to be saddened by a three week old baby in full time childcare?

[lilystyles]

At a local toddler group last week there was a childminder who I'm friendly with, she had with her a new child, a baby of 3 weeks who's mother had gone back to work full-time in teh pub she and her husband own. I am not judging this woman, it's her choice but I couldn't help but feel sad at the situation.

Mothers do mother their children just as fathers do. Why do the housewife brigade go on about mothers not being at home and indeed weep for us but never make any of those comments to men? Because they are sexist to the core.

I was asked:
a) how you know that women "cop out of the workplace because [they] cannot hack it"

Obviously ify o're very successful you tend to stay. If you were never going to get promoted and married a man rich enough to keep you you can hide your career incompetence under the guise of being a housewife.

b) how women who go part time are damaging their daughter's prospects?
Because you cannot do many jobs other than full time and if every woman of breeding age just about leaves or goes part time that hardly further the cause of those of us who work full time and are working very hard to ensure women continue to be taken seriously at work. All you do if you do that part tiem stuff is perpetuate women work for pin money to buy shoes and men earn the real wages.

c) how you know that women who go back to work are "better at psychology" than women who don't?

Because the successful women return to their work and have a higher IQ on the whole. In fact if you analsyed any mumsnet working and stay at home thread you can tell just by the grammar and spelling that there are more housewives who aren't that well educated compared to mothers with careers.

d) the evidence for your assertion that the children of women who stay at home are disadvantaged (where family income is at a reasonable level e.g. no one starving, on the streets or relying on benefits)

The better off the family (within reason) the more life chances the children have. For example if a mother earns enough to pay 5 sets of school fees as I have then children from those 7% opf homes get 50% of the best university places and do better in life. Thus maternal income has a huge impact on a child's life chances.
The fact you might instead have sun wheels on abus 1000 taimes a day rather than the 10 times a day the working mother might do doesn't benefit the children so much.

and, of course:
e) anything at all that backs up your opinion that mothers can offer nothing that money can't buy.

I never said they (and fathers, never forget fathers in these sexist to the core threads). Mothers and fathers who work and are good with chidlren (plenty of parents are uselses whether they work or not) of course benefit them.

Xenia for lots of people its affording to go full time! NOT HACKING IT! I had to go full time because the course I am on isn't part time in my area. My nanny gets paid the majority of my income! (23k) so why would a mother on less go to work with more than 1 child!

Xenia, I asked for evidence, not additional polemics. Clearly, you have none. This is opinion veiled as fact.

Xenia what garbage You will say anything even fantasy facts and figures to justify your choices.The op was only saying it was sad not illegal.I think most kids would love either parent at home and for me that would be the case until the child started school.But that is in an ideal world and not possible for everyone But keaving a baby at 3 weeks must be a financial decision surely?

Yes, women who work and take care of their children have two jobs, Nelly, and so do men.

Xenia, your inability to think outside of your teeny weeny little box continues to flabbergast me. How does it make a man look if he wants to take the maximum family leave that he is allowed by law, and the woman in the next cubicle shows up a week after giving birth, champing at the bit to get back to 'real work'? He looks like a girly wuss who 'can't hack it in the workplace'.

Women like you are the equivalent of the 50s women who were so desperate to conform to what society demanded of them that they lost an essential part of themselves and ended up on valium (aka 'mother's little helper')in their hundreds of thousands. You and those like you have not achieved a happy medium; you are the incarnation of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, hacking it so well in the workplace that you show up those (men included here) who would really like to achieve some work/family balance in their lives. What are you trying to prove, and to whom? There's a tone of desperation to your offensive remarks.

If you're so interested in promoting the idea that men are good parents too (and most are) why not admit that there are many of them who would love the chance to actually, not virtually, nurture their children (nurture being an active verb, not a theoretical concept, or some vague fuzzy feeling you get when you look at your DCs' photos on your desk, or a virtual reality) and who would prefer not to be pressured by the likes of you returning to 'hack it' a short time after physically bearing a baby.

'In fact if you analsyed any mumsnet working and stay at home thread you can tell just by the grammar and spelling that there are more housewives who aren't that well educated compared to mothers with careers.'

LOLOLOLOLOL Xenia; I wasn't going to mention your sentence structure, spelling or grammar, but since you've brought up the matter, I'm going award you the boiled sweet prize for Ridiculous Assertion Of The Decade, based partly on your own woeful spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation (note misspelling of 'analysed' in the paragraph I quoted, for instance), partly on the utter lack of self consciousness or reflection with which you fire off your idiotic opinions, and partly on the sheer comedic effect you manage to achieve.

I think 3 weeks should be illegal.
THe potential for exploiting vulnerable mothers is so high that there needs to be some protections in place for them.
THat means, proper financial help from the government.
FGS, nobody vote Tories or LIbdems next time!!

I bled lochia until week 5 with mine. If I did any physical work, the bleeding returned to red and increased. NOt everyone was like me, but there must be some acknowledgement that for many women, birth is like being hit by a truck.

In a family business, like a pub, for example, the woman will be contributing to the family profit, not even her own!! So that is almost exploitation in itself.

Fair enough if it's a choice. Some women are dying to get back to work. BUt women who want to should at least be allowed to enjoy the PRIZE

Well done, Xenia. You have single-handedly made it entirely acceptable for anyone who reads this thread to have a go at working mothers because you have been more offensive about mums who stay at home with their children than anyone else I have ever come across on MN.

You are arrogant, patronising and quite deluded and I hope people who read your comments don't try to apply your attitude and reasoning to all working mums.

And Sakura, sorry but I don't understand your comments at all. How is it exploitation for a woman to work in her family business - it is her family. And as regards government providing financial help - it is not the government that provides money - it is us, the taxpayer.

Xenia - would you find full-time working as beneficial to family life if you were earning £30K a year? Because the majority of full-time working mums in the UK earn much less than that.

The average salary of full-time graduate women in the UK is less than 40K.

Can you not acknowledge that RICH people like yourselves who can buy in household and education support for their children are going to have a different work/life balance than the rest of us parents on much lower salaries?

It's so much easier to be a working parent when you can contract out half of your domestic responsibilities to someone else. Not so when you have to do it all yourself.

In fairness to Xenia, she has been doing this for over twenty years, her older children are out the other side of teenage and she is a very good position to judge whether what she's done has worked for her children. (although I would be interested to see how your own children manage parenthood, Xenia; obviously their circumstances will be different to yours- different era etc). That's not to say that what you did Xenia would work for everyone. For many people, their level of income precludes returning to work and leaving their children with a nanny or a even a childminder, since the childcare would eat up all of their earnings and more. It would be staying at home (which can actually be an economically sound decision depending on your circumstances) or losing their house.

The beauty of the internet now is that you can take online courses from home and improve your earning potential without incurring massive childcare costs. The government also has a range of measures designed to help young mothers back to work (help with childcare etc) which I think are a very good thing.

"is that you can take online courses from home and improve your earning potential"

Sadly those sorts of qualifications are unlikely to open the doors to the top UK universities and to a job paying 100K a year, which is what you need as a single mother if you want private education for your 5 children, mortgage repayments and wrap around domestic support.

No maybe not Titty, but what's wrong with being a single mother with 5 children that don't go to private school whereby the mother can support the family without relying on the tax payer?

Nothing at all earplugs.

Chill out...
The beauty of living in this country is that we are still (sort of) free to make our own decisions about how we live our lives.

Duchesse, whether Xenia's children are exemplary citizens with fantastic high-end careers ahead of them is beside the point, quite frankly.

The questions she has been asked relate to her assertion as fact that all women who work part-time or stay at home disadvantage their children and, indeed, women everywhere. The issue being taken here relates to Xenia's attitude, not how her have fared (so far) in life.

I'm sure there are mothers here who stayed at home who can judge that their lifestyle choice has "worked" for them, too. Personal experience does not make for solid political or theoretical argument.

Although, Xenia's style is a little brusque, I do think her message, that it is hypocritical to criticise women for working, and not men, is a valid one.
It is a sexist thing to do.

And her assertion that women should try to retain some financial independence is hardly crazy talk is it?
My othert half earns a lot of money, but I have still always prefered to earn too.
He may after all lose his job ( not beyond the realms of possibility for anyone at the moment), fall ill, die...

It always just seemed like common sense to me.

This thread was about feeling sad at a 3 WEEK old baby with a child minder. Not a 3 month old baby or older child.

3 week old babies - always look so fragile don't they?

I have found the posts from some working women attacking mothers who feel 'sad' - very aggressive and 'offended'.

I'm a working mother, I don't feel offended by the posters comments at all. My feelings towards 3 Week old babies are totally defined by just how fragile a 3 week old is. Only outside of the womb by 3 weeks.

This has nothing to do with my politics, my attitude to the mother - for me its a primitive instinct towards a 3 week old baby. Nothing more, nothing less.

Litchick, is that Xenia's message? I hear her saying that only women with low IQ's who can't hack it in the workplace choose to work anything less than full time. I think what Xenia is doing is criticising women for not working, which is not quite the same as criticising women and not men for working.

What I don't understand about Xenia's argument is that, elsewhere, she has argued that if you are good at what you do, you should be able to slot in and out of the workforce as it suits you (female or male). That, after all, is the nature of capitalism: it is utterly gender-blind when you have the right mix of skills.

This probably describes my job to an extent - most of my managers have chosen to take time off and slotted back in and progressed easily, meeting no glass ceiling. The nature of the work is "part-time". Before I went on maternity, my "full-time" post consisted of four contracts, I will simply return to two, causing no detriment to my employer or my own career prospects.

So, in that scenario, why would what I am doing be of detriment to women everywhere or any daughters I might have in the future? The logic is flawed. I can't really see how working part-time in a career position is some sort of anti-feminist get-thee-back-to-the-kitchen retrograde step when it comes down to personal choice.

Xenia seems to be saying that women really shouldn't have choice, because if they want to spend time with their children they are playing into "stereotypes" of women's available life roles. Similarly the women shouldn't choose "female" jobs or caring roles because again, these choices let the sisterhood down (or something). So I, in working with disabled people, have done something inherently wrong as, well, I'm just underlining that all women are good for is the rubbish stuff.

The core issue I have with this is that it assumes that society is inevitably for the rich and the privileged. Xenia, like all good capitalists, should know that there will always be a bottom layer in the hierarchy, with non-earners, in terms of status, somewhere below that layer. So, children and the disabled are expendable in this equation: worthless, not lucrative.

Xenia's simplistic logic seems to me to be that, because society doesn't value these non-earners, they truly are worthless and women should avoid jobs relating to their care as it underlines the notion that the female gender wants to serve. Isn't the more pressing issue here not why women do this job but why children and people who are disabled or different to be categorised in terms of value in this way? Whether a man or a woman carries out a caring role, it will be seen as of less value - hence Xenia's easy assumptions that this type of work is for those with "low IQ" (again, note the marginalisation of those outside of the highest-earning class). To deny the importance of investing in the vulnerable in society and to assume that the choice to care is a less worthy one just plays into sexist stereotypes. Going out to work full-time three weeks after a baby is born is not stripping away inequality, it is adding to it. It is saying that if you value caring in and of its own right, you will be marginalised in our society.

I have no issue with any woman or man choosing to work in a "traditionally male" role because it fulfils them. I do have an issue with suggestions that working
in a "traditionally female" role, or viewing childcare as having importance in and of itself, are inherently anti-feminist choices and viewpoints.

What Xenia doesn't seem to see is that the prize, in terms of feminism, is being able to be a corporate fiend if you want and/or work with children or in a "female job" if that suits you (whether you are male or female). A genderless society is the utopia here, not one where women feel compelled to make choices in case men think that they just can't "hack" particular types of work.

I have no doubt that the general

Litchick was summarising my message. We only go on to the hyperbole because of the tone of the thread sst by housewives that those of us who choose to reutn rat 1 day or 2 weeks do so because we have to and that people are sorry for us. Plenty return from choice. Many men and women want to go back to work.

I always think Xenia doth protest too much.

I agree Xenia doth protest too much, but only because she's often a (relatively) lone voice against hundreds of people saying "but babies need to be with their mummies".

All she's saying is "not necessarily, and not so much that that means a woman who wants to go back to work very quickly shouldn't do so"

Will stop putting words in your mouth now Xenia

I always think Xenia doth make too many typos to be able to follow her posts very well, but what I can gather from everything I think she said is that she doesn't seem to appreciate that the feminist fight has now moved on a long way from the need to assert women's right to work outside the home, and that Feminism has now set its sights on creating a workplace where women and men can equally assert their choice to prioritise their families in a way that does not involve remote parenting.

Not babies need to be with their mummies, but their daddies too, and it's a good thing for all when daddies can have the freedom from the workplace ball and chain to do this.

I certainly don't understand how so many women seem to adore hours of baby care and cleaning up after the family and husbands because intrinsically that is very very dull work. So are they very very dull women to like it? I just don't get it and because I've been lucky enough to have a fun career and lvoely large family I like to spread the happy message.

You don't often see in the press women who work full time and love it and have big families. We are out there but perhaps too busy to press that point home and yes I have to type fast and I'm working now tonight so I can't write any more.

minipie is right and also I don't think there is any problem at all with women (or men) who choose to return to work in 2 weeks and the criticism of Sarah Palin and Dati in France was disgusting and very very sexist.