Netfriend 1

In my circle of friends and acquaintances, there is a significantly different perception of this issue from that abroad in the general population. Population: * decide when to have children; * decide how little time they spend away from their career/job; * put those children into long-day care with [miserably paid] child carers as soon as possible, so they can return to work; My circle: * realise that “mothering” is not the same as “fathering” or “caring”; * raise their children in a responsible fashion; * spend sufficient effort and enough time with children at an early age that the child is given a loving start in life;

Netfriend 2:

I would like to add a third option.

* exercise the gifts which God has given them, which may include gifts which make them valuable in the full time work force for a significant part of their adult lives and may even mean that they don’t have children at all.

* recognise that having children is not the same as buying a car, home or pet * make adequate provision for the parenting of their children which will ideally not involve putting a child regularly into long day care at an early age to be brought up according to the values of others * spend sufficient effort and enough time with children at an early age that the child is given a loving start in life.

1:

From the former flows the idea that women must be supported through the process of giving birth and then returned to work asap. From the latter flows the idea that women might ‘spend’ their career-chances on their children if that is what makes for robust children-youths-adults.

2:

Although I am biologically the one in my marriage who is capable of giving birth and breast feeding, I am not a particularly patient parent and I certainly don’t get the kind of joy and satisfaction that my husband does from caring for young children, so he has stayed at home for their preschool and primary school years and I have worked outside the home. I have other friends who have both chosen to work part time once their babies grew a little, so that they could both share the nurturing and care of the children. I don’t see that it is necessarily the mother and the mother alone who needs to ‘spend’ career-chances on children in order to make robust children-youths-adults. Who says that either parent has to be incredibly successful in the sphere of work? If two parents working part time can provide enough income to support the family at a reasonable level, why is it important that neither is promoted way up the career ladder because neither is working full time?

1:

I remain flabbergasted that society is driving women to ever-greater expectations that biology just barely supports. Let me illustrate it this way: [A very male illustration, perhaps!] * A pilot flying a plane or a racing driver in a car will use their vehicle to “the edge of the envelope” where just a little further brings danger and even disaster. * Biology dictates that men can not bear children, and that women have (usually) a finer ability than men to rear children. Yet, we are driving women to near or even over the edge of their biological envelope such that women are succumbing to ever-increasing examples of not coping physically and emotionally. Society is now seeing the outcomes (children growing up value-less, ‘forgotten’ and ‘wasted’, etc) and these outcomes are typically not pleasant.

2:

I agree that a lot of the societal pressures push women to the edge when they feel that they have to be able to have children, be super-parents and hold down a full time job as well, and I think this is very, very wrong. I don’t believe, however, that it is biology that makes women usually better child-rearers so much as socialisation. Research shows very clearly that people treat boy babies quite differently to girl babies and that this difference continues on through childhood and adolescence. Even in our family where the traditional male/female roles have been reversed at a number of levels, I still do most of the cooking and much of the inside housework and Bruce does most of the mending and outside housework because that’s what we’re best at because that’s what we were taught to do as children.

Our daughter has had modelled for her that women do maths and computers and she stuns her teacher who functions within reasonably strict gender stereotypes by being better at many aspects of computing than the boys in the class and the only girl who has any clue about them. However, she also does make-up, clothes and hair because that’s what girls do at her school. Our son likes to cook and sew, but spends most of his spare time reading on working with computers because that’s how he relates to his peer group. Like his father, he’s far more patient than either his sister or I am.

1:

Others have mentioned the value of mothering, and how it is NOT ‘valued’. But, does it need to be valued in monetary terms?

2:

Why not, when fathering seems to be? A good father in this scheme of things seems to be one who can earn enough money to support the family so that the mother can stay home and look after the children. Why, then, should not mothering be given some sort of monetary value? Although I suspect that this is *not* the way it is in the Ellis family, one could be forgiven for thinking that the father’s only responsibility is making sure that the mother spends adequate time caring for their children, and that the father has no significant role in interacting with the children.

1:

* When do we quit “chasing our tail” with the inflated cost [value?] of housing that is used as scarcely a dormitory, cars and ‘show’, etc, and place/invest value instead on our society itself?

2:

Very good questions, but what has this to do with a woman’s role in the family per se? Either parent can earn income -and what about those situations where if the mother goes out to work, she can earn enough to support the family, but if the father works full time, the mother has to work part time as well for there to be even a modest standard of income? Surely the children have a good chance of getting a better standard of parenting with the father’s whole attention than with only the mother’s part time attention?

1:

My own circumstances were such that >>> my wife’s decision <<< to mother our children until the youngest was out of Primary School has meant that we were not too disadvantaged by not having an income from her. >>> She <<< has recently decided that she can supplement our family income with part-time work as a teacher.

And we’ve done it the other way around.

I realise that there are others who can not know the luxury of our decision, but then might also be able to make the same decision if they valued their life, aspirations, family, children differently.

2:

I agree that some families place far too high an emphasis on getting material goods, but there are also others where neither parent is capable of earning sufficient income to enable one of them to devote their full time to parenting for any length of time. Does this mean that they should not be allowed to have children? In the past, many families like this managed because extended family provided free child-care whereas the increasing fragmentation of our society makes this very difficult. And one has to wonder how it is that some people are only ‘worth’ $430/week (the minimum wage) whereas others are paid many times this amount. I think there should be some differential based on the level of responsibility taken, but the differentials that exist in our society today are offensively large.

1:

This week my wife has seen some of the outcomes of poor decision-making as parents. (The question of whether there should be a “parenting license” before people are allowed to have children is another question entirely.)

2:

Yes, well … I’ve seen poor decision-making on the part of parents where there is a stay-at-home parent as well as dual income families and also in families where *both* parents are at home with the children which on the surface should result in superb care. I suspect that we tend to assume that having both parents work is a likely cause of noxiousness on the part of children, so we notice this, whereas if there is a “nice stable” family background, we look elsewhere for an explanation in the same way that some of the population will say “that badly behaved aboriginal child” but never “that badly behaved anglo child”.