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

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's interesting to me that this thread is almost 20 pages long and no one has mentioned that a lot of the SAHP situations people are mentioning here (staying home for 1-3 years when kids are very young) are really just extended parental leaves and that in countries with better parental leave policies and a culture of people actually using leave there is no debate between SAHPs and working parents of babies or very young toddlers because you are not considered a SAHP just because you stayed home with your baby. Everyone stays home with babies (including men in some countries). It's normal to take extended leave from work with kids and then return to jobs when they are old enough to go to a preschool-like environment where they are walking and talking and interacting.

Like the US is one of the only countries in the world where mothers of 8 months old babies are going toe-to-toe over whether you should be a SAHP or a working mom at that age. In sane places it would be irrelevant which lifestyle you chose -- either way your baby would be home with either you or your spouse during that year.

I guess we have to pretend that actually it's normal or even good for babies to spend the first year of life in daycares or with paid caregivers because we live in a place that is insane and not family friendly? I genuinely don't want anyone to feel bad for going back to work. But come on. The rest of the world knows that babies are better off with their families during that first year.[/quote]

And in those countries, aside from the quota of women leaders, women's careers have a very low ceiling.

There are trade-off but they are often unacknowledged in discussions centered on bashing American parental/maternal support. [/quote]

Show me the stats about how women in countries with strong parental leave policies do worse in their careers than in the US?

Also it's not "America bashing" to criticize the US for the lack of parental and maternal support. We are so out of step with the rest of the world on this issue that there is no real debate here. Is your argument that the American "system" in which families get virtually NO leave or support during a child's first year of life is somehow beneficial for women? That makes no sense. You can argue that family leave systems don't fix sexism and that's true -- they don't. But they do fix the problem of what to do with babies for the first year of their life by simply making it financially feasible for families to do the most obvious thing and just stay home with them. It requires a bit of cultural and economic flexibility to accommodate but it's such an obvious answer to this issue that almost every other country in the world offers mandatory parental leave and most offer much longer leave than is standard in the US.[/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