To be confused by the two working parent set up

Not disagreeing with you at all, but I would query your description of a nanny. Of course they don't take on everything, but they can do more than you've described if you are paying for that time too (shopping, cooking, homework, cleaning and household chores related to kids). I've nannied for several families and they would ask for different things, and that was always fine as agreed from beginning. It always felt good to know I was lightening the mum's load a bit especially if I did something unasked for or random like sewing name rags into uniforms (and yes, always felt like it was the mum's load and not the dad's).

I'm glad you've recorded that, @toomuchcrapeverywhere . Not only is it interesting for your family, it's actually fascinating social history. It also shows how much work went undocumented.
So many had childhoods like this.

Agree with this. We moved into our house 26 years with a mortgage based on 3x DH’s salary, payable over 25 years, as I was just starting 6 years as a SAHM. With people now able to borrow much more over a longer period it comes as no surprise that house prices have risen so much.

Friends I made amongst the neighbours were in a similar position with none of us working. Anyone moving into the street with young kids now needs two good salaries. The local toddler groups are filled with childminders looking after other people’s children and it’s a different world. The “menial” tasks traditionally falling to women of cooking, cleaning and rearing children still need to be done. Both partners can do them and it’s work that needs to be valued.

We recorded my Mum (b 1933) talking about her childhood for DD’s school project. My great great gran and great gran had a clothing business, and everyone was supposed to help out. So my Nan was a supervisor in the factory in the East End, my Great great and Great Grans ran the business side from the office in Bloomsbury. My Mum said that her entire school holidays were spent doing things like collecting cottons and buttons from suppliers and taking them, on public transport, to the factory - they were heavy, so she had a little cart to pull them in. Sometimes her elder brother would help, but he was more often at home with the younger children - he was two years older and trusted to set the fire, heat up lunch and make tea. They didn’t get evacuated during the war as they were needed to help with the business. It didn’t sound like much of a childhood for my Mum and her brother, or much of a life for my Nan.

It does get a bit easier as the kids get older as they can do more for themselves. It is still very overwhelming though! Outsource anything you can afford, we eat out quite a bit. Also let somethings go, my oven is currently disgusting but is not on my priorities right now.

I created a village when my daughter was small - I had no choice as the only family anywhere near were PIL and they were still 30 mins drive away. So while I was on mat leave I went to every local baby group I could find and made friends. Those babies then went to school with DD and became our village.

Yup. I'm 60. My mother is 90. She worked from school leaving until retirement age. If one of us kids was sick, we had to go to work with her and sit in the cloak room while she worked (full-time so a LONG day).

I'm a grandmother now. I've got friends who do childcare for their GC and people on here are right. The parental demands are off the scale. I'm never surprised when GP don't want to do childcare. Being treated like a servant is even less fun when you're unpaid. If parents want free childcare, they maybe need to just accept what is on offer and drop the demands.

I don't know
my
mother and my grandmother both worked.

But being a village, to me, isn't about over ruling another parent, its about backing and supporting that parent to parent- in that scenario I'd go directly to the parent and make them aware so they can sort their kid accordingly. If they opt not to then i will deal with it to protect my kid. If there was no parent present and the child had walked themselves to the park for example then I absolutely would deal with that child directly because there's no alternative. Soft play in particular isn't always fully visible to parents sitting waiting so it's not always possible for parents to see their kid is causing bother.

I also think we're also (thankfully) more aware now of SEN and trauma that requires a slightly different approach and that you won't always know by looking at a child. So attempting to remove a random kid from the toddler area (presumably physically if they aren't going willingly) would absolutely be inappropriate when you could just ask staff to locate and deal with the parent/ carer.

Indeed. A disproportionate number of Mners struggle with the idea of saying hello to their neighbours or chatting to people on the school run, never answer the door, dread play dates because of ‘having to make chitchat with the parent’ and regard the idea of having people in their houses as a virtual infringement of their civil rights.

I mean, you have to be fundamentally ok with the idea of other people for ‘the village’ to be a thing.

My mother's generation (born 1930s) were the first women to work in our family going back hundreds of years. My mother married well but she divorced hin quickly for violence. With her settlement she took herself to university (her father had refused to pay).
Im 60 and my mother worked nearly full time. She had a top job when i was 7 and there were four of us. My gran lived with us until i was ten and my father cooked as he could work nights. He was so good with children he later became my Manny.

Ive been very lucky as a high earner but as i got older and after the crash my contracts dried up. I also had to do unreasonable commutes to just sit in an office in London. My DC missed out.
I think wfh has allowed mothers to have a life with their families. I didn't. We live in an expensive area to access my work and I wish i had moved to the Midlands when I first married. It would have been cheaper. We had plenty of family there.
Even now that i am sick and disabled i still need to financially contribute as we have a student DC.
The only women n my niece's (35) orbit that dont work are single mothers on benefits (they have no spousal support or feckless ex partners) . Everyone else uses wrap around care.
At my school gate my mother was the only one that worked and I was one of three mums for my DC (early noughties).

Fwiw I have autoimmune disease too. Started in my late thirties.

My mum went part time at 24 and has never worked full time since. I'm childfree but have a chronic health condition, a full time job and a 'hobby' (that does make a little money and I'm trying to slowly turn into my full time) and I struggle to keep up to the housework etc, especially the deep cleaning sort of stuff-it's tidy and hygenic but skirting boards haven't been dusted for ages for example. My mum cannot understand why I don't have time...I work 37.5 hours a week, she used to work 15!

I am mid 50s, my Mum would have been mid 70s now. She was a SAHM to 5 children. She didn't need to work, but I recall her telling me there was a pressure to return to work once the youngest was at school. Most of the Mums worked at least part time I think.
This was a medium sized town in Norfolk.

Yanbu

We're not having it all, we're doing it all

People are living a far higher quality of life on average than 50 years ago

I say on average and that means I don’t care that you had a foreign holiday every year as a child in the 1970s

and it means that the fact that your home is damp and mouldy is also irrelevant

on average people have more house space. You have studies and guest rooms not 4 girls in one bedroom. You have Cars, holidays, central heating , greater variety of food, more money for fun rather than just surviving. you have more than one pair of shoes, a selection of coats and bags, I could go on

its crept up on people / bug until the last 10 years the average quality of life was going upward with wages growing much faster than inflation
the wheels started to come unstuck 20 years ago with the start of the housing problem but it’s taken a while for that to really filter through to living standards

there is loads of data out there if you have the patience to search for it

With respect, how old and/or what job did your dad do so your mum didn't work?

My mum worked 3 part time jobs around us and dad worked full time.

I work part time in a professional job and DH full time. One child rather than two. We are much better off than they were.

No, it's not fair.

My parents and husband's parents are in bigger houses than us ( one owned and one council), although I would say our income is/was higher than theirs.

My MIL never had to work, even though they were hardly flush, and my mother always worked part-time.

They drew the ladder up once they had it good. Remember, though, we are the lazy ones for not working hard enough.

Many people have all that - able to go to university, pursue high level (and therefore stressful) jobs not just shop work or cleaning,funded childcare, sick pay etc and somehow are still only ending up living in exactly the same standard of house that families in manual work did in poor areas years ago.

You would expect that households with 2 parents working full time in professional jobs would be able to afford a FAR better house than a 2 up 2 down terrace but in many areas that's simply not the case. And I think this is what makes things feel harder. People wonder what they're doing it for.

gran would have loved the progress whereby a woman can leave a violent marriage and keep her children safe with her

I think people are SCREAMING out for “the village”- they’re just not sure how to make it work alongside the demands of modern working life.

which people? people on here daren't even speak to a child that is pounding their toddler at soft play, let alone move the miscreant from the toddler area.

The difference between then and now is women had to be cautious regarding their decisions and by and large more men did stick around and support them. Now men don't think they have an obligation and many women like a safety bet of benefits.

That isn't progress.

No, I genuinely didn’t know what you meant. I can appreciate it that some people find it hard to manage a FT career, raise children, run a household, have a social life etc, but I don’t see how it would ‘never make sense’ to someone.

I mean, pretty much everyone I know does it, and some of them have extra things in the mix like children with additional needs, illnesses of their own, shift work, caring responsibility to elderly parents etc..

The only longterm SAHPs I know were either trailing spouses and unable to work for a period because of where they were, repeatedly made redundant through no fault of their own, or had conditions which made them unable to work. Not really a choice. The longest term SAHP I know is male.

How people have a full time career, keep a home running and raise children. Pretty obvious what I meant given the OP, but I get the feeling you don't like what I said or agree with me, rather than not knowing what I meant.

I’m in my late fifties and if anything I am more envious of this generation who can depending on the job access WFH and flexible working . When my children were young I was trying to hold down a full time job and commuting an hour each way 5 days a week
WFH was not a thing for most jobs then. Also living in the commuter belt of London we were struggling to move up the property ladder without 2 parents working, there was no way we could pay the mortgage on one salary
There was also no family support for me as my parents/siblings and my husbands parents/siblings all lived hours away
I think all generations have had their issues I don’t think there is a dream generation it’s just that each generation has different problems
But on the plus side it does get easier as children get older . You just have to accept these are the hard years as they have been for every working parent

Yes, I see what you mean. That might be a good idea.

What’s wrong isn’t women working

it’s the fact that men from all classes behave like the men of previous generations- that they are intrinsically worth more than the women - it’s still the minority that pull their weight around the home

women shouldn’t expect to be home makers because the men in their lives think it beneath them