Reply to NYT The Daily: The Parents Aren't All Right

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "NYT The Daily: The Parents Aren't All Right"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This article is such BS, it’s not about intensive parenting. It’s about having two working parents required to just get by, and then really expensive housing which makes everything else harder to manage and afford. [b]There was a lot easier lifestyle where without intensive parenting, when you had a parent, who was home to take care of everything related to the kids as well as clean and cook[/b].[/quote]

But what parent really wants to give up everything to stay home cooking and cleaning? I know some people are happy to do it, but it shouldn’t be an expectation for good parenting.[/quote]

Why are you devaluing SAH parents? [/quote]

I don't think that PP was devaluing SAH parents at all. Just saying that good parents can WOH as well as SAH.[/quote]

Let me quote the person who is admitting to devaluing SAH:

“Because everything a SAH parent has all day to do still needs to be done by working parents, just without a lot less tome to actually do it”[/quote]

It’s not devaluing what a SAH parent can do. As a working parent, I still cook, but I do it at 8-10 pm and cook for 2-3 days so I don’t have to do it daily. I still help kids with homework and that’s also after I get home from work, so sometime between 7-8 pm, or after 8 (if I don’t have to  cook / prep for next day). If I didn’t have to work, I’d be doing these things between 9am - 2 pm while kids are at school, I would be able to dedicate a bit more time and maybe get nicer food on the table, and I’d help kids with homework around 4-6 and be less stressed when I am helping them.

It’s not devaluing what someone else does, just highlighting the reality of working parents. We still need to squeeze significant house / child care into pre/ and after work hours.[/quote]

Seriously! Do SAHMs actually think we don’t cook dinner, help our kids with their homework and clean our homes just because we work? [/quote]

Quite the opposite! We are well aware that you need to do all of those things after also working all day long, and we decided we didn't want that. [/quote]

This. I watched my colleagues doing the two-working-parents with babies/toddlers thing and that looked like an awful life. So stressful. So I chose to be a SAHM until my youngest started kindergarten (and freelanced so it was easy to go back to FT work). What we got is a more relaxing life, the ability to slow down to toddler speed, the ability to get stuff done during the week so DH and I could spend family time with the kids on the weekends. I know I was lucky to be able to do that, not everyone gets the choice, and even if you can, it's not the right choice for a lot of people because they don't want to do it or they have a career that's not conducive to a break or they already have great work/life balance with their job. If I could have WAH or even just didn't have a bad commute, maybe I'd have made a different choice.

Once I went back to work we outsourced a lot more -- afterschool childcare, of course, (and usually got their homework done there so, no, I wasn't helping with homework) but also hired cleaners, got takeout more often, birthday parties at a party-place instead of planning home parties. Weekends became time for errands and house projects instead of just family time. On the positive side, the kids liked going to aftercare with their friends, the 2nd salary was needed to beef up retirement and college savings and let us travel more, and I like going to work. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics