<p>camelia: I agree that if a wife works, the husband should not be helping but share in the housework and parenting. How much and in which way depends on the individuals involved and their particular situation. I don’t really know where my S got the idea that he would be “helping” but he certainly did not seem to expect to sit and sip a drink while dinner was being cooked.
We are lucky that although our lines of work are very different, neither entails 80 hour weeks. There are couples where this is so, and one of the partners has to pretty much stay home to manage it and raise the couple’s children.</p>
<p>I always hated it when I used to see or hear of a dad alone with his kids for the day or evening, and someone said he was “babysitting.” NO - they’re HIS kids - he’s not babysitting, he’s parenting!</p>
<p>I think that has faded in the past few years, thank goodness.</p>
<p>Lafalum - that was one of my peeves as well! I also have a different view of housework – Neither of us does it! 
j/k - sort of. Well, obviously, it has to get done. But I did not make the decision to stay home so my house would be clean. I remember telling my H once, early on, that I wanted more on my tombstone than, “She kept the newspapers off the floor.” </p>
<p>At our house, H is as likely as me to clean the kitchen. He generally doesn’t see mess anywhere else, and still thinks the clean socks in his drawer appear by magic. But I am not fond of “nature” so the division has worked well here that he does the outside stuff, and I generally handle the inside. A couple weeks ago, H was sick or injured - can’t remember what was going on - but I offered to let him teach me how to mow the lawn, and I did it - front and back! All by myself. I was so proud. First time ever. (I mowed our lawn as a teenager now and then, but that was on a riding mower.) </p>
<p>But as someone above has mentioned, it is really for the family to work out their own dynamics. There are many folks who can’t imagine what I “did all day” if I wasn’t cleaning constantly. Fortunately, my H has never questioned it. Seems to attribute much of our kids’ successes to me. Don’t know if it’s true, but I’ll take it.</p>
<p>I asked my H this morning if he minded going to work every day, and he said he could get used to staying home. But he didn’t really seem to be leaving reluctantly. Frankly, I think retirement will drive him crazy after the first couple weeks. Or will drive me crazy.</p>
<p>If I had some sort of high-powered job where I could afford to pay someone else to dust and clean bathrooms, I would do it in a second! As it is, however, I can’t justify paying someone else for something I have the time to do myself. So our house is minimally clean but not like a maid service has been through. </p>
<p>DH is in a profession where he can’t “cut back on his hours.” So it’s long hours or nothing. Fortunately, he loves his job.</p>
<p>This discussion touches on the argument that a woman can “have it all”–a clean house, children, and a nice job. Well, maybe she can…serially. Or with the help of grandparents. But SuperMom doesn’t exist any more than SuperDad does.</p>
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I think my mom’s come pretty close, but again, only because she and my dad are complete equals in almost every way that matters (same profession and level of seniority [and by extension, salary], ~9 to ~6 with occasional late nights, equal shares of housework and childcare, etc.). In a situation where one spouse has “long hours or nothing,” as you said, I can imagine that it would be much more difficult. I honestly don’t know what I’d do if that were the case for me; thank you for reminding me of another possibility to consider.</p>
<p>mathmom, about that article you just posted…</p>
<p>I guess maybe I’m not getting the point, but considering that housework is just as hard as other work, I think it’s unfair to spread the housework evenly when one spouse is working and the other is not! It’s like saying, “You have 1.5 jobs, and I have .5 jobs,” to the spouse who is working outside the home. If one spouse is working, and one is staying at home, the one who is staying at home obviously has home stuff (whatever that entails) as their job. Am I making any sense?</p>
<p>Of course, with kids, it’s different… I can’t say how I’d personally do it yet, but I think the kids themselves would like and benefit from having a lot of each parent’s time.</p>
<p>I also thought the look at same-sex couples in that article was interesting. My aunts who are married to each other have a very traditional division of labor. One is a lawyer, the other is a stay-at-home mom. The lawyer is the one who gave birth to the child though, which kind of reverses the non-gestational parent = parent who goes out and earns money idea. As far as their housework goes… it doesn’t get done very often, to be honest. Washed dishes and laundry seem to be the only regular housework that gets done.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I’m one of those young people (23) who doesn’t know anything.</p>
<p>I think that this is something that families have to work out for themselves. I cringed at the comments made by the OP’s daughter. But I also cringed at some subsequent comments that implied that kids whose parents both work are in some way deprived (like the “ask the kids of dual-career families how they liked it” comment).</p>
<p>I also cringe at the idea, which most posters here do not seem to advocate but many people do, that for a woman having a career outside the home is something that they would only do out of financial necessity, that it’s something you give up if you’re fortunate enough to have a husband with an income that can support the whole family. I <em>like</em> my work, and I like the autonomy that comes with it. Not everyone is fortunate enough to do work that they enjoy, and not everyone puts the same premium on autonomy, but this is my situation. I would not give up my work if I married a rich guy.</p>
<p>Everyone does it differently. I don’t think less of stay-at-home-parents - be they moms or dads. What annoys me is when there’s an assumption that the stay-at-home-spouse, if there is one, should necessarily be the wife.</p>
<p>I’m fortunate in that my long-term boyfriend is much more domestic than I am. If we end up getting married, <em>I’m</em> the one who’s going to have to make sure that I’m pulling my weight in terms of housekeeping.</p>
<p>Jessie and Camelia:</p>
<p>I like my work, too, and have been doing it for nearly 30 years. I’m not ready to retire!
My H’s mother worked full time for 25 years, so he did not expect his own wife to stay at home. Apart from that, we were lucky insofar as we had terrific (if expensive) daycare and that once our children were in school, they could be in school and after-school until 6pm. A lot of suburbs only have half day for young students, and very little in the way of afterschool programs. It forces women to either leave work or work only part-time whether they wish to or not. If I may say so, my kids have turned out to be pretty normal.</p>
<p>Families have to decide what works for them, what does not; what their priorities are. I never liked housecleaning and my salary allows me to hire someone to do it. But I heard of a woman who vacuum-cleans her house every day–and it is a fairly large one!</p>
<p>jessiehl–the “stay at home” person historically was the one who bore the child and needed to nurse it for a period of time. Not because she was the “wife” but because she was the “mother.” If you don’t have children, you can work out the domestic arrangements any way you like. Houses are not important, but children are.</p>
<p>Then someone invented formula… </p>
<p>I preferred to breast-feed, in any case, but my 2nd child would have starved before he took a bottle, so we were kind of attached for a while. :D</p>
<p>As a mom who works full time, I have often commented to other full-time-working moms that I feel my generation was sold a bill of goods when we were told, repeatedly, that we could “have it all.” Well, yeah, maybe, but no one warned us that “having it all” meant being constantly exhausted and what’s more, when we were at work, we’d be thinking about our kids and wishing to be with them and when we were home, we’d be thinking about work. No one warned us that working full time and raising kids meant feeling very divided and worrying that we did neither one as well as we could’ve/should’ve. I was discussing this the other day with a friend, who is a doctor. She was complaining and griping (as we all are wont to do at least once in awhile!) about how tired she was, how much running around she had to do and so on. I turned to her and said “Do you ever worry that our daughters are going to grow up and think that they don’t WANT to work because, for years, they have watched us race from one thing to the other and seen how tired we are all the time?” She stopped in mid-sentence and said “Yikes, you’re right.”
A few years ago, there was a story in the New York Times concerning a study that seemed to reveal that many of the young women now attending Ivy League schools planned to stop working and stay home with kids when they had them. This caused an outcry from some feminists, who worried aloud that this would cause some kind of backlash for women’s rights in the workplace. Me, I think it is kind of inevitable that some young women, after watching how hard it was on their moms, would want to do one thing at a time. Of course, not everyone has that luxury.</p>
<p>I suppose that’s what I don’t really understand. I was never under the impression growing up that balancing work and family was any harder for my mom than it was for my dad, and I don’t understand why it would be. I understand breastfeeding, but that’s only for the first few months, isn’t it?</p>
<p>The part that hurt my mom the most wasn’t the balancing act, but the judgmental comments from other mothers, male colleagues, and the sorts of people who really believed my sister and I would be forever damaged because she didn’t stay home with us. A few times she would come home after work and ask me, anxious, if I’d be much happier if she were home – and I always said no, because I couldn’t imagine what she’d do around the house all day, or that anyone in my family would be happier for it (I had a wonderful childhood as it was, and my mom loves her work and doesn’t have the temperament for being a SAHM; she would probably have been severely depressed, which would have hurt us all). I have nothing but contempt for the people who made her worry that she was a bad mother for having interests and passions besides us; actually, I appreciate and admire that she did.</p>
<p>I think it’s very possible for women to work outside the home full time and be great mom’s, too. It all depends on the mom’s temperament, desires, and the support she has from spouse or others. I’ve known women who have successfully gone back to demanding jobs within a few months of child bearing, but they had spouses who had very flexible schedules as well as other family assistance, usually grandparents who were eager to help out. Their kids are happy and healthy.
What some(not all) women don’t count on when planning their lives is how incredibly attached one becomes to the newborn and how hard it is to leave them with others during those first few years. Conflicts can arise when a couple doesn’t consider that this might happen and they aren’t prepared to make changes and compromises for the benefit of every one’s well-being.
I think it’s wonderful for women to have choices and to go into marriage and family knowing that they have many options. No husband or wife should assume, however, that their minds may not change when the joy of their lives emerges on the scene. All bets are off at that point, and flexibility is the key. If a couple is in love and has the family’s interest first, before their own personal interest, it can work out just fine, no matter which roles they play.</p>
<p>Camelia- Your parent’s are an obvious example of such a successful partnership, and it’s a shame that they were made to feel they “weren’t doing it right.” This was common during the time when my generation was breaking those barriers. It was just as common, however, for those choosing to stay home to hear comments like my daughter has made. It really was not an “in thing to do” in the 70s and 80s to stay home with your kids while the husband worked. Women were looked down upon by other women as well as society (tv, films, etc.)
I do think that most women my age (late 50s) have realized at this point in time that there is more than one way to parent, precisely because we have seen first hand that our children could turn out just fine either way. It seems like the controversy is the most polarizing among young women trying to figure out their options, which is understandable.</p>
<p>camiliasinensis, Did your father ever come home from work and anxiously ask you whether you’d be happier if he stayed at home?</p>
<p>This is really not a cheap shot, it’s an observation about expectations that are hard to overcome.</p>
<p>Good point, QM. The expectations are a part of our biology. Imagine how different this world would be if the men bore the children!</p>
<p>camelia:</p>
<p>Your parents are from a country that has a very different culture from that of the US in terms of gender expectations. You were right, for example, to pick up on the “help” in my S’s comments. It would not have been helping but sharing. But there are many men, especially if they earn more than their wives, who expect their wives to carry the bulk of the housework and parenting, even though in terms of hours of work, they have similar schedule.
When I was in grad school, I heard several stories of women who put their husbands through law school or med school by teaching or nursing, and were divorced almost as soon as the husbands got their diplomas. It happened to one woman I knew personally.
As for the children’s perspective, my kids were always happy to be in daycare, but I witnessed scenes of kids clinging to their moms or dads for quite while before being willing to let them leave. I’m sure it must have been extremely difficult and guilt-inducing for the parents. I would not blame them in the least if they decided to stop working and stay with their child at home.</p>
<p>QuantMech: That was actually my point, and that was why I reacted so strongly to WashDad’s comments earlier. She wouldn’t have felt that way if others hadn’t gone out of their way to make her feel guilty. (For the record, both my grandmothers worked until their mid-sixties, and all the women in my extended family work, so these weren’t really “expectations” in any meaningful way… but it still hurt to hear, I imagine.)</p>
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<p>Oddly enough, one rarely hears this complaint from men, even though many men are both fathers and career men. </p>
<p>Perhaps if couples where both members had careers, also split the housework and parenting more evenly, this would not be such a problem. If a guy were unwilling to split reasonably with me, that would be a dealbreaker right there.</p>
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<p>The 70s, sure, but the 80s? My strong impression, from what I know of 80s media, was that women staying home with the kids was positively glorified (“Thirtysomething”, anyone?). I mean, it was the backlash period, and the rise of the Religious Right.</p>
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<p>Yeah, this is my feeling too. And of course these days there is formula, or breast milk pumps if one doesn’t favor formula. I just don’t see why, beyond actual nursing, this should be assumed to be the woman’s burden, that her career and not the man’s should be sacrificed for it*.</p>
<p>*Yes, I understand that you will sacrifice when you have kids. I’m saying that there’s no reason for the career sacrifice to go overwhelmingly to the woman by default.</p>
<p>May I point out that many women aspire to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months and then continue to breastfeed non-exclusively until age two? There are many supposed health benefits for the baby if mom will do this. Pumping almost exclusively often allows the milk to dry up sooner than actually giving the baby the breast. From what I have seen, read, and heard, breastfeeding can be HARD and STRESSFUL. How many women want to take time out of their workday every few hours to attach pumps to their nipples?</p>
<p>Edit: And in addition to being hard and stressful, many women still claim that breastfeeding is one of the best bonding experiences possible for them and their babies. As cronie says below, it has “less to do with reason than it has with the emotional bond…”</p>
<p>Man, the Parent Cafe is the most interesting place here…</p>
<p>I had my kids in the 80s, and believe me, most of my educated peers felt they should be working while child rearing. The older generation didn’t give us grief- it was our own generation. ( the religious right had little cred in my circles…;)</p>
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<p>IMHO, the fact that the career sacrifice is so often made by the woman has less to do with reason than it has with the emotional bond created by carrying the baby for 9 months, the birth, the breast feeding, all that the childbearing experience entails. Giving up the demanding career becomes less of a sacrifice than giving up time with the child. Not to all women, but to to many.<br>
The men, of course, have their own point of view as to why they might like their spouse to stay home…it makes it much easier for them to succeed. </p>
<p>These two factors are a reality. It doesn’t mean that a couple who prefers a different sharing of roles shouldn’t be successful. I would hope that a young woman who has dream of a demanding and time consuming career makes sure she marries a man who is fully supportive of her dream, and is aware that it may mean sacrifice on his part as well. Many young men today do hope and expect their wives work and bring in as much income as they do, but in any case it is still likely to be up to the woman to help her partner understand that if they have children, he will need to make adjustments in his career as well to accommodate that. Men are unlikely to realize this imperative as fully on their own as the one carrying the child will realize it, …at least in this country, at this time.</p>
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<p>Perhaps it’s a subculture thing. Even in the small bits of the 80s that I remember (I was born in 1985), and for a few years afterward, I remember that “feminist” was considered a dirty word by most people, and that for women in our neighborhood, working was something you did if you had to, not something that you did because you wanted to. And the way that people looked and sounded when they mentioned daycare, you would have thought that they were talking about a combat zone.</p>
<p>Fortunately I had good female role models throughout my life in both the stay-at-home and work-outside-the-home roles.</p>
<p>There’s a Miss Manners quote (in one of her books), that I like a lot - it goes something like “Society is forever telling those ladies at home that they should be at work, and those at work that they should be at home.” :)</p>
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<p>This, I definitely agree with.</p>