This article is a direct response to Jaqueline Eager’s story about the difficulties of being a Stay-at-home-Mother these days. I suggest you read that one first, unless you happen to be Mrs. Eager herself!
I will start off by highlighting one of the lines in her short essay: “In the circles I have run anyway, it seems that being a stay at home mum is not a socially acceptable option, especially for a woman who has spent years at university and has laid the foundations of a successful career.”
I’m pretty sure this one sentence nails the underlying issue pretty well. There are some valid points about economics and how one worker today isn’t enough anymore to supply a whole family and I’m sure there is some truth to that. But the real deal-breaker seems, to me at least, the socially acceptable part. The core of the issue seems to me to be rooted somewhere in the feminism of the past, some decades ago, which basically assumed the following things:
- The world is run by men to their advantage.
- In order to achieve equality, women must be given the same rights as men.
- Hence: Free yourself from your shackles, ladies, and conquer the world.
I’m sure there’s some truth to #1 and a lot of truth to #2. However, the whole discussion at some point — I don’t know when, I’m not a scientist — tilted towards the idea that to be a real woman these days, you have to live like a man, which totally brushes aside the freedom to choose.
Forgetting the family
To me it seems like one of the core issues of this whole discussion is the assumption that being at home and just being a mother is easy. It is very hard to measure the quality of a mother (or a father, for that matter) in numbers, in something tangible and measurable. In your job, it’s very easy: you go to work, you work eight hours, you return home and at the end of the month you receive Dollar amount X. What you accomplished can be seen on your bank account and it can maybe even be seen in the real world if you happen to create something you can actually touch and feel.
Running a family, however, is not something that can be seen or measured. There is no family index that somehow measures your son’s or daughter’s perfection level. There also is no stability index that indicates whether or not you have a functional family. This makes it very easy to overlook how very difficult it is to run a family successfully. Just think about yourself and your environment. There’s many more dysfunctional families than functional ones out there — and the ones that do work did not get there by chance, but by putting in hard work.
You have to somehow meet the demands of at least three people (two parents and a child) or maybe four or five people. Everyone needs to be happy; everyone needs to spend time together; everyone needs to spend time apart. If the children are young, you have to basically handle them like high-maintenance pets which need 24/7 care. There are interpersonal relationships you have to handle. Kids have mood swings all the time which need to be considered. You have to teach them values that are important in life, but there’s not much time to do that (the years pass by quickly).
Women’s worst enemy: the women
In order to appreciate the desire to simply be a stay-at-home-mom we would first need to rediscover the value of the family first, in my opinion. It is very easy to let it (the family) slip away if you’re not careful and raise emotionally unstable children who later become adults that are barely worthy of this designation and experience the high point of their days if they manage to tie their own shoelaces.
There doesn’t seem to be much value placed in functional families these days. Compared to the 70s, there are way more ‘single parents with kids’-households nowadays (in the US). I can’t see much public discussion about this, however. Everybody knows it and no one acts surprised if you tell them that the classic family is on the decline, but hardly anybody talks about it in an open space. To my understanding, this can’t be good.
I’m going to make an assumption that most of the people who disapprove of a lifestyle like Mrs. Eager’s are actually women themselves. I don’t think men would react strongly against a woman who expresses the desire to just being a mother. I might be totally wrong on that, though, it’s just a gut feeling. Enlighten me if I’m wrong.
I’m not making a case that staying at home is better or going to work is better. But I do say that there is a very large bias towards “a real woman these days has a career” which might be tilted too heavily into that direction. Rediscover the value of a strong family and you rediscover the value of the stay-at-home-parent (both male and female).
(Written by a man, by the way. This is my personal and thus subjective perspective of the problem that Mrs. Eager wrote about.)
