<p>I do think there would be some difference depending on the locale. If I lived in a small town that I knew would hold few opportunities for my kid, I’d more strongly urge them to to explore further. I live in a region with many opportunities however, especially in the fields my Ds are pursuing, so I think it’s viable for them to attend college in the general area and still have many opportunities. I also have encouraged them to do some study abroad programs (older D has already done so) to help broaden their horizons. </p>
<p>I know you didn’t mean to imply the ‘being scared’ factor in your post but let me say anyway that it doesn’t enter the equation for me. I would be no more or less fearful of them attending college nearby or further away. I don’t think either D chose their colleges because they were fearful of going elsewhere - I think they didn’t want to go elsewhere because they like it in this area so much and (hopefully) they like the convenience to home. As it is, they’re attending large universities in major metro areas. </p>
<p>Once again, I’d support their decisions to attend college anywhere but I do feel fortunate that they’ve chosen to attend closer rather than further. I know they could end up anywhere due to many reasons, I happily moved every three years growing up and never had what I’d refer to as a ‘home town’, but this doesn’t seem to stop me from being happy if we all end up within a reasonable distance of each other.:)</p>
<p>I just have to add this because it cracked me up
So we go to this town that is about a 7 hr drive in the winter-from Seattle, about 200 people- No Starbucks- one gas pump.
I admit the girls and I all did bring our laptops , cause we were going to be there a week- oldest was working on her senior thesis, younger daughter had homework & I had some papers to go over ( as well as we brought the 3rd season of the West Wing)
We thought we were practically in the back of beyond ( but with indoor plumbing)- and I admit, had very mixed feelings to discover they had free wireless! ( we don’t even have wireless in Seattle- we have * dial up* )
:D</p>
<p>The owners kids- who had lived all their lives in this area, both went to college on the east coast- Amherst & Bucknell ( although then transfered to instate from Bucknell, but I think that was more of a fit issue than distance)</p>
<p>I went to the state college three hours from home and met my wife who was ten minutes from home. Still, my plan is to let my kids choose wisely on their own. Of course I would love to have them close to home for the reasons the OP suggests, but at the same time, I figure we will up and move to near wherever they settle or just bribe them to come home with great vacations for everyone all expenses paid :)</p>
<p>I disagree with the concept that they havel their whole life to travel. For many, there will never be as great an opportunity to see the world as they have during college years. With all the study abroad programs (live in Paris for a year for $35K!), 5 months off each year with endless internships throughout the world and the youthful ability to stomach youth hostels, what better time to explore?</p>
<p>I’ll probably be flamed, but in my experience, many who stay close to home limit their career options. A large percentage of my rural MA college class went to NYC after college. That’s where the jobs for the ambitious in business seem to start. While many left after a few years, they mostly ended up in global financial capitals after key training that could only happen in NY.</p>
<p>The doctors went wherever the internships were best and then most chose affluent communities where they could make a good living. The academics chose towns where they could do research and consult. The consultants stayed in NY or went to one of a few large cities. Investment bankers are in NY, London, Hong Kong and very few other places. Almost no one who did not have a family business seemed to end up in a home town that was not a center for their career. Many who took over family businesses did so after a parents death, not by choice.</p>
<p>I live in CA where most do not leave the state. While at out private school most do, for the state as a whole the vast majority choose one of the decent to good state options. Yet I could not envision my kids returning here. Unless they want a job in the entertainment industry, I think they’ll find a better place for career and quality of life.</p>
<p>I’m with the earlier poster who plans to have a lake home where kids and grandkids will vacation. We have a similar retirement strategy. And if they don’t come to us, we’ll go to them.</p>
<p>I guess I’m odd, but I’ve told my kids that they’re to go out of state for college and not to come back for their “starting out” years. Where we live is not a place I want them starting out in life. It’s great for children and middle agers like H and me, but the opportunities don’t exactly abound for the 20 and 30-something set. I think they’ll be more interesting people if they get out there and mix with more globally minded people. My sibs and I were brought up that way. Sister has lived in Latin America for the past 35 years and we all are the better for it. We’ve missed her terribly, but have visited frequently. Its’ added another dimension to all of our lives. We look at things differently because of it. Its hard to explain.</p>
<p>I agree with Zagat that it can be career-limiting to stay in one place. We’ve moved for H’s career, and he certainly wouldn’t be where he is now if we had stayed in California. It’s never easy to leave family and friends, but there is so much to be learned along the way. My only regret is that we didn’t pursue more foreign assignments.</p>
<p>Moving for career advancement is much simpler if only one spouse has a professional job. In our case, I have worked professionally since before my my kids were born at a very secure job which is ideal as far as the work, the flexibility, and the benefits. Because of my job, my husband did not seriously consider new positions which would require moving. Overall, he may not have advanced quite as far as he would have otherwise, but, on the other hand, we both have respectable professional salaries at this point in our careers, and we have always felt more secure with two incomes, since if anything should ever happen to one of our jobs, we know we have the other salary to depend on.</p>
<p>My H always has loved HI, so that’s where we’ve always lived. He’s had a very stable career here & we have strong family ties here. I have a professional career here as well, but have told him that if he wants to relocate for work, I’d be willing (he’s not interested).
We both believe that my S may live in a big city like SF or LA rather than returning to HI, but it’s really hard to say, since there are so many factors, as everyone has pointed out. My D has no clue where she wants to go or what she wants to study, so we’ll see how that evolves as well. We have travelled to many cities on vacations since they were 6 months old & they love the large open spaces of the national parks but the small, homey feel of HI. We look forward to seeing how the future evolves. If we can afford it, we’d like to have a rental for them or us (or houses large enough to have nice guest quarters), so extended visits would be comfortable if they live outside of HI.</p>
<p>I’m more in the emeraldkitty camp - I value where I live as I think most of the people here probably do (Milwaukee poster, NYC people, Northwest people, etc.). I would definitely turn down advancement and mo’ money to stay here rather than move to someplace I find less desirable. I want money to be able to live - not live to be able to make money. I chose where I am though rather than having grown up here. Of course there’s a threshold; I’d move if I had to, but I prefer to have the best of both worlds - a locale I prefer along with great salary/job opportunities. I think most people make this compromise weighting the living or career as appropriate for them. I have met people however, who don’t care at all where they live and would be ready and willing to move from a place like San Diego (or your Milwaukee or Hawaii or NYC for example) to Wichita (one of the places I’ve lived and wasn’t crazy about - no offense intended) but not me.</p>
<h2>MotherofTwo: “Moving for career advancement is much simpler if only one spouse has a professional job. … Because of my job, my husband did not seriously consider new positions which would require moving. Overall, he may not have advanced quite as far as he would have otherwise,”</h2>
<p>This is soooo true…unless the spouse has a prof job that is easily to relocate (such as teaching or nursing). When my H’s company relocated to another state, many employees had to decline the move and give up their jobs because their spouses’ jobs could not relocate. Some spouses were realtors, doctors, attorneys, etc. – all careers which can have a strong clientale base or name recognition which would take years to regain.</p>
<p>Another “group” that had to decline the relocation were divorced people. This included those who either had custody of their kids and their divorce papers forbid them from relocating, or they didn’t have custody and didn’t want to move away from their kids.</p>
<p>Another group that refused to relocate were those who had grandchildren living in their home town areas.</p>
<p>Lastly, some couples ended up divorcing because one spouse felt he had to accept the relocation while the other spouse refused to go along. BTW… no married female employees relocated – all their spouses refused to move for whatever reasons.</p>
<p>It has become harder and harder to relocate people. I guess if a person is going to pursue a career that will likely require relocating, then he/she should choose a spouse who won’t mind and can accomodate.</p>
<p>However, many firms, like the management consulting one I long worked for, bent over backward to find a spot for me in the city my husband had an offer in. My brother and sil worked for the same bank which always found jobs for both when they were transferred. And I wonder if it will change for our children’s generation, but most of my highly educated girlfriends with great careers, if married to a husband who could support the family, stayed home after having children.</p>
<p>There are also more and more people either telecommuting or long distance commuting to work. I see this a lot. I routinely work with people who commute to HQ from other states almost every week. This isn’t something I’d desire or even do (except as a last recourse) but plenty of peopple do it. Telecommuting however, can really help release the geographical constraints.</p>
<p>I gave both of my kids the freedom to choose any college they wanted without geographical boundaries. My D chose a liberal arts college in state and my son chose a unversity in the opposite coast.
Six years later, my D is working and living in the opposite coast and my S has come back in state. I am sure there will be a few more moves before a more permanent location is found.</p>
<p>It is a luxury unfortunately many families/couples cannot afford to allow one parent to stay home with the children when they’re born rather than both parents working full-time+. I feel very fortunate that we were able to allow me to remain at home & raise both of my kids & even now I only work part-tiem.</p>
<p>HIMom, it is great that you were able to remain at home when your kids were young and to work part time now, because that is what you felt was best for you and your family. I don’t want to open a hornet’s nest here, and this is way off-topic for this thread, but neither me, my husband, or my kids ever felt that it was “unfortunate” that I have had a professional career throughout my adult life. I will say that I am fortunate in that my job has more reasonable hours and better flexibility (as far as staying home with sick children, etc.) than some other jobs in my field. I also feel that I “raised” my kids (along with my husband, of course) even though I was working 35 -40 hours per week throughout their lives. I guess we could have “afforded” for me to stay home, since many men who work with my husband in similar positions to his have wives who do not work. Do you really believe that most mothers with professional careers feel “unfortunate”? Personally, I feel very fortunate that I have been able to use my education in a job which I enjoy.</p>
<p>I don’t think that when HImom said that she felt “fortunate” to be able to stay home with her kids, that she was implying that all women who don’t are “unfortunate” (altho I personally know many working moms who do feel “unfortunate” that they weren’t able to “cut back” or not work at all while their kids were growing up or at least while they were babies.) </p>
<p>Certainly there are many working moms that feel fine with their situation - often that is because they have a job that allows some flexibility (stay home with sick kids &/or leave early when necessary); cut back on hours; the siblings/grandparents “help out”; and/or they have a husband who truly “equally parents” the kids. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, some moms do not have those above-mentioned benefits;… so some of those moms stop working (or cut back), and the rest of those moms feel “unfortunate” because they have to work full time and they don’t have much (if any) help. </p>
<p>In my own case, I had a great career, but I didn’t have the “support system” so that I could continue to work after my kids were born. I wanted to breast feed. My job was over 40 miles away and required travel with little notice. My h loves his family deeply but he’s not good at doing “mom stuff”, and he has to travel a lot, too (again, with little notice). Grandparents were not around to help out with scheduling problems. For us, it just worked out better for me to stay home, breastfeed, join “moms groups”, and have the option of going back to work later. When that time came, instead of going back to my original career, I opted to teach for awhile.</p>
<p>(To give you an idea of how bad my H is at doing the “mom stuff”, when I was in the hospital having S2, my H brought S1 (age 2) in for a visit and had dressed him in shorts – with both legs coming out of one leg hole!!! And… H never noticed that it caused S1 to “walk funny” (poor baby!!). — We still laugh at that one! H also tried to clean up apple juice that had gotten on the wall by blow-drying it! He’s just not good at these things!!! The things he does well - he does very well. The things that he does badly… he does very badly! )</p>
<p>Do you really believe that most mothers with professional careers feel “unfortunate”?</p>
<p>I didnt hear her say her choice was available/right for other famiies only that it worked for hers.
We all , I assume try and make the best choices for our famiies using our own criteria, just as I hope we help our kids make the best choices for them.</p>
<p>But to bring it back to topic, on kids ending up within 500 miles of home, if your kid attend school in MInn and you live in WA, if your kid visits Seattle for the weekend, you arent likely to find out after the fact, like I found out when I asked my daughter what she did this past weekend and she said that she drove up here (not her car) with some friends.
I hope next time she comes up she lets me know so I at least can wave as she goes past !m ;)</p>
<p>I am sorry if I overreacted or misinterpreted what HIMom said. She did say in her first sentence that “unfortunately” more families couldn’t have one parent stay home with children. I guess I should reemphasize that I am very fortunate to have a rewarding job in my field, along with a situation such as described by jlauer - flexibility to stay home when kids were sick, reasonable hours, and a short commute from home and my kids’ schools, although my husband did travel a LOT for work when our kids were young, creating stress for me. I recognize that everyone is not as fortunate to have a situation such as mine, and it is wonderful for mothers whose careers are not compatible with caring for young children to have the choice to be at home and return to work later on, but I guess I am still sensitive to the insinuation that children whose moms work full-time are somehow deprived (although HIMom did NOT say that).</p>
<p>By no means do I mean that families should have to make any particular choice. I just feel that it is very fortunate when we have the resources to make the choices that work best for us & our families. I am a professional & have a professional career, as does my H. I feel very fortunate to have had the choice to continue working full time OR cutting back or stopping out of the workforce entirely for a while for my kids. I feel families who have these options & can make these choices without great hardship financially to their families are truly fortunate.
I’m sure our family would have had things work out if I chose to continue working full-time at my career, as many of my collegues have done, but feel fortunate we were able to make the choices that were right for me & my family.<br>
Economically, many families MUST have the full income from both parents to survive economically and it isn’t really an issue as to whether a parent will cut back or stay home with their kids. I’m not making any value judgments other than to say it is a luxury to have a range of attractive choices that will work well for the individuals & families involved, including remaining full-time at a career with quality day care, cutting back on the “parent track,” stopping out for a while, etc.</p>
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