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

Hi - no obvously can't do both daycare and work but unfortunately day nurseries\after school clubs however good, really just act as a holding bay for the child. When you get them back at 6, then travel home, say 6.30 - 7pm you still have make time for all the listening to their day, cuddles, dealing with arguments, playing, listening to reading books, homework etc that a home-based parent can do in the late afternoon and that's before you start on dinner and bedtime.

After that it's washing, cleaning, sorting uniform, making the World Book Day costume for the next day or whatever, filling in forms that should have been in weeks ago. Stuff like insurance quotes, ironing or supermarket online shop have to be relegated to small hours. I can't remember the last time I went to the supermarket for more than a 10 min grab at lunchtime - never have a whole free hour, with chn or not.

Now, not knocking home-based parents home but they can weave this stuff in through the day, with their children and feel proud that they are doing what we really all know is probably best for them, even though at times yes it must feel a bit boring and unfulfiling. But you either have to be on a lowish family income (and so eligible for some support) or have a high earning partner to be able to afford to make this 'choice'. I can't see that the state could afford to pay more women to stay at home. Would just take more of them out of the tax system and result in less paying money into the pot in the first place. In fact if DC brings in the transferable tax code for married couples, won't this be what happens?

Xenia - '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.'

I am speechless!! So you are saying that it is morally right for a mother to go out to work rather than choose to stay at home to care for her own young children? You are perfectly entitled to choose to work and employ someone else to look after your chldren, but how dare you impose your choice on others as a moral obligation? more and have one of these too .

As far as I know I am fairly intelligent, had a good education, gained a decent degree from a good university, had a good though not well paid job (more undervalued women's work) and yet still decided to give that up because it was the best thing to do for my family in our circumstances. How can that be morally wrong? And how does that make me more likely to fail at being a good mother?

Hmm, can't see that either way is 'morally right' or 'morally wrong' - all individual choices (sometimes a real choice, sometimes economically dictated). But cannot see that stay at home mums and dads should get special payment for being at home. This is what a transferable tax credit would in effect be. Would more than compensate for loss of CB from family income (if say 2 chn) but still many families couldn't afford for one parent to give up work and get any benefit from this at all.

Just have to keep working, keep paying out in tax and ni, do all the housework at 5am, lose the CB and never see small children awake! Except at weekends when we know all about entertaining them all day!

Some of my best friends are SAHM's (and have to say seem fairly unstressed and happy with their lot), it is just these stupid policies that are making us compare and pitting us all against each other.

I agree Mima - I'm not saying that I am more morally right by being a SAHM - I think most people just do what's best for them and their family. I just can't believe that Xenia is implying that it's actually morally wrong for a mother to not have paid employment.

I also don't think that the state should pay for one parent to stay at home. I have chosen to do this - it's my responsibility to make sure we can support ourselves without state help.

What I see in the tax 'argument' is pure begrudgery. And even resentment.

Really and truly, there is no element of choice if you can't afford childcare on your wages. You are forced to stay home or come out with a net loss. There is no choice involved.

Xenia -- your last post beggars belief.
'...but just to do that [taking care of children and home] is not really anything that most people want to do which is why most women now and in the past have worked.' WTF? So the poor women who slaved in the mills and on the periphery of the coal mines scavenging coal, or those who toil in the fields of California so that Americans can enjoy fresh lettuce in November absolutely love it and would prefer not to have to take care of their children? What are you smoking?

'most well off housewives even hire cleaners because the work that otherwise would have to be done is boring and low paid.'

Because what could be more stimulating than spending your day stooped over picking lettuce all day in the hot sun. Or filling a sack with coal. Or tending a loom repetitiously in the stifling atmosphere of the mill.

You have a tremendous gift for confusing cause and effect.

But they do. GO to any country and culture and as soon as women can afford it they find others to hlep them with child care and cleaning as it's so boring. Obviousl most of us want time with our children every day but not all day.

On moral rightness, women have a lont way to go a work and all our gains will be lost if women keep giving up work to stay at home thus there is a political and moral obligation within a couple that if anyone stays at home it ought to be the man at least until women are in 50%+ of positions of power.

Children do better with working mothers anyway so it's gains all round where women work.

If Cameron's CB policy means housewives are encouraged to work so much the better and it's a huge great pity that wasn't his real intention. If we could make flexitime harder and full time less attractive for women and more attractive for men and have paternity rights that are not transferrable to women and men haev to use them or leave them we will benefit women. Women might kick and scream about it but it will do them good long term.

AAAaaaaaaarghhhhhh.

It's not so boring.
It's not obvious.
All our gains -- what exactly do you mean by 'gain'? Gain what men have, gain what gives men heart attacks in their 50s? Gain the right to work 60+ hours a week at a leading US law firm?
Political and moral fiddlesticks.
Children do better with working mothers because their day to day care is entrusted to the lower IQ women whom WOH women employ to take care of them? Doesn't make sense that if you entrust your children's care to women who are by your own definition not too bright, they will turn out better.
And the last paragraph is so paternalistic I want to boak. Do you not hear yourself? You sound like chauvinistic Irish pigs men in the 70s. Do you jeer at 'wimmin drivers' too?

The gain of huge fun from lucrative work. The gain from money and power. The gain from ghaving a balanced life with fun career plus lovely family (things some men take for granted and women had to fight hard to achieve).

Working fathers and mothers still bring up their children. Children are mostly at school whether a woman is a housewife or worker. Working women and non working women today both spend more time with their children than in the 1970s and our influence is big whether we work or not.

Women drive very well. They make great London tube drivers. In fact there were adverts in Cosmoplitan at one stage to entice them in.

It's not chauvanistic to say women need to get back to work (to the extent there are any jobs at all of course at the moment) and if I and most other women even those with children under 5 find work and family is a great combination we ought to be free to extol the benefits of that in the hope of convincing hosuewives they have made a choice which damages others.

All good fun and anyone happy in her choices will find it water off a duck's back.

I think it is morally wrong for the state to give financial incentives to parents to outsource childcare so that both parents can WOH and put money in the state coffers.

What Bonsoir said.

I find the 'children as a choice', 'fund them yourselves' comments pretty short-sighted. Children are not pets or life-style accessories. They are the doctors and busdrivers of tomorrow.

More starkly, they are the ones that will fund our pensions. A sharply declining birthrate will be disastrous for us when we are old and grey because there won't be enough working-age people to fund our pensions and healthcare.

We owe it as much to ourselves as to our children to make sure that those future workers are well-educated so that they can perform highly on the world stage (again, to fund us when we are old). There really is merit in the taxpayer of today funding childcare for the future - including paying SAHMs, where that is likely to produce the best outcomes for the children.

Really, Xenia. What is this extremely highly paid job you do? In your job, as this discussion, can you place supposition ahead of fact, determine that your own views are "objective truth", take an absolutist view of a discussion to suit your own ends avoiding reading all nuance? It ill behoves your superior IQ if it requires as little thought and interaction as this discussion and I wonder why it requires so much pay....

I rather think that such black-and-white thinking might damage the cause of women everywhere! I mean, let's not beat around the bush, shall we?

"We ought to be free to extol the benefits of that in the hope of convincing hosuewives they have made a choice which damages others."

Again, can you delineate the precise nature of these damages Xenia without merely restating your opinion in broad brushstrokes? Back them up with a bit of evidence that doesn't merely involve mentioning what the Romans and Victorians did or making massive assumptions about the educational and intellectual profile of SAHMs?

And maybe use a bit of punctuation?

To heck with nuance, how about reading actual words.

I said above. It took years to convince people women could be doctors, teachers, soliders and the like even after marriage. If women give up work when they have babies it sets us back for year. By all means do it - it's a free country - but don't assume it damages no one else or is good for families.

It's good if people have different views and we are each exposes to the views of others.

(I want anonymity so I don't want to say what I do. I must be a housewife of course).

But everybody knows women can be doctors, lawyers blah blah blah. We've won that argument, a long time ago.

The issue now is one of free choice for women.

So pay the women for the work of raising the babies. That way women's work will be acknowledged, nobody will be 'damaged'.

I hate to use your terms because the thought behind them is so inherently flawed. Where to even start with something like this -- 'If women give up work when they have babies it sets us back for year. By all means do it - it's a free country - but don't assume it damages no one else or is good for families.' Where are you coming from, philosophically? The whole point of feminism was that women would have a genuine choice, and men too, about working outside the home or within it. It isn't all bra burning and casting aspersions on the work of women, and their choices. I think you have possibly spent too much time hob-nobbing with alpha males in the course of your fun career; you have certainly managed to absorb the idea that it's women who must change and ditch their values, leaving the male world and the power of those who rule it, (and their ability to discourage men from standing up for what they may want, and of course discouraging women too) sacrosanct and above questioning.

We got the pittance we have now by radicalism and by not playing nice. 'It took years to convince people women could be doctors, teachers, soliders and the like even after marriage' and clearly there is a lot more to be done. We need to keep on demanding the transformation of the workplace -- not nearly enough has been accomplished for the vast majority of women to consider the progress to date to be a success for all women. Maybe for you, Xenia, but you are the exception that proves the rule.

You expect huge numbers of women to abandon their children to the care of school drop outs and join you in your crusade for the right to work 60 hours a week, while the obvious solution to problems is to do away with the current culture that still favours men in the workplace while at the same time devaluing their role in their own families beyond the earning of income. Do you really think the way things are is good for men? Good for families that have men in them? And I see you have no intention of supporting other women, the SAHMs who are 'letting the side down'. Here's a thought -- 'When lucratively employed women think other women should be forced to go back to work after having babies, it sets SAHMs back years in their efforts to have their immense contribution valued'.

WRT the extremely low wages now paid to those who do take care of children for a living, and those who do housework and cooking for others, they are also employed women after all, even if their jobs are dull and boring, etc., -- do you think they would earn more if this kind of work was valued higher? Why is their work not valued? (Hint, they are mainly women)

You are way too attached to the status quo. A little thinking outside the box might be very beneficial.

Don't assume that free choice for women damages others or is bad for families, Xenia.
As far as I can see, you are the one assuming on this thread.

"(I want anonymity so I don't want to say what I do. I must be a housewife of course)."
What does this even mean?

Maybe she suspects 'housewives' don't actually do much all day every day, and are unable to account for their time if asked?

I suspect this is at the bottom of much WOH antipathy towards SAHMs.

Most women do work though. I am the majority. I am the British and international woman. We don't want to live on male earnings ni return for cleaning and childcare services and sex. That latter is morally pernicious.

What we need is to challenge housewives into thinking - hey why am i lumbered with cleaning. Why can't you mate make with the mop whilst I swan off to the office and have mroe fun. Why in this home here is it the woman doing the dross awful stuff and the man having a nice family life, housewife services and children when it suits him. That's what we want housewives to think. They think they are making a choice but they are just conditioned into that subservience by their enivornment or lack of an education which might have enable them to run BP or whatever. How can they possibly prefer housework cleaning and child care to a fulfilling career plus family? Why have only half of the good deal when many, indeed most, women have both?

(I just meant I haven't said what I do and I could therefore be a housewife playing a double bluff or something - who knows? I could be a man or anything)

Xenia - you make too many assumptions and your views of other women are patronising.

Some women want to work out of the home, others value bringing up their children more. There are wider societal benefits that warrant both roles being recognised equally.

I am a well-paid WOHM, a graduate and a professional. Although I enjoy my job, I would very happily spend less time working and more time bringing up DS if I could afford it. I believe that few people in paid childcare could do as good a job bringing up DS as I could. Am I one of those apparently ill-informed women whose views you seek to challenge?

mathanxiety - "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?"

Is that a serious question ? Paying (more) people (out of the public purse) to opt out of work to to stay at home to look after their children because they WANT to and feel it is best for their kids is a ridiculous idea that is highly unlikely to fly with the tax paying electorate, imo.

Where would this theoretical money come from ? Higher rates of taxation on those WOH? Taking it from other areas of funding ? Or perhaps just by increasing the deficit ?

It would cause resentment and would possibly result in many more people leaving their OTH working lives to SAHP in order to receive this new benefit. We'd likely end up with a deficit even bigger than we have now and more civil unrest as chances are it would be seen as another 'middle class benefit'.

Bringing up children isn't a 'job'. Who is going to provide the money to pay a 'salary' for it? How would the 'work standard' be measured anyway? Would whoever is paying this hypothetical salary pay the same standard rate whether the SAHP nurtures their child in an approved manner - eg feeds them wholesome food, engages them in positive activities, or whether they feed them fruit shoots and stick them in front of the telly all day?

People have children because they want to, not to be paid for being a parent.

FWIW, I have no axe to grind re SAHMing. I am currently a WOHM but when my youngest child was 0-4 I was a SAHM due to prohibitively high childcare costs.

My salary covered f/t childcare for DD but I just couldn't cover her care and that of her two school aged older brothers during school holidays, unfortunately I wasn't making enough of a profit during term times to break even over the year. So, for us as a family, it made financial sense for one of us to stay home until all of the children were at school. In our family it made the most financial sense for that person to be me as DH earned 15x what I did.

All that said, I do accept that even though childcare costs were high, it was our choice (mine and DH's) to have another child and to find ourselves facing prohibitively high childcare costs. It may not be a rosy choice but I did 'choose not to work' (in the traditional sense, which is what the OP quote was getting at, I think).

I am chosing not to work today. This is why I'm sat messing around on Mumsnet hile my child watches telly

To work at a job is to do a job that someone else wants you to carry out.

If you work at looking after your own children then the only person who wants you to do that is you. So effectively you would have to pay for it.