Reply to Are you offended when someone says they “didnt want someone else to raise my kids”?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To be fair, women who aren't motherly or patient by nature, wouldn't their kids be better off getting raised by fathers, grandparents or hired help?[/quote]

Just don’t call it raising. It hurts too many feelings. Call it something like “spending significant awake hours with” and you have to assume almost nothing happens during that time.[/quote]

That doesn’t work because some SAHM think being there during nap time is significant to their kids lives and some colder so they are literally in bed with them.[/quote]

Working mom here and I actually do think there is value when kids are very young (babies) to being near or with parents when they are napping. My sister is a developmental psychologist and turned me onto both attachment theory and the idea of "co-regulation" as a way to teach kids how to regulate emotions. The safety and security of sleeping in the vicinity of a parent as a baby may have real value to the parent-child relationship, and babies who learn to calm by co-regulating their bodies (breathing, heart rate) with a calm adult may do a better job calming themselves as they grow older due to modeling.

I was able to cobble together a European-style maternity leave (4 mo paid leave from generous employer, 1 week stored vacation and sick leave, 4 mo unpaid leave, and a 3 month "on ramp" where I started with just two mornings a week and then built back up to 32 hours adding both in-office and WFH hours) and I'm a real believer in the value of being physically present for very young children. And I stayed at 32 hours so even now I have a ton of flexibility-- if I didn't I'd probably seriously consider being a SAHM at least until my kid was older. But I recognize this is not a realistic option for most parents, including my DH who wanted to take a longer leave (and we could have afforded it even if unpaid) but his employer gave it a hard no. I was extremely fortunate to do what I did.

I wouldn't blink or be offended if a SAHM told me she wanted to stay home because she "didn't want someone else raising" her kids. I get it. I think in an ideal world you wouldn't have to choose but in the US you often do. I view it as a criticism of US's lack of supports for the parents of young kids and poor options for childcare. Work culture in the US is generally very anti-family and anti-child specifically. We have done very little as a family to enable families to engage in "best practices" in terms of early childhood development.[/quote]

Dang! I had an even better schedule than you did but I took walks during naps and now I know that my children are screwed. All that for nothing. [/quote]

Of course not (PP here). And again I'm only talking about for babies here -- the idea with attachment theory is to form the strong parent-child bond early in order to provide the child with a secure attachment and then you can build more independence into the child's life because they have developed a firm belief that you will always come back.

And I didn't spend every single nap with my baby! I was just noting that I can see what the benefit to napping with a very young child would be because the PP was mocking it like it was stupid to say that a parent napping with their child is providing value. I think the experience of many parents who nap with their babies during parental leaves or who use infant carriers to keep babies close to them (even if they are working) undermines this point. Young children benefit from the physical closeness of their primary caregivers.

Even at my very medicalized birth in a hospital (high risk pregnancy) both DH and I were encouraged to do skin to skin contact after birth and told to continue this after we went home to promote bonding and because it is show to help regulate the infant's breathing and heart rate. It makes a lot of sense when you think about how human children are born fairly helpless compared to other mammals -- from an evolutionary standpoint there is plenty of evidence that human infants are supposed to spend most of the first year of life physically close to their caregivers. These are pretty widely accepted ideas about infant development.[/quote]

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