Where do you stand on feminism?

Parent Cafe
561

<p>Thank you, busdriver11, for expressing some regret. I don’t trust anyone who’s raised a child who doesn’t have at least a pang. But boy, were you ever slammed! I’m so glad that you are all safe, and that everything worked out.</p>

<p>I was a SAHM. We waited until 10 years after we were married to have our first child. I was working at a job that paid more than my husband’s for several years, and we wanted to get our finances under control before we brought another person into this world. The goal from the beginning was for me to stay home. I want to say that this was mutually agreed upon, but looking back I’d have to say that this was mostly my position. My husband was surely for it, but when times got tough, he couldn’t help but wish he wasn’t the sole breadwinner. </p>

<p>I worked for my husband (who started a new company) during the baby years, and I still do today. I also had a very tiny side business, so I wasn’t totally not working, but essentially I was “just a mom.” I had visions that I could do my work at home, and he had visions that his company would take off, and I could be the office manager, and we’d live like kings on what he made.</p>

<p>Well, that didn’t happen. But we’re frugal as hell, and we have practically no debt, so we did survive, and nicely too. But I did have to skip the hot yoga, sally. And vacations to exotic places, and a lot of things that other people take for granted. For instance, we are do it your selfers, which tends to mean that nothing gets done. </p>

<p>But I strongly agree with alh “I think it matters how and with whom our kids spend their early years.” I never wanted some kind, patient person to raise my children instead of me. Perhaps in my egotistical mind, I didn’t want anyone raising my children except me. I wanted to show these little people the world, and I wanted to be there when they saw it. I couldn’t even physically bring myself to leave them when they were infants. And I didn’t even like kids in general. I don’t think I could have had children and entrusted their everyday care to someone else. I felt, even 25 years ago, that the world was populated with people who didn’t share my values, and I feel it more now. </p>

<p>Am I a feminist? Sure I am. I have a daughter and a son, and I love them both. And I want their friends to have the freedom to be who they are.</p>

<p>Was this a career? No. It’s something else. You can call it what you want, or denigrate it if you wish. </p>

562

<p>

</p>

<p>I disagree.</p>

<p>Only a VERY SMALL percentage of high school students are chasing the AP/IB, test every year, jump through hoops life. Less than 1/3 of high school students take even 1 AP exam (<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c8/c8s1o12.htm”>http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c8/c8s1o12.htm&lt;/a&gt;). </p>

<p>80% of students graduate high school in 4 years. (<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014391.pdf”>http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014391.pdf&lt;/a&gt;)</p>

<p>Only 66% of high school graduates enroll in college (<a href=“College Enrollment and Work Activity of Recent High School and College Graduates Summary - 2022 A01 Results”>http://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm&lt;/a&gt;). And only 60% of college students graduate in 6 years (<a href=“Fast Facts: Undergraduate graduation rates (40)”>Fast Facts: Undergraduate graduation rates (40))</p>

<p>That means roughly 40% of high school graduates finish college in the next 6 years. Which means roughly 32%, or 1/3 of high school students, end up with a college degree 10 years after their freshman year of high school.</p>

<p>In 1994, 62% of white male high school graduates were enrolled in college, and 66% of white female high school graduates. In 2012, the numbers were 62% and 72%, respectively. <a href=“Gender gap in college enrollment | Pew Research Center”>http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/06/womens-college-enrollment-gains-leave-men-behind/&lt;/a&gt; Almost 60% of college students are women.</p>

<p>What is happening to the boys, and what is being done about it? Society can no longer be built on the backs of manual labor done predominately by non-college educated males.</p>

<p>Surely the best answer is not to leave them be and send them to prison a few years later, as often happens, especially to black males.</p>

563

<p>Well, and let’s be honest, this isn’t really great news for the girls, either, if their generation of men aren’t getting educated. </p>

564

<p>100% agree poetgrl… just like society benefits from education women that have the ability to choose whatever career they want, society also benefits from the same for men.</p>

<p>Additionally, I assume (but have no proof) that most women want to / do marry and have kids someone of similar educational and economic achievement. And, as a society, I believe we have chosen, in overarching/general terms, to prefer 2 parent households with kids as the best foundation for the future. I believe this is visible in our tax policy.</p>

565

<p>Well, I am glad my daughter’s fiance also has a college degree and is applying to MBA schools. Not gonna lie.</p>

<p>But, I also believe in equality of opportunity for men and women and I don’t want us to forget the boys and only focus on the girls, regardless. </p>

<p>What do you think can be done?</p>

566

<p>“Thank you, busdriver11, for expressing some regret. I don’t trust anyone who’s raised a child who doesn’t have at least a pang. But boy, were you ever slammed! I’m so glad that you are all safe, and that everything worked out”</p>

<p>Thanks for your kind words, @HotCanary. I don’t wish this on anyone, and every time I read about a married couple in the military with kids, I think, “No, don’t do it!” I believe my husband had it easier than I did, as he was deployed for several months at a time, and it gets easier the longer you are away. I would leave for 2-3 weeks, come home for two days, leave for another 2-3 weeks, come back again for another few days. My little guy had no idea who I was, and I had no idea how to take care of the little guy. I always hoped that my lack of foresight didn’t make him suffer for a lifetime.</p>

<p>I definitely agree with your statement,
“I think it matters how and with whom our kids spend their early years.” I never wanted some kind, patient person to raise my children instead of me. Perhaps in my egotistical mind, I didn’t want anyone raising my children except me. I wanted to show these little people the world, and I wanted to be there when they saw it. I couldn’t even physically bring myself to leave them when they were infants. And I didn’t even like kids in general. I don’t think I could have had children and entrusted their everyday care to someone else"</p>

<p>I never could stand anyone watching my kids after that experience. I felt okay with my husband being the one to take care of them when I was gone, because he got to experience being with the kids full time, in a way that most guys never get to. But I never got comfortable with anyone else, after our first traumatic experience, and by the time the second child came around, it was pretty much just us. Albeit often just one at a time, but they didn’t seem to care which one of us it was. I also never liked kids in general, though my kids had some pretty great friends over the years.</p>

567

<p>soccerguy - I’m not sure how your post is disagreement. I said, minus stats, that more women are heading to college now. You post stats to back that up. I implied that men are a smaller percentage of college enrollees not because they are going in smaller numbers but because women are going in larger numbers. You post stats to back that up. Furthermore I said that many of the family wage skilled trades jobs have disappeared and you agreed in bold print. </p>

<p>My experience has been that as those honorable career options have dwindled for young men, administrators and education planners at higher levels have pushed more rigid curricula and increased testing to ensure that we don’t “fall behind”. This leaves even less time for open ended, kinesthetic, experimental learning in the primary grades . . . in my experience . . . the type of learning that many boys thrive on.</p>

568

<p>HotCanary: Was this a career? No. It’s something else. You can call it what you want, or denigrate it if you wish.</p>

<p>I don’t like to think of my kids as work product, but frequently considered them a passion project.</p>

569

<p>Sometimes distance may be necessary to understand an experience, though memory, of course, is the subject of a whole lot of academic discussion - however, this thread is making me think about my almost decade long homeschooling involvement. I was fortunate to be part of a very large community, mainly women, only a handful of men. It was a completely child centered community and for the majority of those years filled with most participants ovulating, gestating, lactating . And I really don’t remember competition, cattiness, back gossiping among the group members. And this was a group that included conservative Christian fundamentalists whose children did purchased curriculums during regular school hours and atheist unschoolers; hot yoga mamas with household help and women barely scraping by; families with one child and families with eight. I can recall some ugly comments (from my pov) from non-homeschooling moms outside our group about group members. But I really can’t remember anything but a feeling of support and live & let live from within the group. Now that I am a few years post menopausal, I wonder how much of our lack of competitiveness was due to a sort of chemical high, magnified by being part of this particular group. A more intense version of how women living together get into sync with their cycles.</p>

<p>anyhow - it was lovely to feel part of that whole</p>

570

<p>We can cut the number of black males going to prison by simply changing our drug policies.</p>

571

<p>the war on drugs is a complete bust. Total waste of time and money.</p>

<p>Treatment not jail.</p>

572

<p>We can also cut those numbers by short circuiting the school to prison pipeline. I don’t have them at hand but my recollection is that studies showed that black kids and particularly boys are disciplined more harshly for the same classroom infractions even at very young ages. This is more prominent in some states and apparently even more prominent when there are for-profit alternative “schools” and juvenile detention facilities. It becomes a profit center.</p>

573

<p>Yes, I’ve read those studies, too. I do believe they’ve shown unequivocally that African American males are punished for school infractions in ways their white counterparts are not. </p>

<p>It’s an interesting issue. How do we accomodate boys learning styles in school? (full disclosure: my youngest was frequently in trouble with the boys and was an athlete who had trouble sitting still.) It’s not only a boys issue, but it is primarily a boys issue. And there is no reason whatsoever to ignore it.</p>

<p>I wonder what can be done? Has anybody come up with any ideas?</p>

574

<p>In my experience it got worse as elementary school teachers had less flexibility in how to structure their school days. My kids are now 20 and 18 and things were just changing over when my older started elementary so that every minute had to be accounted for. It got progressively worse so the things that teachers had done that were unique to them were squelched in favor of measurable uniformity. That seemed to be a top down thing. It was driven by our superintendent and principals were weeded to be “yes men/women”. I’m sure it started higher up than that with NCLB and offspring of that movement. Our son had a great, male, 5th grade teacher who used to close the door and do things that were “top secret” and not according to curriculum. He was a guy who really got and appreciated our son and rekindled his spark for learning. So much is measuring and checking boxes now that kids who aren’t as good at just putting their heads down and doing what their told can have trouble.</p>

<p>I guess it could me mitigated but moving back away from that rigid model but what are the chances of that? When people don’t trust teachers to do a great job the profession is turned into one where teachers are just a delivery conduit for a pre-packaged product. We had a wave or retirements when my kids were in elementary during that transition. </p>

575

<p>

I believe my state (WI) is one of the worst for this. And it is only going to get worse after Tuesday.</p>

576

<p>When you create an education system where performance, pay, promotion and often school funding are based on aggregate data each child becomes a data point rather than an individual who wants/needs to learn and succeed in their own life. The “product” is not the individual child but the measurement. That incentivized moving kids out who aren’t meeting numbers. IMO the charter school movement makes this even more possible because any individual school is not mandated to educate everyone in their catchment area. </p>

577

<p>

</p>

<p>I guess my point is that I think “more women are heading to college” because of countless programs and a re-working of the way K-12 is taught that, while positively benefiting girls, is hurting the boys. Girls were left out for so long that there has been a big push in this area. I think we, as a society, need to be careful though. Where are the policies to get more boys to college?</p>

<p>In China, their one child policy has created an imbalance of males and females. Could the U.S. be creating a society that has an educational imbalance? And what would the impact of that be? If women only want to marry men with college degrees, and there aren’t enough men, where does that leave us?</p>

<p>Unfortunately I don’t have any grand ideas… I just think this is a big problem (and, if we take the “feminism = equality” definition, it should fall under this banner).</p>

578

<p>The stats that you posted indicate that boys are attending college at the same rate and that the rate of female attendance has gone up. I would chalk that up more to expectations of female economic independence than a culture that is intentionally discriminatory against boys. I do agree strongly that much of modern school is harder for many boys. I would start a movement but mine has almost survived and made it out the other side. </p>

<p>Interestingly . . . I feel like part of the problem, as I said, is devaluation and mistrust of teachers and union animosity in general. Educators have been so demonized in the last decade or so that the only sensible thing seems like those top down, regimented curriculum models with firm metrics attached. </p>

579

<p>

</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>You can’t draw that conclusion from that data. Maybe there are gender-neutral factors which encourage people to attend college but also discrimination against males. That could result in the same rate of boys going to college and a rising number of women going to college. Or perhaps there are special efforts to encourage women to go to college or to make them more college-ready which are absent for the boys. In most definitions of ‘privilege’, that would amount to de facto discrimination against boys. </p>

<p>If 60% of college students are women, why would you assume that this is because women have expectations of economic independence. Men also have these expectations. What forces do you assume account for this difference? Innate differences?</p>

580

<p>

</p>

<p>If the sexes were reversed, would you “chalk” it up to the same conclusion (or, would the masses cry rank discrimination)?</p>