Posted on 12/30/2013 5:09:11 AM PST by Kaslin
Women used to be faced with a dilemma: forgo a career to stay at home and raise children, or sacrifice the upbringing of your children in order to pursue a career. Since the 1960’s, feminists and conservatives have sparred over this choice. Feminists criticized mothers who stayed at home, claiming women could instead “have it all;” pursue a career while putting their kids in daycare. Conservatives criticized women who put their career first, correctly observing that a parent in the home raising the children is better for the children. This debate was known as the “mommy wars.”
The war is now essentially over and the feminists have won, although not because they were more persuasive. Only 12 percent of moms believe that working full time is an ideal situation for children, and 74 percent of adults say that mothers working outside the home makes it harder to raise children. About half of adults surveyed believe that children are better off if the mother does not work.
Yet today, only three in ten mothers do not work outside the home. The reason the feminists have won is because it is now difficult for men - as well as women - to make enough money from one job to support the entire family. As economic conditions continue to spiral down under Obama, employers have been forced to cut jobs, hours and benefits. Jobs that used to pay decently have been replaced by free student labor, or “internships.” Most parents are lucky to find full-time jobs that pay slightly better than minimum wage. There are fewer people working now than anytime within the past 35 years; only 63 percent of working-age Americans are in the workforce. At the same time, the cost of healthcare, gas, food and other necessities continues to increase.
The median annual household income across the U.S. in 2011 was $50,054. It is extremely difficult for a family of four or more to survive on that level of income. Many parents have student loans, credit card debt from a temporary loss of employment, or huge medical expenses from procedures not covered by insurance. Times have greatly changed since the Ward and June Cleaver era of the 1950’s; workers can no longer count on stable employment, and student loan costs have soared.
Attempting to be a stay-at-home mom on a husband’s meager salary is difficult. Low-income stay-at-home moms, where the annual household income is less than $36,000, report higher levels of unhappiness. Over half report they are struggling, and four percent say they are suffering. Only 46 percent say they are thriving.
Men no longer have more college education than women, making it less likely men will have a high income. Women now make up approximately half of the U.S. labor force. In 1970, they only accounted for 38 percent.
Compounding the problem is the increase in single parents. The number of households led by single mothers has more than tripled since 1960, to 25 percent of households. It is more expensive to support two households than one, not to mention all the additional ongoing legal costs from child support and custody battles. When parents divorce, even if one parent was making a decent income, everything becomes more expensive. In this area the feminists have won some ground; they have successfully removed the stigma of being a single parent, making it easier for parents to walk away from their marriages rather than try and work things out for the good of the children.
What does this mean for families and children? Children are spending more time in daycare and less time with their parents. Over 60 percent of children under age five are in some type of regular child care arrangement. According to research from the Heritage Foundation,
Numerous academic studies suggest that more hours spent in daycare in a child’s earliest years is associated with lower social competence and negative behavioral outcomes, and that these persist through childhood and adolescence. Greater amounts of time spent in non-maternal care and younger age of entry into daycare were associated with a greater likelihood of socio-emotional problems and lower cognitive skills. The cumulative effect of extensive daycare was associated with lower academic achievement and poorer emotional health. As one comprehensive study that tracked 1,300 children from infancy through age 15 found, the quality of daycare was significantly less important regarding social and emotional outcomes than the number of hours spent in daycare. The negative effects of day care were more persistent for children who spent long hours in center-care settings.
Additionally, children are learning values from someone who likely does not share the values of the parents, which is especially troubling for conservative parents. The feminists have pushed hard for this in the name of women’s rights and this is the result.
When the left finds itself losing on a particular issue, it finds a sneaky way instead to ram its agenda through. Having failed to convince women it is better to put their kids in daycare and work full time, Obama and the left are forcing them to do so by continuing the dismal economic conditions. This is just one of many issues Obama is forcing through by artificially extending the recession. The same can be said about Obamacare. Making healthcare unaffordable is opening the door for single-payer (socialist) healthcare.
The left’s ultimate goal of putting both parents in the workforce and their children in daycare has nothing to do with their pretense of “choice” for women. It has everything to do with gaining control over our children at a young age and indoctrinating them in the left’s values. Daycare regulations are increasing and soon parents will have very little control over what happens at them. The only way to stop this is to put conservatives back in power in order to revive the economy with adequate jobs. Times have changed, especially with more women going to college than men, and so the real choice should be whether the mother or father stays at home with the children.
The bigger the family, the cheaper it is for mom to stay home and teach. If she is a professional, telecommuting can often bring her additional income. It is accepting the chains of liberalism that is so costly. Don't.
“real chauvinistic” I’ll grant...
Some real men haters on this thread.
Apparently made some really bad choices and now think all women make equally bad choices.
Exactly. My wife home schools and actively manages the household. In 2011, I made around $54,000 for five people. My children lacked for nothing and some how we managed to spend two weeks in Daytona and three days at Disney without going into to debt.
Everything is about priorities and proper management.
Obama killed my “retirement” (savings). I will probably be working till the day I die now while he sips on margaritas from his vacation home in HI with his homo buddy, Reggie, sitting on his lap.
If all the troubled marriages I’ve known of, only one was because the guy was a real POS.
The rest were due to wives rationalizing their expectations, preferences, and wants, then attacking the husband for not agreeing to them.
If a career woman can’t find time for a child she sure as hell can’t find time for you I would never trust one.
I have thought for a long time that a significant, but unspoken reason, that “everyone” wanted women to work instead of staying home is that a second income provides not only money to the family, but income taxes to feed liberals’ favorite programs.
One of the big shifts I think in the “Mommy Wars” is the rise of online home businesses, freelancing, contract work and part time employment in general.
The ideal family model is now mom working part time. For lower class women, part time work generates income while still letting her keep EITC and other “welfare benefits”. For middle and upper-class women, part time work gives you the ability to contribute financially to the household without the stress of a full time job and often lower childcare costs.
Another shift is the acceptability of on-ramp and off-ramp careers. Have a kid, take a year or two off, come back to work. You’re at home when they are littlest, but you don’t drop out of the workforce for 20 years.
We ran some tax scenarios with my accountant and found that if my wife chose to quit her job and stay home being house frau, we would actually have MORE money than we do at present since we would keep more of our taxes in the long run.
People want that more immediate gratification even if the end result is less.
Another problem in the mix is the constant drumbeat over ‘Equal Pay For Equal Work”.
Many of the women in today’s work force were raised under the NOW banner & they firmly believe that ‘equal work’ can be measured and quantified in the white collar jobs. I say it cannot.
Unless you are making widgets & there is an actual count of your hourly/daily/weekly production of widgets, there is no accurate way to quantify the ‘equal work’ portion of the formula.
I have worked in both blue collar & white collar jobs, and I have been a full charge bookkeeper for the majority of my life. I still have clients. I have worked for a number of small businesses as a self-employed person. I have seen up close & financially how much a small business struggles to make ends meet & have profits for growth.
Then there is the age old problem of ‘working’ women who want to take off for trips to the doctor or to the dentist for their offspring. The dad rarely takes time off, but the women are gone with nary a thought as to how that absence affects the workplace & who might have to make up the workload she has left behind to tend to her ‘little ones’. Then, when promotions are being considered, the women get left behind because they are not dependable to be there 8+ hours a day & to put their loyalty into the company where they want such Equal Pay ahead of their children.
I say-—have kids, and be prepared to not get promoted until they are 20 & out of the house. Until then, I cannot DEPEND on you as an employee 52 weeks a year & whenever there is any kind of work crunch which has an unmoveable deadline. You will beg off because of ‘the kids’.
I cannot ascertain exactly how YOUR work is EQUAL on a apples to apples basis, since you are gone at random times all year long—for the kids. What you also don’t realize with YOUR absence is that those who don’t have kids had to work harder or stay longer to cover the work you left behind when it all HAD TO GET DONE in a timely manner. You don’t realize one little bit how angry those people are at YOU, when you are all on a equal pay scale & YOU are NOT pulling your fair part of the wagon load.
In short—THEY CANNOT HAVE IT ALL!!!
If one father wasn’t supporting his family and 3 other families,
both parents wouldn’t have to work.”””
PERFECTLY SAID!!!!
What an odd statement.
Seems you are painting with a rather broad brush there.
Of all the marriages I have known to fail, the men were addicted to porn.
If you know of some good responsible men please tell
Good post. Many are obsessed with buying the latest “stuff”, be it cars, a “better” house or latest gadgetry for themselves or their children.
Rather than living frugally and not expecting, when (not if but when) a financial crisis occurs either from an act of God or loss of employment, it’s assumed by such people it’s everyone else’s responsibility to bail them out.
Been on that same page for a long time. I have always thought that the government engineered our economy to force the “other half” of the population into the work force for a much more efficient fleecing operation to feed the beast.
The problem with “having it all” is that the timeframe for building a career coincides with the timeframe of a woman’s fertility.
Even if she goes ahead and has kids and puts them in daycare,
she’s not “having it all”, because kids raised by others aren’t really your kids.
Absolutely true. We did it; but, we weren't taking any vacations either. I cooked all the meals and we had dinners that corresponded to what was on sale at the stores that week. I always shopped sales for the kid's clothing as well. Yes, it was difficult; but, I had my first child at age 29, the second at 33. I'd been in the workforce since age 16 and I really wanted to spend time with my babies. I have never regretted it. I looked at it this way: A little more money; or, seeing my child take their first step; not having a babysitter call me on the phone to tell me about it.
Well, I’m not a “fleshy sex fiend”.
Part of the reason there is so much obsession with sex is because of the constant advertising using sex to sell (much less Viagra type ads these days.). Not to mention the objectification of women that has been pervasive throughout centuries. It’s not the greatest reason but it’s a reason.
Humanity has supplanted everyone’s desire for Christ with many things including sex. This is where the true destiny for humanity lies. In Christ, the role of mother is fully realized in every woman (and father, every man).
The feminists were right about men objectifying women throughout time, except for many notable incidents throughout, as a general rule, women were viewed (and still, to a lesser extent) by men as baby factories or tools to “relieve frustration”. Or both.
This isn’t to say that every, or even most men mistreated their wives, just that any idea of women earning money for the family would have been met with derision. The point is experience has shown that it’s important for every family with children to have one parent at home, the other bringing money home.
One could argue that this is only the male role, but such an argument would rest solely on evolutionary statements or traditional roles, both of which are reductions of humanity. Reducing us to animals only (the evolutionary argument) or slaves to tradition minus reason. Just because it’s “always been done that way” is a reductionist argument divorced from reason.
But like all human centered ideas, we went from one extreme to another.
Unfortunately for the feminists (or maybe fortunately, as maybe this was their plan all along), they turned the view of a woman from being familial/sexual slaves into being slaves of money. One objectification for another.
It’s only in realizing we all, in our true unbridled humanity, have an infinite desire for everything, that we can fully come to realize Christ is the only, and real, answer to everything that ails us. He doesn’t take away all our problems or solve them with a wave of His hand. He accompanies is on our journey, which is what we really want anyway.
When a person realizes this about themselves, when one realizes we are made for the infinite and therefore Christ is the only answer for our infinite desire, the burdens of life become lighter, and all of our obsessions, including sex, melt away like a candle under the light of His Love we run to with open arms, as a child who wishes to rest in his father’s love.
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