributions because you asked about financial reward. It is interesting that you ignore the rest of my post about the lack of logic in your claim that SAHPs should get paid money on top of all the other tax breaks and so on from which they benefit already.

The contributions to society in the form of raising happy and well-balanced children are made equally by working and SAHPs. Working parents still nurture and bring up their children. Having a trusted minder look after them for an hour or two after school is not abdicating that responsibility.

Were your children with you every minute of every day? Were they not allowed to play with friends after school, or go to clubs, or follow interests of their own? Or doing homework in their rooms when the 'farmed out' ones were doing it in an after-school clubs with access to a library and qualified staff? Or just sitting in their rooms being unsociable, like pretty much every 10-15 year old I've ever known? When you take that sort of thing into account, working parents often have as much time with their children as SAH ones.

Of course all childcare should be valued. Nobody is saying that it isn't. Why should it just be those who stay at home get more financial reward, though? What about those who look after their children and do the housework and do all the other things connected with parenthood, but also work?

I am not at all suggesting that the children of working mothers are not bringing up their children well - assuming of course they are able to find/afford the quality of child care that they want for their children.

It just all looks a bit cock-eyed at the moment. There is financial support for child care for working mothers, who still often finish up earning almost nothing by the time all the expenses associated with working are taken into account. I also appreciate that by doing so they are contributing to the economy. But their lives are frantic, meeting themselves coming back; and there can be no doubt that for some this is to the detriment of their parenting - they are tired and overworked trying to keep so many plates spinning. It is far from an ideal situation, but many keep going with it as they are frightened that if they duck out for a while they will lose their place on the career ladder.

I watch my DDs struggling with exactly this dilemma. One has solved it by her OH being the one who only works part-time while she provides most of the income to the household. Another works from home, with all the problems that causes of having one's attention split between work and school runs and child care. The other works for her sister and they have a gang of both lots of children rampaging about while they are trying to work - not easy.

It was always going to be a dilemma that most impacts on women. We all want to do the best for our children and that is very hard to do, especially where couples have high mortgages to pay that are based on more than one income.

Staying at home was a career choice for me. We were always short of money but managed somehow. I did go back to working outside the home when the youngest was a teenager.

I agree, Luckygirl, house prices are ridiculous these days, not like when we started out, although then the interest rates were 16/18% if I remember rightly.

My hairdresser who works from home, told me this week that her D who has a 2 year old now needs to go to work full time as their mortgage cost has gone up to £1400 a month.
None of my business I know but do young people really need large 4 bed houses with conservatory etc.
We, as I am sure many many of you did, started married life in rented then after 3 years of saving managed a 3 bed semi and I was able to be SAHM which I loved.
However I am told constantly “ times are different “.

I agree with your last post, Luckygirl, but it is saying something very different from your previous ones.

The logic behind providing (or helping with) childcare from the public purse is that it benefits the public purse to do so. Whether the individual mothers benefit in the short-term is debatable, I agree.

Paying parents to stay at home would be very unfair though, for all the reasons I've mentioned, but which boil down to the fact that (most) working parents also do the things that (most) SAH ones would be being paid for, so they would be being penalised for going to work.

I started married life in a small terrace but no by the time I had children I had a 4 bedroom house. I also massively benefitted from selling my tiny house for 3 times what I paid for it, a situation not available today.

If I hadn't kept working my children would not have eaten, let alone have a roof over their heads! My husband decided he didn't want to remain married, it appears he didn't want to pay for his children either! Despite several attempts to get him to pay, legal system exhausted, he never paid much as he kept moving house, job etc so nobody could find him!
It was tough, but looking back I feel proud that I did it all single handed.

Doodledog

I agree with your last post, Luckygirl, but it is saying something very different from your previous ones.

The logic behind providing (or helping with) childcare from the public purse is that it benefits the public purse to do so. Whether the individual mothers benefit in the short-term is debatable, I agree.

Paying parents to stay at home would be very unfair though, for all the reasons I've mentioned, but which boil down to the fact that (most) working parents also do the things that (most) SAH ones would be being paid for, so they would be being penalised for going to work.

Maybe working parents could be paid double! They could have help with childcare and be paid for doing a double shift when doing the housework and looking after the children as well.

(PS. I'm not entirely serious.)

Well done Shandy3. You should feel proud. It's amazing how many fathers seem to feel paying for their own children is optional. Just as well we kept working.

We take it for granted now that parents want their children to have more life chances than they had. One would imagine that parents who had been through WWII would want to see their children get on and have improved job prospects.

However this was not necessarily the attitude back in the 1950s and 1960s. To want something different from what your forebears had was seen as disrespectful and snobbish. My father actually said "Whats the good of educating a girl? Your only going to get married and have babies."Im sure there were girls in middle class homes who met this attitude as well to their detriment. They were sent to secretarial college while their brothers went off to university. My father was incredibly hostile because I had to open a bank account for my salary when I went into librarianship. Only "posh" people had bank accounts and cheque books.

I was just about to point out that for every single mum, there is a father, presumably family on his side...

There does semm to be an assumption that if a mother works the children are in professional childcare.

In many households these days, jobs are more flexible and childcare does not necessarily mean paid care. There are many other ways of covering the need, from part time working, to flexible working, to family care and indeed so it has ever been.

Both DH and I, and now DS and DDiL have been able to manage to amalgamate work and childcare with a minimum of outside care. A solution I fully understand is not available to everyone.

But my feeling from many of the SAHMs, who assume and do not hide successfully, their sense of moral superiority (not all of them, but most of them) is they all assume working mothers drop their children off at the nursery at 7.00am and do not collect them until 7.00pm, which of course is, to put it mildly, inaccurate.

I agree with your last post, Luckygirl, but it is saying something very different from your previous ones. .... I don't think so!!

My SIL has virtually never worked - she had one child and then stayed home for good. And she also believed that children should not be educated above their parents' standard as it causes problems in the family - it used to make me cross and her own DD did not have any sort of higher or college education. Sadly she is infertile so an interesting career would have been a big asset to her. And my brother was not at all well and I used to seethe quietly to myself as he struggled and his wife stayed at home - and played golf a lot!

I agree with your last post, Luckygirl, but it is saying something very different from your previous ones. .... I don't think so!!

Ok, maybe I am misreading, in which case I am sorry. to clarify - what do you think is logical about the state paying for people to stay at home when we need workers? What is logical about making those who work both at home and at work, and who pay tax and NI, which SAHPs don't, and then hit them with a double whammy of not getting the 'wages' given to those who are not paying in? Wouldn't it be more logical for them to decide not to keep working but live off the state instead, thus increasing the shortage of workers?

ETA to my post above - I am talking about the logic that was mentioned in your earlier post, from the perspective of the state (and its contributors) which needs a workforce - not necessarily from the perspective of those who want to SAH but are not able to afford to do so.

The option to stay home is almost eradicated, apart from, I'd imagine, if a partner earned enough to keep you.

My mother never worked after she got married - she firmly believed that it was the man's place to be the wage earner and the woman's place to be the home maker. She still didn't entirely approve of me going back to work after I had my children. Even though this was in the early 90s, I still remember one of my (very male chauvinist pig) colleagues expressing his astonishment that I planned to return to work too. He firmly believed that the only place for a woman was barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen! No irony whatsoever. I couldn't believe his attitude.

Luckygirl3 It is a matter of choice, but both choices need to be supported. At the moment help is available to buy child care, but no help is available to offset loss of earnings/pension rights. That does not make logical sense.

Staying home with children is a matter of choice, end of. However, I don't understand why anyone making that choice could expect an offset for loss of earnings/pension? That's part of the choice. Or was for us.

M0nica In many households these days, jobs are more flexible and childcare does not necessarily mean paid care. There are many other ways of covering the need, from part time working, to flexible working, to family care and indeed so it has ever been.

Clearly "these days", location near work and childcare, availability of any family care, and part time or flexible hours in worker's jobs - matter.

Not everyone has the advantages you list. We didn't.