To be WILD at the news at 10 wording 'mothers who chose not to work'

[NotanOtter]

who are hardest hit by benefit cut

How bloody condescending...

Nip round here any day and 'choose not to WORK' looking after my kids

society's

I'm with ja9, you're being touchy
I choose not to work, I had a great job which I loved but we can afford for me not to work ie in paid employment and that is the path we CHOSE.
For us it is absolutely a lifestyle choice from which we all benefit.

I personally get tired of people who read things into phrases; noone is saying that you are not working hard, that it is easy, that you are worthless or anything else, they are simply talking about those people who can afford not to, and decide not to, be in paid emplyment ie WORK

I am new here so "hello" first of all. My first instinct was to say that it is silly to fuss over an unfortunate choice of words. However on greater thought I think it does matter. I do not know many women who have a real, meaningful choice in working or not. The price of houses, childcare and I think most importantly the difficulties and cost in retraining and the lack of lengthy available career breaks for either men or women mean that "choice" is not real for many families. I also don't agree that having children is a "lifestyle choice" as is often suggested. Having a very large family might be, but wanting to reproduce at all is perfectly natural for many people and should not be based solely on finances!

NomdePlume, why is it difficult to imagine a world where mothers' work at home couldn't be paid work? What is it that makes it possible to begrudge a mother compensation for 8 hours spent working at her full time job every day in her own home? It is work after all. Right now it is assumed to be a voluntary public service. Why not pay them from the tax kitty? Politicians are paid from taxes after all. Is the work valued or is it not? Why is choosing to work outside the home seen as a reasonable choice that deserves pay while choosing to work in it is maybe a reasonable choice but not deserving of financial compensation?

Affordability is not entirely the result of personal choice as to family size. Affordability is a result of the market being able to squeeze what it does out of WOH parents.

Funny enough, a friend of mine who is a mother of 6 is now contemplating going to work outside the home as a cleaner, despite the fact that she is a nurse with many years experience pre-children, purely because she can set her own working hours to coincide with school hours. Ironic that she will be paid for cleaning other people's houses but she can't be afforded a 'benefit' or 'pay' for cleaning her own, or for taking care of her children. She and her DH didn't foresee what the economy would do in the last few years; her construction foreman DH works part time as a barman and in a health club plus any construction work he can get his hands on on the side. Should we all limit our families to 2.3 children, 'just in case'? Or could a hospital just possibly provide 24-hour nursery care for the children of their mainly female employees?

The way employers have operated is that they have seen their employees as individuals with no life outside of their working days, no ties or responsibilities except to their jobs and their desks. A certain amount of progress has been made with maternity leave and other concessions to the fact that many employees are now women, and men have benefited from this kind of allowance too. But essentially the world of employment continues to deny the fact that people, men as well as women, for the most part live in families and have family obligations. It's a paradigm based on the outdated notion that employees have a wife at home taking care of the details for them.

You manage your family life around the job, no matter how unreasonable the demands of the job may be -- and in many professional areas face time and billing thousands of hours a year, or bringing in business by devoting your time to networking are what allow you to progress. My schoolmates who chose to do medicine found the squeeze was an almost impossible one, as they ended up specialising and working horrifically long hours in hospitals just at the time when their biological clocks started to make their ticking heard. Many young women headed for professional careers that make huge demands on time in the late 20s and 30s should be logically considering having a baby or two in their teens if they think they might like to have a family, because the demands of work will make it very difficult for them later on.

People don't plan out their lives to the nth degree like that though, and nobody warns girls who are bright and heading for medicine or law or careers in the City that they will have tougher choices to make than their Hs or Ps do, and they have to make those choices because employers have not stared thinking outside the box to any extent, as if giving too much to women and making allowances for the reality of their lives would just encourage them.

And Xenia, are you saying that being a SAHMs are the equivalent of 'Untouchables'? If so, thank you for expressing the sorry truth, because that's how SAHMs are treated, in the unofficial caste system that is the framework of our oh so modern society. Just because every society on the planet accords a low value to the skills and contribution of women in the home doesn't make it right. Women in the workforce are paid a fraction (75%?) of what men are paid for the same work after all -- so even outside the home the inequity persists. Clearly, it's not the work itself or what it consists of that matters, it's who is doing it. Misogyny and discrimination against women are not right and should not be tolerated just because that's the way things are.

"I do not think it is male or 1950s or whatever just because some women have my views. We are women too. You don't have to be a flexitime/housewife adherent to be female. Many many women are happy capitalists and love their work."

Yet, you would dictate the choices of other women based on your own choices? Make sweeping assumptions about the relationship of pay to IQ, education level and intrinsic social value?

Obviously, I wouldn't expect someone who is Far Too Busy in the Very Important World of Work to consider a response that involves reading anything I have written. None of which, to recap, denied you or any other "happy capitalist" woman your choices or disparaged your path in life. That is what is "1950's male": your attitude to the choices of other women based on your own peculiar world view, not that you work or that you are happy to do so.

I am also interested to see the conflation of 'the way things are' with 'the way things should be' in Xenia's posts.

Hillyhilly, do you seriously not work?

hilly hilly i disagree with you
I chose not to work out of the home because i believe it is best for my children

HillyHilly, I'm with you on this one. You CHOOSE to stay at home with your dc, because childcare is too costly. That is a choice you made, it may not be a choice you like, but's a choice or the same. THe alternative is to go to work and pay childcare. You chose your pathway.

But the front page of the mail made it quite clear with its headlines;

"DON'T HAVE CHILDREN IF YOU CANNOT AFFORD THEM"

YANBU should say, 'Mothers who choose not to do paid work'

having a child is not something that needs to be recognised by the government. It should be kinda a given that the parents (either which one) of the said child will stay at home and care for it or provide someone that will. You don't need a medal or a "congratulations" from the government.

ingodwetrust

No you get me so wrong
I chose to stay at home with my children because i believe i am best equipped to provide for them and bring them up....

I have had children . I CAN afford them . I DO work. I bring up my own children and do not pay someone else to do it for me

Xenia do you define 'success' as rich/well paid? We don't all measure success by the amount of money we earn, some of us rate it by subjective emotions like happiness.

Fortunately, otherwise we wouldn't have many nurses for example.

then why would the phrase "choose NOT TO WORK" offend you, if you work?

I'm saying most societies have a pecking order and Roman ladies had slaves to mind their children and clean up and the Victorian middle class usually had at least one live in servant for the same purpose and most well off housewives even hire cleaners because the work that otherwise would haev to be done is boring and low paid.

Parent who work of course bring u their children, breastfeed, love them and play with them and that's part of life but just to do that is not really anything that most people want to do which is why most women now and in the past have worked.

In individual relationships with men it is possible however for housewives to find someone who appreciates what they do and indeed in some religions women must stay at home and be in effect servants so it is certanily possible on this planet to find misogynist men and even sexist women who think a woman's place is strapped to the kitchen sink but it's not the prevailing view.

So if Cameron's chipd benefit hit on the richder 15% who claim child benefit irks housewives they can get a job and then they will have a double win of making the right moral choice and also resolving their issue over not having much money.

ingodwetrust aaarghhh

arghhhh yourself !

If a parent chooses not to work that is fine if the parent can afford to raise the child(ren). But it is not fine if you expect the taxpayer to raise them.

Mathanxiety - I have to say I find it difficult to support the idea of from the public purse for f/t stay at home parents. Very different from child benefit in my opinion. All individuals, with children or not have to cook, clean and look after themselves and homes. Working parents do it as well, on top of work and at the end of the day, 5 am in the morning and so on. Are we going to pay them for that too, on top of their salaries? If not, why should some mothers work to pay for others who can afford to choose to stay at home with their children\can't get a job on an income that enables childcare. Not trying to be nasty but have to say some stay at home mums can be very self-righteous about it all. Having tried it myself on maternity leave several times, it was tiring yes, but not as stressful and exhausting as the constant juggle of doing BOTH the work and home roles.

What exactly constitutes having the taxpayer raise them? Do you count CTC? The taxpayer will often pay much much more in childcare tax credits for a working couple than they would in tax credits where the partner doesn't work.

this argument is lose lose for sahms

mima - if you work you do both jobs - daycare and work - how does that work?

where do child tax credits etc come into it? we are hardly subsidised to stay at home - when i did not work at all i did not get a bean - no tax credits no tax allowance etc etc

I'm probably just confusing the issue, but I have had arguments on here before that my family is being subsidised by the taxpayer in order that DH can stay at home. This would be because we receive marginally more CTC than we would if DH was earning. Despite the fact that we would be a much bigger drain on the taxpayer if DH was working, even 16 hours a week, because we'd be entitled to help with childcare costs.

Don't want to muddy the waters but wanted to explain why I mentioned it. Obviously it wouldn't apply to families where the single earner is on a better salary.

I think what Mima was trying to say was that WOHM still have to clean their houses, prepare meals etc. How do you weigh up how much work is done at home? If one mum has a peaceful baby who naps regularly, she may be able to prepare dinner and have a quick tidy while it is sleeping. A WOHM would HAVE to do these things after work, so should she get paid an additional salery?

I still think that having the child is the choice in the first place and you should check out options open to you before having it rather than moaning after the event that you cannot afford to stay at home/ cannot afford to go to work because of childcare. However all mums have to raise their children and should do it because they want children, not because they are getting a salery.

mima - how can you do both roles?

I think you'll find that the "work" is not any of the things mentioned like cleaning, cooking, etc. but rather managing to care for and entertain one or more young children for hours and hours on end, day after day, week after week. That's the hard bit, and that's the bit that working parents just don't have to do. Plus when a family is already making sacrifices to allow one parent to be at home, there is often not much money around to pay for trips out, new toys, etc.

Peaceful sleeping baby? Housework done during the day?