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

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[quote=Anonymous]Women get stuck with a pretty harsh choice these days because the economy is structured on the premise of two incomes -- look at housing costs and college costs and the number of families that can comfortably get by on one income is really small.

At the same time childcare is not only incredibly expensive it's also often inadequate. Ensuring all the hours match up so everyone can get to work on time is hard. And it does not end when kids are in school because school is not structured as childcare -- you still have to figure out summers and school holidays and after school and random days off.

Due to misogyny and uh all of history this problem falls disproportionately on women. Our reward for 9+ months of pregnancy and giving birth is the "choice" of staying home or being a working mom. Society largely exempts men from this "choice" so only men who opt into viewing it as their problem face it. How nice!

When this is the reality there are a lot of unpleasant truths that are both perfectly reasonable and deeply insulting:

Some women stay home because they believe  it's a higher quality option than the childcare available to them. It hurts to say this out loud because it's often true (a lot of childcare in the US is sub-standard) and no one using childcare wants to contemplate that.

On the other hand some women work because it's the only way to afford the opportunities they want for their kids -- better schools and more enrichment and better college options. Again this sucks to hear for a sahm who has sacrificed her career to stay home but it's also true for the majority of families.

And then there is a small percent of sahms who don't sacrifice income because they are married to very high earners. There are also a small percent of working moms who don't sacrifice quality childcare because they have another resource for really good care -- they are wealthy enough to afford a really good nanny or they have a grandparent who is willing and capable or even a DH who is willing and capable. All of these are fairly rare situations though. Generally women give something up no matter what choice they make.

What if we all just acknowledge out loud how much this sucks and how dumb it is that we've placed this burden on women and that women then go and criticize and beat each other up about it instead of turning our ire on where it belongs -- a society that scapegoats women when it is actually society-level inadequacies that cause this problem (the high costs of childcare and housing and college plus the way we abandon families to just figure this out for themselves with no collective action to ease the collective burden of raising children).[/quote]

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