"... but I’m not cut out to be a stay at home parent"
As with leadership skills, I think that enjoying to be a stay at home parent also must be learnt. It might seem hard, or boring, or tedious to some. But I am convinced basically anyone can make an enjoyable experience of it if they actually make an effort. It will not come automatically, it will take some time and effort.
I know it's boring and very, very hard work. Which is why I believe that we should support stay at home moms (and dads) by elevating the position in society and recognizing the hard and rewarding work it is. Going back to a career and paying someone to take care of your child is quite frankly the easy way out.
Women leaving the workplace to raise kids should be seen as a victory, not a "problem" that needs to be fixed. It's definitely not easy though and all of this media broadcast negativity surrounding being a parent instead of having a career can't make it any easier.
Oooh, that could be a controversial point of view.
I've done a fair bit of the stay-at-home dad thing and I found it HARD. There something unremitting about dealing with the demands of small children while trying to keep the house clean and food on the table (and while my office life was all about getting rid of repetitive tasks, stuff like cleaning and cooking just has to be done again and again, which I found very hard to deal with).
I used to look forward to the days I went to the office; they were like days off.
No, I would never say that "staying at home with the kids" was the easy option.
Hmmm. You're writing this as if being a stay-at-home mom is pure bliss. It's not. It is completely wonderful to spend a lot of time with your children. But it also has a huge cost in adult self-actualization and development. Some of that is completely silly (the way our culture values people who work more than those who don't, or who are experts at projecting a sense of workplace-type competence). But some is completely legit: striving and succeeding in the adult work world can also be rewarding and exciting. From our experience, looking after a kid leaves very little time for hobbies.
That finances thing is a pain... same situation here :-)
> Some cited the boredom of stay-at-home momism. Many complained of partners who didn't shoulder their share of child care responsibilities.
I don't have kids yet, but when and if that will happen I'll try to make sure that the mother of my kids won't ruin her career and her sense of self-worth by becoming a stay-at-home-mother. That's how I grew up, with both my parents having full-time jobs, if it was good enough for me as a kid seeing my parents happy and all I hope it will be good enough for my children.
That's true if you were just managing the home. I know that "homework" and caring for kids alone may sometimes be exhausting, but regularly allocating time for studying is usually worth it for everyone. I personally know two mothers who successfully changed their careers for better during their stay-at-home years.
I agree that nothing's wrong with making the choice to be a stay at home mother (or father), especially when children are very young and not at school. But as a society we have organised ourselves in such a way that this choice is economically and socially much harder to make than it used to be and in my view much harder to make than it should be.
One of the problems in particular is that it is far too hard for people to come back to the workplace after taking a 5 or 6 year career break to look after children while they're young. People know this and it too often forces them into one of two paths - give up on their career entirely, or go back to work much sooner than they wanted to.
So back when being a stay at home mom was the norm, it was hard, but now that working moms are the norm, being a stay at home mom is easy? I don't think that checks out.
I did being a stay at home dad for a few years. I didn't like it much, although it was fun in small doses. These days thanks to retooling my skill set as my stay at home dad side project, I'm a dad that works from home on interesting stuff that pays the bills. My inlaws were not impressed with my house cleaning abilities.
I have to disagree with this one. My wife has been a domestic engineer almost since we were married. I wouldn't do her job (actually, I would if she died and I had to).
She does everything around the house. She makes all of the baby food, cooks all of the breakfasts, lunches and dinners and educates our children who -- at their young age -- have three settings: histeric laughter/screaming and yelling.
She doesn't have to commute, but in order to keep the children sleeping through the night, she has a more rigid schedule than I do.
When the kids are older, I'm sure it gets easier, but it's no picnic when you have two under age three.
I'll stand by my statement that the hard work you put in when raising an infant is rewarding. Just as cutting firewood to stay warm in the winter would be, but I digress...
When they go to school is when the stay at home parent has time to indulge in their actual interests. By that time, if one partner is working and the other is SAH, the finances should be pretty stable so the at home partner should be able to enjoy their free time a bit.
I still maintain that a huge part of the problem is that people tie their identity to a career. When the child goes to school, the at home partner should not just sit around watching tv and getting existentially miserable. They should start working on their interests. It's really a valuable opportunity and a bit of a pay off for all the hard work they did when the child was an infant.
Well the idea of a stay at home parent is that child care is work. You can either pay someone or do it yourself, in which case you're doing the job you would have paid someone else to do.
It's comedy, but honestly, being a stay-at-home mom really isn't the hardest job on the planet. And looking back at most of history, it was probably a luxury.
P.S.: I am a father that works remote from home. My girlfriend is a stay-at-home mom. Our daughter spends most time at school. Honestly, my girlfriend has a pretty relaxed life. I take care of the money and we got a small house, so cleaning the house really takes little time (I even help in weekends vacuum cleaning and evenings doing dishes). In daytime she has many hours to spend as she sees fit. And in evenings often as well.
"If she stays at home with kids, she was also working."
I think it's reasonable to believe that some jobs are harder than other jobs. Staying home with the kids, while hard (and maybe even boring) isn't as demanding as the jobs that some people have.
I have to tell you that I'd rather the person who operates on a heart or a brain or flys a 777 (and there are many more I'm just picking a few obvious ones) focus on their job 100% and get rest to function at a top level. Raising children can be hard but it's a different type of hard.
As with leadership skills, I think that enjoying to be a stay at home parent also must be learnt. It might seem hard, or boring, or tedious to some. But I am convinced basically anyone can make an enjoyable experience of it if they actually make an effort. It will not come automatically, it will take some time and effort.
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