Reply to If You Quit To Be A SAHM

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, how chaotic of a home do your want? How much chaos is okay for your children to experience from day to day? How often is it okay to drop the ball on making sure your family runs well? How much confusion and anxiety do you want to inflict on your children? Because working full time means chaos, confusion and stress runs your home first and foremost. Your employer always comes first -- that's the truth. Your kids know that, but they can work it out with extensive therapy after they grow up, I guess.

Your either put your children first or yourself first. If you want well-adjusted children, you put them first. Always.[/quote]

Wow. Im not sure what you did for a living, but it's certainly not my work experience.  I have 3 kids and I've worked between 32-40 hours a week since they were born. Is it easy, somedays no. Would I change it?  No.

[b]Childcare is the hardest part of parenting young kids. If you can get a good, reliable childcare provider, you and your children will not experience chaos, stress or need therapy because you have a job. [/b]My children have a role model who knows how to balance work and life most of the time. My children will always come first, but they are not the center of my universe. They have become independent and well rounded kids who know that their parents work but they also have their backs, always.

If your life included chaos, confusion, the inability to draw boundaries and keep a calendar, you can't apply that to all mothers and all workplaces. This is the worst advice I've read in awhile.

OP: Be healthy. Choose to work or not based on your mental health, long term plans and financial situation. Your child sometimes dictates whether you can find reliable, safe and appropriate childcare. We have na autistic son and we knew he was safest and most comfortable with a nanny.  Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Can you return to your career easily? Can you keep taking advance classes and keep moving forward?

I have friends who are the most amazing and kick a$$ say at home moms who are raising amazing humans. I have friends who work and are balancing it all with grace.   You need to figure out what works for you and your children.[/quote]

The bolded is the problem. I SAHMed when my child was a baby/toddler because we could not find good, reliable childcare within our budget. Staying home was the only way to get high quality childcare for my kid. And it's not that I'm so low paid that we couldn't afford quality childcare, because there were definitely daycare centers we could have afforded. But we could not get spots in them. There are not enough of them and many gave preference to people with certain employers. We were on waitlists for over a dozen centers (and we got on those waitlists when I was 5 months pregnant, and I had a 4 month maternity leave, so there should have been plenty of time). The only two places where we were offered spots were in-home centers that were unclean and weirdly hot when we visited (they keep them hot to keep the babies lethargic and easier to deal with). Only one of them was close enough to work or home for us to feasibly be able to pick up our child without leaving work early, and both had incredibly strict rules about pick up and very high fees if you were late.

It's dumb to have the conversation or criticize women for the choices they make without having a real conversation about how this country fails working families, the cost and unavailability of childcare, and how no one in a position to do anything about it seems to care enough to act.

I felt judged by friends when I decided to SAHM and it was really frustrating because I really did do it simply because it was the best, most affordable option for providing my child with what she needed. I wasn't making some statement about what I think the role of mothers should be. I was presented with two options and chose the better one, full stop.[/quote]

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