Reply to NYT: professional moms who opted out of work after kids are now opting back in

Forum Index » Infants, Toddlers, & Preschoolers

Reply to "NYT: professional moms who opted out of work after kids are now opting back in"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]to me the money paragraphs were the one about how these women were fine with the child care, but drew the line at having to do the housework too, even though that was clearly part of the job description of stay-at-home spouse. so, they were fine doing one kind of menial labor but not another. like they expected their husbands to come home from their day and help them pick up their workspace (i.e. the house)[/quote]

I don't really like the idea of equating child care with housework, and then calling both "menial labor".  One task is scrubbing toilets, the other task is taking care of people. And furthermore, people who are the joint responsibility of both the husband and the wife. Also the house is not merely the women's "workspace" but also the men's living quarters.

But! I haven't read this article -- only a billion other similar ones.[/quote]

Well, you're part of the problem. You can rationalize it all you want, but these are both forms of "menial labor." Child care is about as menial a labor as there is.

I refer to the house as the woman's "workspace" because I'm referring to messes that accumulate during the work day.[/quote]

I'm a woman and agree with this--a lot of childcare is menial, meaning that you don't need a lot of skill to do it. (The education these women have was not to prepare them to be good mothers, and very very few parents have education and training in childhood development or early childhood ed.)

Regarding housekeeping--not many people enjoy vacuuming or scrubbing toilets. If both parents work, you can justify/afford to outsource the parts you don't want to do, or at least have a legitimate basis for dividing them up (e.g., we're [i]both[/i] tired). If one person is home all day....very easy to see how the other person would expect them to pick up that slack. If I worked and my husband stayed home, I would be really annoyed if the house wasn't clean, laundry wasn't done, etc., and even more annoyed if he'd spent the day decorating or baking or volunteering--doing fun things he enjoys, but not the hard work, which he would expect to share with me (after I'd been working hard all day). I'd prefer more stress and more mess (and, to be fair, more money) to a situation where we resent each other rather than feel "we're in this together."[/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