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][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A question for working moms:  if you ask a non-working mom "what do you do?" what do you prefer she says? Is there any response we could give that you would approve of?  Just curious.

[/quote]

“I stay at home with my kids.”

[b]Why is this a complicated question?[/b] [/quote]

I feel like SAHMs make things super complicated, maybe because they are out of practice in planning and executing complex things. A week’s worth of dinners can’t get cooked without 5 harried trips to the grocery store…[/quote]

So you get offended that a stay at home mom says she stayed home so her kid didn’t have to be raised by strangers in the early years - probably saying that your chosen community of your daycare was super intentional - and then you go and put down women who choose to stay home with their young children? It’s actually really hard to provide full time care to young children well every day. It’s emotionally and physically and intellectually taxing. And what your comment tells me is that you actually didn’t care about the likely brown and black underpaid women watching your children every day while you worked (your “community”). It tells me you thought the work of taking care of children, including your own child, was beneath you. I’m a full time working mom and I have a ton of respect for the people who provide care to my three children between the ages of 1 and 5 every day and maybe that’s why I’m standing up for stay at home moms. Because it’s hard work and I respect it and I respect them and their decisions.  [/quote]
Posts like this are so bizarre to me. The first nanny we hired worked for us for 7.5 years and grew up 10 minutes from our house. (She also happened to be white, though I'm not.) We must have paid her okay, since she managed to buy a house during that time period.

We are still in touch with her, and I have nothing but respect for her abilities and her intelligence. I'm good at my job, and I think I'm a pretty good parent. But I'm bad at managing a household and some of the day-to-day of childcare. I hire people who are better than me at this. And if DH said this, no one would bat an eye.[/quote]

That may be your situation but the PP is correct about many families-- 99% of the nannies in my area are immigrant women and none of them are buying houses on their salaries. And the salary issue is interesting-- nannies here make around 50-60k per year, which families view as highway robbery (and indeed it's an incredible amount of money for a family to spend annually on childcare) yet it's also nowhere near enough for someone to be able to save a down payment on a house because housing here is do expensive-- their rent will eat up a lot of their income and what is leftover for savings is not enough to help buy even a modest home. Daycare workers make even less.

Within that context, for a parent to denigrate the work of caring for children as unimportant and dull is incredibly insulting to these women as well as to SAHMs (many of who SAHM specifically because they cannot afford this kind of high quality care do choose instead to perform it themselves). It betrays a troubling attitude about the labor of raising children.

It sounds like you likely live in a different sort of area, one with less expensive housing and overall cost of living, which may change these dynamics. [/quote]
Keep telling yourself this if it makes you feel better. Or maybe accept that some people who WOH are not terrible parents and also not AHs who think nannies are garbage people incapable of providing quality care to children.[/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