Starting to wish we had old fashioned me (mum) stay at home, he (dad) go out to work set up :(

And disingenous with it .

Bonsoir - me? where have I been rude?

I'm almost at the end of my childcare years :-) youngest now 17 - but I would say, based on my experience (mixture over the years of SAHM, p/t work, f/t work, now working from home) try to always be in a position where you could, if you had to, feed, clothe and house yourself and DCs independently of a partner. This might mean upskilling, getting qualifications while you are a SAHM (I did a career change degree) or having a qualification that you can fall back on - e.g. if you have a teaching qualification you can always do supply teaching - agency work with other professions.

This should enable you to feel more secure in being a SAHM if that's what you choose to do. I think its fine to take a decision with a partner that one will do the bulk of the home stuff - but as people here have pointed out, the grass might be greener on the other side, doesn't mean it will taste good :-)

Gosh you are lazy, and rude too!

I think it helps if you have a lot of money and can buy status. Seriously. This is not a comment on any particular person, but I think it's what underlies a lot of the yummy mummy consumerism. Quite simply, if you look posh and rich you get treated with more respect. Sometimes if I am feeling downtrodden I go into a nice shop or restaurant and it's not just the niceness of the food or the things I buy that cheers me up, it's the fact that the people in there are talking to me like people used to talk to me when I was a university lecturer. Shallow, but real.
money is also great for enabling you to buy your way out of the chores you hate and buy time away from the kids and hence headspace; seriously, I think the life of the well-off SAHM is easier to reconcile for some very practical reasons.

Bonsoir - actually, I don't think that asking you to explain a brief assertion that you initially made, and give some evidence for it, is particularly demanding. Neither do I have to research your argument, which you made, for you. If you want to argue that state supported childcare is wrong, by all means do so - but, as I have pointed out, you didn't actually do more than make the assertion itself in your post. You also seem extraordinarily reluctant to post even the briefest of details to support your case - how do I know that you have done your research to back up your point?

If these things are not quick and easy to summarise, perhaps posting several lines that say something is 'wrong', with no discussion or evidence, is somewhat misleading of you.

Will be back to the thread later and will read with interest then

pickledsiblings - I don't understand what link there might be between career burn out and reconciliation of lack of status. I know plenty of women like me who certainly felt that they were not going to gain anything by pursuing their career path (that the sacrifices were going to be a lot greater than the gains) but that is a mere cost/benefit analysis.

I think that attaching personal status to work status is something that generally has its roots in childhood and family values. In my family work is very much seen as a means to a (financial) end. Maybe perhaps because we have many generations of professional (upper) middle-class behind us and we cannot see how our social status will be improved by work? Most women I know who are still slogging it out at work come from modest backgrounds and suffer status anxiety.

EightiesChick - you are an extraordinarily demanding poster! No I am not going to do ground work for you and these are not things that are quick and easy to summarise. I suggest that, if you are you as interested as you say in this very complex issue, you do your own research before entering the debate

Bonsoir, you are one of a number of mums on MN who seem to have reconciled the idea that SAH does not equal loss/lack of status. Did you suffer some sort of career 'burn out'? If so, perhaps that is why you are able to see things so clearly .

Bonsoir I agree that there will indeed always been a trade off between economic necessity and the desire to SAH. However, I still don't see why that means that the vast majority of women are going to be forced back to work against their will.

Yes, higher taxes will be required to fund childcare, but even if I were to give over an extra 25% of my earnings in additional tax on top of what I pay now, it would still be far far less than what I'm currently paying in childcare. For working women (who make up the majority of the female adult population), it works much better and it also allows women who want to work but who find childcare costs prohibitive to re-enter the workplace. The countries you are talking about also have a significantly lower gender pay gap than here in the UK because more women are able to enter the workplace.

Yes, there will be some families where the hike in tax and the availability of childcare means greater pressure is put on the SAHP who wants to be a SAHP to go back to work. I certainly agree that is regrettable and I would like to see something enshrined in law/tax to try to circumvent this. However, I think these will be far fewer in number than those women who benefit. To some extent being a SAHP has always been a set-up limited to a small, well-off section of society anyway. The increase in tax may make the choice harder to maintain, but I doubt it would be a massive disincentive to someone who holds that lifestyle choice in high regard.

I don't need a book, Bonsoir, but a paragraph might be nice! You didn't give any examples in your original post on this. I assume France is one of your cases - do you want to take a few lines to evidence your argument with regard to France, then?

I certainly don't extend universal support to other women for their choices. Some of them make totally deranged choices that harm themselves and their families. I got cornered by someone (unknown to me) yesterday who was clearly in an advanced state of mental breakdown, yet defending her decision to work and outsource her home life, despite have an über high earning husband. She had no clarity on her choices and they were inordinately ill-informed...

My mum stayed at home and looked after us but it was a "duty" for her, she did keep the house very clean, and did all the laundry, but looking back she was obviously depressed and bored shitless and she returned to work when I was 14 to a job way below her capabilities and became very dissatisfied and very very depressed later in life at the chances she had missed.

Her last few years were tough for all the family and she told me categorically not to ever make myself dependent on a man (my dad then backed this up by saying, "don't make yourself financially dependent on anyone").

I work part time and I have a cleaner and sometimes wish we had more time, but I take a week off to do housework etc and I'm crawling up the walls by the end of it. I like my job as I find it mentally stimulating most of the time, and I don't find housework stimulating and I don't feel fulfilled by laundry. But my cleaner, well she LOVES cleaning, she really does, but I don't.

If you feel you are doing too much get your DH to do more, I wrote down a list of stuff and we split the chores, DH does everything to do with hoovering for instance, I don't touch the hoover, and he also hangs out laundry and irons his own shirts. Men do not die when they pick up an iron, despite what they might think.

Agree Bonsoir that choice is more a degree of compromise. However the burden of this compromise tends to fall on women -the decisions and the guilt.

Totally agree with EightiesChick that women should support and respect each other's choices.

Would it be possible for you to take a career break for, say, 6 months to a year, OP? Because it might be foolish to properly give up your job, and find a few months down the line that you hate SAH.

Another option would be to look at working part time, so you have a couple of days a week when you are SAH.

Personally, I think it is possible to get yourself organised to the point when you don't feel like you're spinning plates and all is constant madness. DH and I both work full-time. I have a cleaner and shop online, which is lovely as far as I'm concerned since I hate shopping and cleaning. Are you sure you'd really want to do those things yourself after the novelty has worn off?! We make sure that the DDs only do a limited number of activities, and try to co-ordinate activities around each other so we're not running in several directions at once. We split the school runs and collecting, we split the housework, we pick up for each other when one of us needs to go away to a conference or work late.

I don't feel like I'm spinning plates. The house may be a bit scruffy between cleaner visits but who cares? The DDs are in childcare a lot but they love it. I go out a couple of evenings a week to my own activities, weekend afternoons are very relaxed. I grow vegetables, go running, the kids go over to friends and have friends over.

I would suggest you sit down, look at all the things you're doing, rank them in order of importance and see if you could simply do less. Quite often, I think, people take on more stuff than they need to and are so busy rushing that they don't realise not all of it is vital.

Good luck whatever you decide.

EightiesChick - you are asking me to write a book here, and I cannot do that. Take a look at Sweden, Belgium and France.

Bonsoir - I'm not familiar with an instance of the state funded model. Describe it to me and tell me the problems that arose, if you would, please. You stated that it doesn't work, but without more detail I can't make my own judgement on that. You mentioned 'when this happens' - so tell me more about that.

I often think that it must be lovely to be a SAHM, but I'm sure I would long to work, if I didn't have to. I think the key for me is that I have absolutely no choice at all - I earn the higher salary (still not that much), so I always knew I would have to go back to work after 6 months, and it irritates me slightly when people talk about your "choice" to return to work - I haven't had one.

Fortunately, I really enjoy my job and it is fairly flexible - so I can do 3.5-4 days, plus paperwork in the evenings. DH's isn't at all however. He works full-time (including every other Saturday but with a day off in the week), and they are not at all helpful about him going part-time, or, if he did, giving him regular days off. So it's a very stressful juggling act, where, by necessity, I earn most of the money, and do most of the childcare. Housework doesn't really get done by anyone (I try), and we can't afford a cleaner. Nor could we afford the childcare if we were to have another child, but we can't live (and I mean eating, not luxuriess) off one salary. A similar scenario must be experienced by many, many families and yet everyone talks as if women have a free choice to stay at home or not.

I think whichever you do, you can feel a bit trapped, if there is no other option.

EightiesChick - I don't understand your question.

There is never going to be "free choice" about whether mothers work or not - it is always going to be a trade off between money/time spent with children/time spent on other aspects of life.

Zwitterion Yes, completely agree.

For me choice is a core part of feminism as long as it is real choice. So I fully support women who want to be SAHPs because they genuinely prefer it; but I would like it to be a matter of pure choice for anyone, male of female, to become a SAHP or to be a parent working outside the home. That's why it's tricky to use grandparents as a comparison, though, because that element of free choice was much less available to women then, so even for grandmothers who appeared to enjoy the role, that's within the context of there realistically being little other choice for them.

Always remember though that it serves patriarchal interests for women to be occupied in criticising one another's choices. This is why I would like to see all women supporting one another's right to choose freely how they parent - then we can focus more effectively on combatting injustices against women.

I think this set up can work really well (for both sahd or sahm) if entered into freely.

What could become a real tension point is when the sahp is expected to be the primary carer and main homeworker 24/7.

Each parent in the partnership ideally should have the same amount of free time to do what they want.

In the past I don't think this was the case for many set-ups. Certainly my grandmother would get up before my grandfather to do chores, go to bed later for the same reason, and would still be doing the bulk of the childcare and home care at weekends. This patently isn't fair.

Bonsoir - can you elaborate on the effects of the state-model you've mentioned with some specific detail, please?

sunshineandbooks - on what basis do you disagree? Have you lived in an economy that coerces mothers into work with high taxes and subsidised childcare and discussed their feelings with them?

Someone posted about the stress of working and the logisitics of school and childcare. That takes on a huge looming significance when they were small - I clearly remember starting a 'summer holidays spreadsheet' back in April!1 Just so I could work out who was looking after them when. It was a perpetual worry. And the running around taking DC here and there before I started school every morning - I look back and wonder how I did it But I only have one at primary now - the others gets themselves to school and back and can wait at home without DH or I. It also helps that DH teaches for can do school hours. But it is only a temporary problem - that needs to be borne in mind.

I share the pleasure of doing household things well. Making a good meal, setting the kitchen straight, planting runner beans and seeing them grow. I have to say I have much less enthusiasm about doing my own cleaning Partly because apart from a few years we've never had a cleaner so I would happily never ever lift a hoover in anger again! Hate it!