Man, I just checked back in with this thread having been away from it a few days. Holy smoke!
These topics are obviously near and dear to everyone’s heart. That’s good, I suppose.
I just skimmed the thread, but a couple of things I wanted to respond to:
Having a mom work outside the home isn’t selfish and doesn’t deprive the child of anything. Robyn’s song understands this – I can tell by her comment about her child being in a learning environment while she works (as opposed to being at home watching mommy clean and run errands). That is the same thing we did – there were many afternoons I would go to pick the kids up from pre-school and they didn’t want to go yet! They were having too much fun with their buds.
I made a deal with my kids: if they ever told me they no longer wanted to go to the pre-school or after-school care, that would be the last day they would go there. That only happened once and, when it did, we as a family searched for a new place. The kids picked it out and loved it.
On the first day of kindergarten, you can almost point to each kid that had a stay-at-home mom. Those are the kids that look overwhelmed and, in some cases, cry because they aren’t used to the hub-bub.
Some couples decide that having the mom at home is best for them. I don’t fault them for that – it is a perfectly valid choice. It just isn’t the right choice for every family. It certainly wasn’t right for us.
However, even I think a parent should be home with a newborn. It’s just much safer, unless there is a relative or trusted adult around who can babysit. The way we handled that is we worked opposite shifts…we’d meet in a parking lot and swap cars (the kids snugly in the carseat of one car) as one of us was getting off work and the other was starting. We didn’t get to see much of each other for awhile, but we made it through just fine.
And I’m not quite sure why anyone would have to hire a housecleaner and laundry service just because both parents work. We never did that – we did those chores ourselves. If mom and dad and kids are out of the house most of the day, the house gets much, much less dirty. That wouldn’t work too well in homes where the male won’t pitch in, but we split the chores equally. It didn’t take that much time. Heck, now that we are older and have more $$ we just started hiring a house service and it only takes them 3 hours every other week. It’s not a major undertaking.
