Reply to It is so much easier to be a good parent when not working

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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][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well yeah of course.  Being a stay at home mom is a full-time job. But being a work out of the home means you have two full time jobs which is exhausting.[/quote]

Being a sahm to school aged is NOT a full time job. I think that’s been clearly established. 
Which is ok. [/quote]

It depends. You can be an intense cook, cleaner, gardener, handyperson, room parent, helping neighbor or family, etc. [/quote]

Right?  Often jobs are as intense as you make them.  I certainly wasn’t working intensely for 8-9 hours straight at my paid employment with zero downtime/breaks/social interaction.  I suspect a lot of other professional jobs are similar.  The only full-time thing about it in many seasons was the fact that I had to be physically present full-time to take care of any tasks as they came up (and those tasks were often mundane and easy and quite frankly pointless).  There were of course busy times where I worked my butt off, but that was not the norm.

I feel like maybe people don’t realize they hold SAHM as a “job” to a completely different standard than they might hold their own paid employment.  Because I don’t think my experience was totally unusual.[/quote]

You were lucky to have an easy job.  But when so. Being away from your home for 8 hours plus commute and having to spend your remaining waking hours caring for a child/children is exhausting [/quote]

That’s the thing - you can do just as much stuff as a sahm if you work and have school aged kids - esp if you have location flex (which frankly I would not take a job without). You’re just more burned out. 
But the ‘sahm to school aged kids is a full time job’ people need to just - stop.[/quote]

You’re missing the point.  You can do just as much as SOME stay at home moms, but not the ones who actually treat it as a full time job.  And the stuff you do undoubtedly won’t be to the same standard.  And that’s fine, but why are you insisting that other women don’t get to call their job a job?  [/quote]

You cannot do as much housework as a SAHM can, that is absolutely true. And your toilets may certainly be dirtier and your ironing may be more erratic.

But for a school age child who is in school in the normal school hours, you can easily do just as much *parenting* at the same “standard” whatever precisely that means.

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What do you mean?  Do you mean that working moms spend the same amount of hours with their kid per day as a SAHM?  I don’t see how that’s possible if the mom is working 40 hours per week, so I may be misunderstanding. [/quote]

I wft and this is basically true. I either drop kids at 830a, run home (as in go for a run but end up at home), shower and online on calls by 930, then dh gets kids and they are home by 530. Or dh drops them and I am online by 830-9 then pick them up at 5. I would not get them earlier very often even if I didn’t work bc it’s better for them to be playing basketball or doing music classes at school than in our small apt (nyc). We log off early on Fridays so I get them at 315 that day. I [b]do do a lot of work after they go to bed and I am tired in the evening so prob not gazing into their eyes and leaning into further enrichment (they are also tired and typically watch a little tv or we watch together) so I’m def not bringing my a game to the party as much as I would be if I’d chilled all day. That is true[/b] [/quote]

Op here. This thread has gone off the rails and devolved into a debate mostly about whether elementary school SAHM do as much work, but to go back to the original intention of my post, this is my point. It’s easier to be a present, involved parent when you’re not working because you’re well rested when the kids are around. I too spent a lot of time with my kids when working because I wfh with lots of flexibility, but I didn’t realize how tired I was during those times. Now that I have down time when kids are at activities, I’m so much more engaged and happy and not distracted by the other things on my mind when i am with them. [/quote]

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Your whole premise is completely and categorically incorrect.

SAHM are not necessarily more rested and hence present and patient with kids.

I’d argue they are more exhausted, sick of and stressed by their kids because they have no other outlets, are busy cleaning and cooking, and generally are less present because they are with the kids with no other intellectual outlet.

Many are less happy, well rested, etc by mind numbing tv, posting on DCUM, etc.[/quote]

DP here. I am the happiest when I am with my kids.

when I quit my job to become a sahm, I retained my cleaners and increased their hours and frequency (twice a week) so that they could also do laundry, food prep, decluttering, organizing for me under my supervision.

I knew that if my DH would have become a sah parent, he would have first  made sure that he had a team of domestic helpers to help him succeed. His goal would be to focus only on the children and the success of our family life.   The point of becoming a sah parent is to spend time with the kids primarily. The fact that the at home parent can also function as a house-manager and make the household run smoothly and free up the time for other members of the family is a bonus.

The most important commodity in the world is time.  If you can buy the labor and time of other people for every other boring chore and free up your time, you can focus on what is important. [/quote]

You sound like an outlier.

Most SAHM are counting the hours to hand off their kids to dad when he gets home, get bitter that they have to do bedtime routine with no help, and exhausted being with kids all day, and cooking, shopping,  then doing dishes while the “breadwinner” expects them to “do it all” because “that’s their job now”.

Also it ribs kids of having 2 parents.[/quote]

Wait, which is it… SAHMs do nothing more than “Pilates and lunch duty” and add “no value” to their family’s lives, or SAHMs are “exhausted being with kids all day” and “bitter” and “counting the hours to hand off the kids to dad”?

(Quoting PPs)

You working moms sure have a lot to say about other women’s lives![/quote]

You SAHM sure have a lot of fantasy worlds made up in your head about everyone’s lives including your own.

OP might be a better mom when not working. Nobody is arguing that. But saying all women in the world are better mom because they don’t work because they are more rested and present is categorically incorrect.

A mom could literally do nothing with the kids all day and just he exhausted by their constant bickering or incessant asking mom to play… or mom is Mary Poppins doing everything with ease and care.

But we know many Mom’s are just exhausted being woken by kids early and burned out by 4 pm hours before dad gets home (whether they spent every minute with the kids or spent the day doing Pilates/lunch/shopping/cleaning)

Just because mom is home and in the vicinity of the kids does not mean she is engaged, well rested and valuable. Perhaps OP is but that does not universally speak to the experience of every mother on earth. We know this from incessant articles/post/etc on the subject.

We also know that some working moms are exhausted by commutes/long hours/household duties. But we also know some Mom’s have flexible schedules, don’t commute and have help with kids/cleaning which makes them more present with their kids for more hours/day with the added bonus of those kids actually having a fully engaged fatter.

Making one sweeping description of every women’s experience based on their working status is categorically incorrect no matter what the statement made is.

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