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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I find it insulting that a woman who is highly educated will be willing to SAHM, to do all the housework etc. I wonder if this is also what they preach to their daughters? Yeah, I will pay for your college and grad school but please find a high potential husband so that you can be a good SAHM for him?[/quote]

I find it insulting that you don't think women who are highly educated should have the choice.  My parents were like you.  I no longer speak to them.  I am so thankful my husband gave me the choice (and financially it didn't pay for me to work but [b]he would have supported me if I choose to work[/b]) was I didn't realize it was even an option.  I regret going back at all before quitting.  I was miserable.  Child care was as much as my take home and it was impacting my husband's job because I often could not leave on time to do the day care pick up.[/quote]

It sounds like your husband didn't give you the support you needed at home, which is why you quit your job. Since you didn't need to work, why didn't you get a nanny instead of day care? You wouldn't have had to worry about doing day care pick up. Also, maybe your husband should have done some of the pick-ups, too.
It also sounds like your parents didn't help either. My parents would be livid if, with my PhD, I quit my job. (But, I understand your frustration, my parents didn't help us very much when our kids were babies. I thought about quitting then, too.)

My bigger concern is that the more often highly educated women, with graduate degrees even, quit to support their husbands and children, it makes it harder for women who stay in the workforce to get promoted because bosses will think that they'll promote moms only to have them leave.

Ladies, we need to get our men to do more of the heavy lifting!!! It may be too late for this generation, but let's raise our boys to learn to carry the mental load.

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This is exactly the point.  By volunteering to take care of home and kids stuff, SAHMs are keeping the traditions in place both at home and also for the ones in the office. That is why we still don't get paid leave, day care subsidy and other benefits as a society, because there is always a woman who can take care of these at home.[/quote]

But there will always be women who genuinely prefer to stay home with their kids. And outside of the expensive city bubble (where people are more ambitious), that’s a lot more women than you might think. They don’t want daycare, paid leave, or their husband taking care of their baby. They want to stay home with their babies and young children. This is probably especially true for women in service jobs or other hard, boring jobs that are really the majority of jobs in this country. To me, there is a minority of highly ambitious women with jobs they love who want more childcare help, and they want every other mom in the country to sacrifice time with their children to help the ambitious moms achieve critical political mass.[/quote]

+1 kind of. I agree PP is demanding women with low paying service jobs work, instead of doing what they want which might involve staying home, largely to benefit higher paid professional women.

But I also think PP is just wrong that the thing preventing us from getting paid leave or a childcare subsidy is women choosing to SAHM. I mean, there are SAHMs in Europe. And as in the US, it’s a choice made both by wealthy women whose spouses make enough to keep the family very comfortable on one income, and middle class women who find mothering more personally rewarding than whatever they do for a living and are willing to make the financial sacrifice for greater household harmony.

Many countries with real parental leave and subsidized childcare also provide payments to families with kids, and they are often higher for kids under 5. While many women return to work after their long leave and take advantage of the subsidized childcare (a very different proposition than what most American women are expected to do, which is go back to work while their children are still infants and then pay for childcare out of pocket), some women choose to stay home for several years and are facilitated by government payments. This isn’t super common but not unheard of either.

Blaming women for making choices that make sense for them in our messed up, cruel system that is aggressively hostile to working moms is backwards. Women in the US cannot “earn” access to leave and childcare by working harder. We have to decide as a country that paid leave is good because it’s good for parents to have time with new babies. That subsidized childcare is really the only way to make that industry function (because like education, if you privatize it, quality of care and affordability are always at war with each other). Whether women take advantage of these policies is an individual choice that is honestly none of your business.[/quote]

lol you’ve been living in a liberal urban location too long.

Europeans receive paid leave but it’s not like it’s reported in the media.  Most countries only provide 6-8 weeks of fully paid leave and after that it’s a measly amount that’s similar to unemployment insurance.  In the UK, it’s around $200 a week!

There are also some major cultural differences that result in European countries providing paid leave.  Many educated women have children out of wedlock and their finances are separate from their partner.  How would they have kids if they earned $0?  There isn’t this notion of men supporting the family like there is in the US.  It’s also way way more expensive for the average family to live in most European countries.  Paid leave is a necessity.  I see a stark difference between my MC friends living in a flyover city and my MC friends living in Europe.  They pay much higher taxes in Europe and their overall cost of living is much higher - especially housing.  I am personally glad we don’t have a culture here where the government is paying women to stay home from work to take care of kids.

You seriously don’t get we don’t have paid leave because outside of small urban liberal areas, American men and women don’t want it.  It’s fairly easy for the average American woman to stay home with kids if that’s what she wants to do.  She doesn’t need a government hand out.  The women who are poor and require assistance are already receiving it.

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Um, you're the one who is out of touch if you believe that Americans don't want paid leave, and that women can just stay at home if they want. That's seriously the dumbest and most out of touch argument I've heard in weeks. You seriously don't know how the lower middle class live in America. [/quote]

I don’t believe most American families want it.  It’s why we don’t have it.  I know it’s hard for someone living in a liberal dual income area to understand, but it’s simply the truth.  Most people simply don’t care.  [/quote]

NP. This isn’t really a matter of “belief.” Organizations like Pew have done polls.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/03/23/americans-widely-support-paid-family-and-medical-leave-but-differ-over-specific-policies/[/quote]

I mean who doesn’t want something for free?  Of course someone in a poll will say they want paid leave.  But does the average MC/UMC woman really want 12- whatever weeks of paid leave and then to be required to return to work?  Nope.  They don’t want to work at all, which is why so many stay home with young kids.  [/quote]

Is this the same PP just making stuff up based on “beliefs?” Only 4% of SAHMs are highly educated with a husband who makes 75K or more. Motives are going to vary but so you think all the rest of them really just don’t want to work?

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