Domestic zombies, motherhood penalty & childcare

Why should the mum pick up the slack? Why can’t mums stay in high level jobs and dads pick up the slack?
That would work too! But what happens is that couples go “the highest earner needs to keep their job” and because of the gender pay gap that’s usually the man. And Mum is already out of work and being sidelined because of maternity leave (possibly multiple maternity leaves), and maybe she has physical injuries and emotional damage or post natal depression, and maybe she’s breastfeeding, so of course it’s obvious that she should be the one to give her job up.

The odds are stacked. If someone has to give their job up it’s going to be the Mum. So things need to be changed so that nobody has to give their job up and two parents can juggle kids between them. But that would require employers to accept that employees work less than full-time hours and need to always leave at their finishing time because they have kids to pick up. Which they won’t. I 100% believe that the employers are to blame here.

Why should the mum pick up the slack? Why can’t mums stay in high level jobs and dads pick up the slack?

Maybe if more men took on part time jobs, they’d realise that part time jobs are often a bit rubbish, limit career progression etc. And then things might finally start to improve.

But I agree, most professional jobs don't seem to be available part time and this needs addressing
Employers won’t accept professional employees not being available 9-5. In fact they want to be able to ask you to start early and stay late and go on business trips too.

My husband sometimes has to get the train at 6am to visit a far away client at 9am, and they won’t change the meeting just because he needs to drop off the kids at 8! Or he gets stuck in a meeting that runs after 5pm and it would cost him his job if halfway through the meeting he said “sorry I need to leave now to pick up the kids”. Or if they tell him to travel to see a client and stay in a hotel, and he says “sorry Tuesday is my day to pick up the kids while my wife is at work, I can go on Wednesday instead” he would get sacked for that too.

The fact is, high level jobs demand too much flexibility. You can’t leave just because it’s the end of your shift. Which means there needs to be another person (usually mum) who can pick up the slack. Which means she can’t have a professional job. It stinks.

I work as a language teacher part-time and the pay is quite good. But I agree, most professional jobs don't seem to be available part time and this needs addressing.

when I went part time after my first child, my employer invited me to take a 20% cut in my hourly rate. that was fun (I told them to stop breaking the law, and they did)

Then they often take low-paid and part-time work to fit around family life.
The question is why is part-time work always low paid? Yes there are a minority of women who are already in good jobs when they get pregnant, and their employer values them enough to let them work part-time for a few years in order to retain them. But what if you get pregnant and you’re not already in a good job where you’re valued? You should still be able to apply for and get a good part-time job later on after pregnancy… but you can’t. The only jobs that actually advertise for part-time from the beginning are shitty ones.

This is the biggest problem imo. Because not only does it prevent mums from getting decent jobs after pregnancy, it also prevents dads from switching to jobs with less hours so they can do their share and allow mum to work.

Why can’t employers offer career level jobs with the salary and responsibilities of a 40 hour post, but for 30 hours only? It would be great if I could work 8-2pm while DH drops the kids at school, then I pick them up at 3pm while he works 11-5pm. But professional jobs only advertise 40 hour posts, which means only one of us can have a 9-5 job while the other is restricted to 10-2 in order to do both schools runs.

Men are like that because boys are still socialised to think that women are there for their convenience.

and this is a story I see again and again on the relationships board

are many men just inherently shit parents? I dunno. but the fact is many ARE shit parents

It's not fair to make digs at women being unable to "let go". I was a woman who had a partner, father of my small children, who made noises about staying at home more. This wouldn't have been state paternity leave - it was before it existed - it would have been an informal arrangement whereby I supported the family and he did childcare. I had no way of saying yes to this in good conscience because he would have been crap at it. His parenting was like baby sitting and he didn't do a thing for me when I was exhausted and vulnerable with a newborn. I knew if I went out and left him for 10 or 11 hours I would come back to have to look after the house, everything for the children that had not been done, and everything for me as a working person out of the house full time. Aside from how miserable that woudl have made me, I couldn't let my children be looked after as shoddily as he did it. he was a stop gap - lots of tv, lots of processed food, nothing difficult, he never pushed things like potty training or said no to anything or developed the child in anyway that would have challenged him. I couldn't say any of this to him of course. If you ask him, you will hear that I wanted to do it all. I so, so, so did not want to do it all but I really cared about whether it was done properly or not.

Affordable, quality childcare should be available for all those who WANT to use it.
Not mandatory (it isn’t in France or Sweden either) but there if needed.
If SAHM works best for your family great, but it should be a real choice which for many women / families it currently isn’t.

Society decided that it wanted to have as many women as possible in the workforce because it wanted to increase the labour force and productivity. As a result, most families don't have the choice any longer to have the mum or dad stay home.

That wasn't some kind of altruistic move on the part of the state, and certainly isn't about individual choice.

Well that is the approach that marriage where the non-working spouse, usually the woman, is entitled to half of everything plus support to continue to bring up the kids, is supposed to be about.

So you have a family income, essentially, and like other assets it belongs to both.

To some extent this idea was rejected as being sexist. So instead you have this sense of married couples as almost independent financial entities who may or may not choose to combine financial resources.

This is supposed to be better for women, but it's not especially better for mothers.

It would be good if more employers could have the logic of this demonstrated. Surely there are schemes?!

I tend to think of mothers as having extra skills and experience, because ime there's no harder job.

Yes, absolutely.

We need to look at how society is built and runs - as ever, it relies on the subjugation and oppression of a large segment of the world's population.

Personally I think the impact of having a few years out from the workplace is overstated. We work 40+ years these days, loads of people take time out for caring responsibilities, travel, study, sick leave etc etc.

I don’t think we have to tie ourselves in knots trying to find all the ways that these breaks in employment have made us more skilled. Just accept that this is the way life goes and that people don’t become unemployable just because they take a few years out.

I don’t have the magic solution for getting employers to come round to that way of thinking though, sadly.

It's one of those things where radical feminism isn't radical enough. To achieve equality requires a complete revolution in the way society deals with childcare and child-rearing, which in turn requires a revolution in employment, which in turn requires intervening in the labour market in a way that is incredibly unfashionable at the moment.

Housework is reproduction of labour power. It doesn't just benefit your family, it benefits society. Without housework no paid work would be possible, so housework should be seen as essential, just like the education system and health service are seen as essential.

It's not inevitable that it has to be the mum though

I know several people where the person to give up work/go part time is the mum and it's because they want to be the one that stay at home even if it isn't the most sensible decision for the family financially

I'm involved in recruitment/interviewing, and I certainly do count years off parenting as useful experience. It's sad when women come in and literally apologise for a 'gap' in their CV - and I mean it when I say it's not a gap, it's years of learning to organise, be a diplomat, teacher, team leader, and I tend to assume that a woman who's spent time looking after her children is a hard worker.

You may be in the minority there. Certainly if you post on Chat or AIBU here with questions about how to showcase the skills you’ve acquired during the parenting years, responses can tend to range from the politely dismissive to the downright offensively misogynistic. Even at best the attitude is ‘you haven’t got a paper qualification, you weren’t supervised, there are no performance reviews in motherhood and I can’t get references, so how can I progress your application?’ I’d be interested in creative ways of bypassing these institutional barriers.

Having children is a choice, sure, but it's one that over 80% of women in the UK make according to the ONS (apparently its harder to track the % of men, but assume roughly equal). Personally I think something that will impact the vast majority of people should be treated as a social responsibility by the government.

Properly funded childcare should be considered as infrastructure and available from the age at which maternity leave ends. The current fudge of funded hours is leaving many nurseries massively underpaid by government, so they're having to recoup costs from the unfunded hours, basically pushing up prices for kids under 3 or those not getting funding. The government like to claim to be supporting working families but they're not willing to pay the price.

I personally struggled on maternity leave with my first so for our next I'm taking the first 6 months and DH is taking the next 6 months. We're lucky to have the option but I think it should be available to all, not least because it would stop the assumption amongst men and workplaces that childcare is women's work.

Partner up with a good man who wants to provide for a family and enable a mother to be with her children for as long as possible.

People on here talk as if it's inevitable that mum has to give up work or go part time but it isn't.

but if the cost of childcare means that you can’t afford to go back to work, then staying at home isn’t a choice, surely? You’re forced into it

But it's all a choice. It's a choice to have a child, it's a choice to have more than one, it's a choice for a parent to stay at home, it's a choice that parent the mum (it doesn't have to be), it's a choice to go back part time. People on here talk as if it's inevitable that mum has to give up work or go part time but it isn't.

Do I think society needs to change so men take more of the load? Of course I do, but that also requires mums to let go of the reigns a little and stop automatically considering themselves primary carer.

Going back to my original reply, what I simply don't agree with is the idea that 'we' as a society should be paying a wage for a housework role. People need to take responsibility for their own choices and cover it as a family