<p>I think Driver’s #12 post sum it all. It is difficult to have it both ways. I wish my mom stayed at home more. In her pursuit to try to give me the best of everything that she can(which I am grateful), she could not be there most of the time that I needed her the most.</p>
<p>Driver, I do have regrets too…my mother-in-law who took care of my son during the day, saw more of my son than I did - all his “firsts”. I used to be insanely, insanely, jealous of her. I regret it, even now that he is gone, out of the house. Yesterday, my husband and I were recalling when he was a baby and used to say this and that.</p>
<p>But I have to admit, he uses me as a role model, it’s awfully flattering. 
I have the same feelings as you - I don’t know if this was “optimal” or not, God knows. So far he has turned out all right, although he is only 19, so the word is still out.</p>
<p>My mother went back to work full-time when I was about 6 months, and I had a nanny from then on. For me, staying at home when I could be working sounds dull, uninspiring and I cannot imagine myself doing it. But you know what, that’s not what ‘women’s rights’ is all about. It’s about giving women equal access to employment IF THEY WANT IT. If these women want to stay at home to bring up their kids, then I applaud them. If they decide they want to return to work after giving birth, that’s great too. Women’s rights should be about women choosing to do what they think is best for themselves and their families, not about fulfilling some feminist ideal.</p>
<p>Chief, I’m with you.
The Cheyenne, in their heyday had their own form of nobility, and, like the Greeks who considered all foreigners barbarians, they refered to themselves as “human beings” because of the high and noble values they held dear. These “values,” though not always, or even often, manifest, were nonetheless made the object of the greatest honor and a sign to all that the person(s) who embodied them were the carriers of the spirit of the tribe. It is not without significance then, and especially if we note the present world in which we live–and the fate of the Cheyenne–that the highest honor and praise was delivered not to warriors or to chiefs but to parents who took it upon themselves to raise but one child every seventeen years, so that through their concentration and effort (and sacrifice) they could raise up (educate–to build) real human beings to replace themselves.<br>
Now, doesn’t that sound like a fairytale? But it’s true.</p>
<p>I would tend to agree that the end goal of the women’s movement was that everyone might chose to do what they want and be limited only by lack of talent or effort and not by gender. Some women will choose to stay at home. My mother chose to work, and I didn’t think I suffered. I wasn’t envious of the kids whose moms staid at home. On the other hand my wife chose to stay at home, and I think my children had a much richer experience for it. It may come down to the personality of the mom. Some women shouldn’t stay at home with the children (I’m quoting from a child psychologist here)</p>
<p>A few thoughts:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Frankly, this article is only revealing a “dirty little secret” many of the students already know. The big consulting, investment banking, and law firms all lose women in large numbers as they reach 30. The women’s movement has succeeded in getting opportunities for women, but our (high- and low-paying) workplaces here in the USA continue to be hostile to family life in different ways. </p></li>
<li><p>Songman, the communities you are talking about all sound as though they require a commute. Where I live it takes over an hour to get to the financial district. When you add that to a workday whose length is predicated on the assumption that the employee has a “wife” who will attend to running the home (and that’s true whether she is employed or not – read Arlie Hochchild’s The Second Shift), it becomes very difficult to feel grounded in one’s community. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>My d and I talk a lot about how one of the best choices one can make in combining work and family is to live close to where you work (or work close to where you live). I have done this and she sees what it has meant to all of us. However, it’s not easy to do, especially when the big city holds out the promise of incredibly big bucks. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>MotherofTwo, yes, I know a number of lawyers who work locally…and others who find it very hard to give up the enormous incomes they can earn in big firms in the city. And people I know who work for those big firms must be available at the drop of a hat 24/7, including being required to return from vacations if needed. </p></li>
<li><p>Are we talking about a tiny elite here? Of course. But this is the culture the young women in the article are steeped in. Unfortunately, the feminist movement’s goals have been somehow warped. I am a lifelong feminist and consider people’s <em>wholeness</em> to be the essence of feminism, not just their capacity to work in high-earning fields. Maybe the next step for feminism is to recreate the work world. </p></li>
<li><p>I agree with those who say it’s not our place to judge anybody else’s choices or arrangement. Around here the women who are not employed are the ones who stand beside the retirees and work at the soup kitchens, food pantries, etc.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>“I am a lifelong feminist and consider people’s <em>wholeness</em> to be the essence of feminism, not just their capacity to work in high-earning fields. Maybe the next step for feminism is to recreate the work world.” </p>
<p>aparent,great post - I particularly like this thought.</p>
<p>Songman:</p>
<p>You and I must live in different communities in MA! The Harvard, Yale, etc… graduates I know all work and have children (I know them through my kids’ schools). Could they have had more high-powered careers? Most probably yes. But it’s not been all or nothing.</p>
<p>I agree that living close to work is important. My SIL eventually gave up working (but only after 20 years) because she no longer could tolerate the 3 hours round-trip commute. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was actually her company being bought out and having to relocate from the East Coast to the Midwest. </p>
<p>I knew from the very beginning, that I would not be able to stay home. If I did, my kids would probably not benefit from my laser focus on their development (or lack thereof). I have to confess I have never been concerned about not being the first to see them take their first steps. As long as they did walk, that was fine by me. S1 was pronounced ready by his pediatrician to take his first steps at 10 months. It was not until he was 18 months that he let go of coffee tables and chairs and walked on his own. S2 did not sleep through the night until he was 4. I would stagger in to work, bleary-eyed. </p>
<p>While each and every family and each child is different, it bothers me that so many young women, a priori, opt for some of the most demanding career paths and then, decide to drop them in order to stay home. One of the single greatest factor contributing to women’s downward economic mobility is divorce. Not only does it have an impact on them, but also on their children.</p>
<p>On another note, my brother is the sole bread-winner in his family. When they married, he supported his wife’s desire to be free-lance, but commissions are few and far between. Since the French economy is iffy, the fact that the burden of providing for the 4 of them by himself has introduced huge tensions between him and his wife. I would not wish to be in either of their shoes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I like this, too. But it won’t happen if women stay home. When I first started working, I was one of two women in my group; the other had an older child. Meetings often ran past 6pm. Luckily, my H was able to pick up our kids from daycare. Several years later, more women joined our group, and several had young children. They asked that meetings not start late or last past 5:30. Done!</p>
<p>I agree that living near one’s job makes the work/family balance much more manageable. My H and I are lucky enough have jobs 10-15 minutes away from our homes. Picking up on Marite’s comments on her brother’s family, my sister stayed home for many years and now works in a relatively low-paying job. Her kids are much more limited in their college choices than my kids, due to financial constraints. There are tradeoffs in any path one takes.</p>
<p>Songman-- not a flame. However, the glass ceiling is more complicated than just women dropping out of the work force. In my 20+ year career in Human resources, I’ve seen every excuse in the book for a woman to reject a promotion, a lateral move which will be followed by a promotion, even attending training programs which are typically held at golf resorts, Bermuda, etc. It’s these opportunities which create the upward mobility, not the job descriptions or performance evaluations, per se. If a talented woman rejects several promotions in a row, guess what-- the opportunities stop coming her way. She can still be working professionally at age 40 but her career in no way can be compared to her male colleague who started with her, but had the luxury of relocating every other year, taking a 2 year assignment overseas, or spending several weekends a year shmoozing with senior people at training programs and conferences.</p>
<p>Is it fair that he has a wife (often not employed) which gives him the flexibility to take advantage of these opportunities while she’s stuck with a husband, who is usually not willing to go along for the ride??? I don’t know the answer… but women who drop out once kids are born is only partially the answer.</p>
<p>I work in the traditionally female profession of nursing. This is my 25th year. When Ifirst started, the majority of nurses who had babies returned to work, usually close to full time. Most used daycare. Today, most either work limited hours, or quit. Very few use daycare. When I asked one young mom why she thought this was happening she said alot of the nurses her age had been brought up in day care and they hated it. I thought this was interesting.</p>
<p>“it won’t happen if women stay home.” Agree, Marite! And your observation about divorce is certainly on the mark. </p>
<p>But for young people in these schools planning their careers right now, the ante has been upped beyond all recognition from what it was when I went to an Ivy. In those days most people I knew were looking for more of a counter-cultural lifestyle and wanting to change the world. </p>
<p>Today for both guys and girls it is all about having arrived at college with an astonishing resume and now doing about international internships, going for partner or doing a residency or whatever that consumes your entire life, competing with hundreds of others for a single job, recognizing that it’s dog eat dog in a bad economy with a shrinking dollar and a global workforce. Maybe motherhood represents, for these young women, a way to get in touch with the human dimension. Maybe, for them, that’s the counter-cultural piece. I don’t know. I am just trying to understand what makes them tick.</p>
<p>Blossom, I wanted to chime in on this one, because I feel those extra opportunites were not always passed over by the female. I’m in a field once dominated by men. I’ve been asked over the years to describe any discrimination I have encounted. There have been a few times it was obvious, but most of the time, of course it was not. I believe one of the biggest obsticles was similiar to what you described, but on an even smaller level. In my young days, it was rare that the women in my field were invited to go out “with the guys” after work, on weekends, to the golf games, even to lunch. It would just be awkward. It is perfectly acceptable to ask a work “buddy” out to a ball game. Asking a female colleague is not (especially if the guy is married!). But where are the office politics discussed? Where are opportunities, and sometimes “inside information” learned? On the golf course, at the game, at lunches. It is far better now, as more females have entered the field, but I do believe it made a difference when there were so few.</p>
<p>keymom,
Both my kids liked daycare - they thought it was fun. And it was not a ritzy or highly educational daycare, just a regular one with a lot of craft projects, outdoor play, toys, singing, etc. I am not just saying this - both my kids have written letters to the editor of our local newspaper in the past in response to anti-working mother columns in which they talked about their good memories of daycare. In fact, my daughter once spent a day at my sister’s home when she had a day off from first grade. Only my youngest (preschool age) niece was home, as they are in a different school district and her older two were in school that day. When my D came home, she told me that she felt sorry for her cousin because she had to stay home all day while Aunt ---- does her chores. I guess the nurses you work with had a different experience or reaction to daycare.</p>
<p>Oh, the glass ceiling is there all right, but it’s a statistical, thermodynamic model, not an absolute deterministic model. Individuals may make it through it but the deck and the odds are stacked.</p>
<p>TheMom and I made compatible life choices early on; like all choices, there were trade-offs and consequences. Choices included a not-more-than-25-minute commute to TheMom’s work, me having the job with the flexible hours to accommodate child-schlepping and pick-up, etc., and TheMom staying to work in the public sector rather than going corporate or agency. There were significant economic downsides to both of these but neither of us regrets them as we had the quality of life we wanted while we were living it, not enduring something we didn’t want all for the promise of “some day.” </p>
<p>Staying at home was never an option for TheMom and would have been a huge waste of potential and I haven’t noticed that TheD has suffered any from it. As a “latch key” kid myself, I think she had significantly better life experience than I did…certainly there are many ways to do it.</p>
<p>Otoh, while TheMom only took a three-month leave when D was born, it’s more likely than not that if she were male her would include the words “vice chancellor” instead of “director”…and she works in an environment that is much more egalitarian than most. There’s a substantial minority of director-level women at UCLA but the assistant vice chancellors and vice chancellors are almost all (completely?) male.</p>
<p>I have mulled the social component over the years. TheMom is far less combative politically than I would have been in several situations. And yet she has survived in a way where I probably have not.</p>
<p>Don’t mind me…just ruminating aloud.</p>
<p>I found it interesting that the young women quoted seemed to feel that financial stress would not be an issue–that is, their significant others, who also will presumably have degress from elite schools, will be willing and able to support them and their their children in appropriate style and comfort. I’m glad these women are happy with their childhoods and proud of their mothers, but I am somewhat surprised by their cavalier attitude toward all their own prevoius hard work (that is, doing what it took to get into these schools in the first place).</p>
<p>I have always found the issue of good child care versus career advancement to be a difficult one, in part because my profession is an interesting but poorly paid one while my husband’s is a somewhat less interesting but better paid one. I think good day care can be very good indeed, and a bad nanny, like bad day care, which does exist, can be very bad. It is by no means a clear-cut decision, but it isn’t one I would have been ready to pontificate on at nineteen.</p>
<p>I am glad these young women think they have choices, but I am always a little concerned when people make plans based on things over which they have little control. Not everyone who wants to gets married. Not everyone stays married. Not everyone who marries and stays married has children. As I get older, flexibility in future plans seems so much more important than laser focus.</p>
<p>My brother is a homemaker for a high-achieving-80-hour-week-working spouse and children. It works for them and he is able to use his skills (Stanford BA and MS) in the community. My husband stayed home for a year when the youngest was little while I started a more demanding career path – he hated it! Different choices for different folks with the aim being a satisfying life for everyone.</p>
<p>My W and I both have careers and both took turns with the kids. We had nanny help, but kept it manageable, and never over a few hours a day. We often took the babies (then kids) to work with us. I had a crib and play pen in my office. When the kids were older, the President of the organization for which I worked would come looking for a kid to play with. I now realize more than ever, we were very fortunate.</p>
<p>I may be of the minority opinion here, but I think this article typifies the attitude of entitlement of many Gen-Xers. Many of them are spoiled brats who want to have everything without making any sacrifices. My generation of women went to college with dreams of making a contribution to the world, the greater good, and not the least of which, to improve the position of women in the workplace. Many of us wanted to work but also needed to, and daycare was the only option for many of us. My daughter went to daycare at the age of 18 months and I think it contributed to her social skills and independent character. The lack of social conscience I witness in many pre- and college-age people today appalls me. And what about other women who are denied admission to these prestigious universities, who may actually want to make contributions to society?</p>