<p>I know several people who have kept the nanny/housekeeper into their old age and have become their caregiver.</p>
<p>These friends/family already decided before marriage that wife would stay home when kids came.</p>
<p>Moochild, I don’t have any statistics but I would venture a guess that most women don’t work at career-type jobs before having kids. Heck, our high school has an infant care.</p>
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<p>I guess that depends how you’re defining career-type jobs. Certainly all the young women in our family and their female friends are working what I’d call career-type jobs, e.g., in teaching, accounting, law, social work, banking, acting, medical research, fashion design. What type of jobs did you have in mind?</p>
<p>Wow these are first-world problems. </p>
<p>I used daycare and aftercare, but I never hired a nanny because I had summers off and a lot of control over my schedule. I also had an extremely supportive spouse who didn’t balk at taking a day off to stay home with D when she was sick so I could go to work.</p>
<p>I don’t really see how we could have had much of a family life if I had been away 12 hours a day, 5 days a week with occasional business trips like my H. Then we would have had to hire a live-in nanny. And then you have to realize that that kind of a life is a choice too, just as being a SAHM is. If you need to hire a full-time employee to enable you to work at a given demanding career, you are pretty privileged. In my area the going rate for a full-time, non-live-in nanny is 45K+ (as long as you are paying social security taxes above the table). I would not want to feel like I was exploiting unskilled immigrant women in order to life my life.</p>
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<p>And who is the caregiver for the nanny/housekeeper when she has to quit because of age or incapacity? </p>
<p>I’m asking these questions not to be critical per se of people who hire nannies etc., but I have always wondered about the undervaluation of domestic labor and the way in which so many privileged liberal professional women with feminist credentials rely on poor uneducated immigrants to support their work. It’s the modern-day version of Downton Abbey and no one wants to talk about it.</p>
<p>Marian, If your H was on board with you working part time while raising kids, I don’t see how he justifies this position. He can be sorry that the job market is what it is for people like yourself who are coming back after many years away, but he can’t be upset with you for what he agreed upon decades ago.</p>
<p>Alwaysamom, I don’t doubt that is true in your family and I hope and expect it will be true in my family, as well. But, most? By non career-type jobs I meant cashier, waitress, salesclerk, grocery checker, mall hot dog chick, etc. These people have babies and there are a lot of them.</p>
<p>“And who is the caregiver for the nanny/housekeeper when she has to quit because of age or incapacity?”</p>
<p>No, my friends/relatives have had to become the caregiver for the nanny/housekeper. These are people who have been with them for over 30 years and have become members of their families.</p>
<p>That’s very decent, emilybee.</p>
<p>But the lines of domestic labor/family are blurred. Just what do we owe people who spend their lives looking after our own kids? There is little safety net; good intentions and kindness from individuals is not the same as a pension.</p>
<p>I think that quote about keeping the nanny/housekeeper and being the caregiver in their old age means that the family employing the nanny/housekeeper takes care of that person. </p>
<p>My sister’s family has an elderly part-time housekeeper who still works two days a week by choice. She used to be their nanny and has worked for them for about 25 years. We all love her and their kids and my D are closer to her than to their own grandmother. She mostly does lighter jobs now, laundry, ironing, organizing. My sister and her H do a lot for this dear lady, including replacing her car for her and sending her on trips every year. She is not poor either and doesn’t need to work financially.</p>
<p>She has been a blessing in all our lives. She is an immigrant and does not have a lot of formal education, but she is extremely smart and is actually quite well self-educated. So the stereotype of the undervalued, uneducated immigrant doesn’t always hold up.</p>
<p>That’s great. I trust the lady is eligible for social security because her employers have been making contributions all those years when she worked full-time.</p>
<p>Yes, they did pay Social Security for her and relevant taxes. She is a widow so I think she must have collected survivor’s benefits from her H for decades. And she also gets retirement benefits from her home country, and one of her sons lives with her and pays rent and maintains her house and car for her! But she still works because she wants to. She is one of the hardest working people I know.</p>
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<p>Most women are working. I consider salesclerk, waitress, grocery clerk, etc. all legitimate jobs- career or not- and many times they are career, lifelong jobs. It’s not about whether the career is white or blue collar. All women need the support of their spouses equally if they are going to be working full time. Some men are quite fine with this and their own career goals fit in with the family lifestyle.<br>
My point was that it takes more than “marrying a woman who works.”
Of course, if the couple decides not to have children, then it’s much easier to balance home and work. Housework can wait for the weekends, whereas children need care 24/7.</p>
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<p>No, but he would be happy to train your husbands <em>just in case.</em> My guess is after they see how much more work it is, they will want to stay married. :)</p>
<p>Exactly, moonchild. That was my point, actingmt. Simply telling sons to make sure they marry a woman who works is not enough. In fact, it is, in my opinion, kind of irresponsible advice to be giving young men, if that is the extent to which you are giving advice.</p>
<p>No disagreement there! I would just say that it often makes more economic sense to stay home than work at a low wage job. Child care and taxes eat up that small extra salary.</p>
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<p>This is exactly the position so many women find themselves in. So someone who works isn’t really the answer, is it?</p>
<p>This is a big problem with no easy answers.</p>
<p>As I said above, the going “legal” rate for nannies in my area is 45K per annum, so you have to make a relatively high salary to make it worth hiring one. </p>
<p>If you have the kind of job where institutional daycare is doable (i.e. regular hours, out by 5 pm), it may pay in the long run to work at a financial loss for a few years until your child starts school. This won’t be true of salesclerk, cashier etc. jobs but might be true of some administrative positions that carry benefits and promotion opportunities.</p>
<p>My cousin recently married after holding out for a long while demanding his wife-to-be finish her college degree and get a “real” job. He had a vision that they would both work in career track jobs for a while (emphasis on career), buy a house, then have kids and wife can stay home at that point. She was clear from the beginning that her vision was that they would get married and have children immediately, so there was little point in starting a career just to quit almost immediately afterward. She didn’t want to invest the money in schooling and the time in a career just to quit almost immediately after-- they are already late 20’s and she wants babies like yesterday and wants to stay home. I can understand wanting his wife to be educated and have career skills, which she is and she does, but I thought making her jump through those hoops only to immediately have children after was a little silly. Evidently my cousin came around to this point of view, because while I think she did finish some sort of degree she didn’t start a career track job and they did get married. If she’d gone along with what he originally wanted they wouldn’t have gotten to have babies until they were WELL into their 30s, which just isn’t what every person wants.</p>
<p>I don’t like the implication that women who don’t work career track jobs are less marriage eligible than those that do. As has been discussed at length, it is a rare family that has the means (and the energy) to balance two full careers and a family. While I think this is an arrangement that society should be supporting as much as possible, it really isn’t the ideal for everybody. You won’t really know what’s right for your sons until they are established in their careers and ready to settle down. They might be sorry when they demand their wives maintain a career, whether they want one or not, and now theirs can’t advance as far as it might have without a stay at home parent’s support-- which is almost certainly what would have happened to my cousin had he not relented.</p>
<p>So D1, not sure about D2, has learned two valuable lessons.</p>
<p>First-- Saw her beloved uncle walk out on her aunt, my sister, and leave her with nothing. He is an orthopedic surgeon and she was a registered nurse. She gave up her career to be a SAHM by mutual agreement. So they were very wealthy but he made numerous bad business decisions. They got themselves into a financial bind. He trades his old in for a newer prettier model and my sister is left with absolutely nothing at 60 yrs. old.</p>
<p>Two–She got involved with a young man when she was a sophomore in college. He was older than her, had already graduated from Columbia in engineering. He had a good job, owned a townhouse a subway stop from Manhattan, drove a BMW, was very charming. (and totally full of himself I might add.)</p>
<p>She lived with him the summer between her sophomore and junior yr. to intern at “investment bank” in a back office job in Compliance. She planned to be a lawyer. All was good. But they spent almost all of their time with his friends and family.</p>
<p>Next summer, between her junior and senior yr., she moves in with him to intern at “another investment bank” front office. This job is potentially much more lucrative. She also wants to spend her first semester senior year abroad. BF claims he was responsible for her getting her new internship and also does not want her to go abroad. But she still planned to.</p>
<p>Next thing you know, he breaks up a few days into second internship. She has no where to live and is totally devastated. It was a very difficult summer for D1, H and I.</p>
<p>So D1 says she will never again be dependent on anyone and says a woman must always be self sufficient. I think she would only be a SAHM if she had some kind of financial safeguard.</p>
<p>Sorry to be so negative, but with 50% divorce rate and men often the major bread winner, woman need to protect themselves.</p>