'Womens Work'

Apologies, messed up the formatting a bit there. Hope you get the gist.

^I think SAHMs are one of the most maligned sectors of society as if somehow they are lazy for not doing a full-time job as well as all the other stuff women generally end up doing.
I would argue that SAHMs are also helping society by indirectly creating job vacancies.^

I agree.

Personally, I blame the Economists*. Bear with me here - They tend to be really lazy when it comes to applying financial worth to anything that isn't directly related to cold, hard cash. Assessing the economic potential of someone who is paid is easy, you just look at their pay-packet. Once you get out of this and start trying to quantify stuff that doesn't have an easily applied money-value then they start to get a bit skittish. Therefore people who work, but aren't paid are considered not to be "wealth generating" and are written off. Despite allowing other parts of the population to work, despite creating markets themselves, despite producing and rearing offsrping that themselves will contibute to society (and the economy).

It's difficult to ascribe financial worth to such a wide variety of variables and often it has to be a qualitative analyis rather than quantitative which is even more confusing. None of this tallies up very easily with the short-term, capitalist society in which we live.

• Plus most of them are Blokes and have the usual blinkered viewpoints expounded endlessly on FWR.

I think SAHMs are one of the most maligned sectors of society as if somehow they are lazy for not doing a full-time job as well as all the other stuff women generally end up doing.
I would argue that SAHMs are also helping society by indirectly creating job vacancies.

Dh does all that at ours but he doesnt say hes working he says hes off with the children which is true as he isnt working.

We should aim to ensure men do as much of it as women. I would object to domestic things being called "women's work". Plenty of women are more than happy to minimise the housecleaning and do something more fun - even work. Let's call it men's work and leave it all to them.

I find this debate very difficult, even though it has been discussed on MN a million times. So I am not stating any definitive position here, just thoughts.

I am not sure whether looking after children at home historically was ever considered as "work". Except perhaps for professional nannies employed by the very rich. I really struggle to think about a time in history, perhaps with the exception of some kind of rosy picture of the 1950s, when all women did was clean the house, cook and take care of the children. In normal circumstances, poor women will be cleaning, cooking, looking after children, but also tilling the fields, milking cows, feeding livestock, spinning (often on the go), weaving, sewing, making preserves, making baskets, repairing their homes, etc, etc, etc. Rich women would be supervising large households, planning events and doing accounts. So yes, I question the assumed historical normality of our present conception of a SAH parent.

Mind you, questioning the normality is not the same as questioning the desirability. It's none of my business whether people stay at home or not.

I am all for making childcare more affordable to more people because it allows people to become more financially independent. And work is not just money but also a chance to interact with the outside world, to build up skills that may be very useful in the future. Community childcare is also historically normal as children were commonly looked after by people other than the parents (grandparents, older siblings, neigbours, etc) while the women did their milking and tilling and going to market/well.

And yes, I completely agree that the absence of the living wage is a crime.

I also think that the difference between WOH parents and SAH parents is waaay exaggerated. Lots of people move in and out of work. And once children are at School (4 years old in the UK), the difference in childcare hours put in by SAH and WOH parents becomes rather minor.