to be totally fucked off with the antisahm comments on here?

[slackers]

Wtaf are you only a good role model to your DC if you are in paid employment?
Why does someone only be valid in society if they earn?
Why should I work only to pay someone else do a job to look after my DC? wtaf is the logic in that?
ffs

Soverylucky- I am a secondary school teacher so I see them come in at 11 so would echo your point exactly. And among many of our cohort who have just left yr 13 to go on to university are very bright, well rounded confident young people who had mothers who worked from when they were small. Go figure eh!

Sovery, you teachers know nothing. You're just numbers, dont you know?

Responding to posts back on p13 - I think there's a lot of talking at cross-purposes here. SAHM (as we know it today - i.e. not economically active) is indeed a very recent social construct. I am arguing that WOHM (again, as we know it today - i.e. a mother who leaves the domestic sphere and her DC for x hours per day to enter an entirely separate economic sphere) is an almost-as-recent social construct. The norm would surely have been for women to work alongside their children and for that work to be based very close to home. As WoodBetweenTheWorlds points out, there would have been a lot more communal, informal childcare going on as well, often performed by older children.

It's not until industrialisation and the huge separation of economic work and home that terms like SAHM and WOHM can really have any meaning. They are both social constructs (as are factories, agriculture and childhood itself, for that matter).

SM - while these are social constructs, I take issue with your use of the word 'affectation' to describe SAHM in the modern sense because it ignores the fact that we do now completely separate economic and domestic spheres and somebody has to do the work of looking after children, and it also ignores the fact that the job of parenting has expanded massively in around the same timescale as we've had SAHMs as we know them today. It's no longer enough to just feed and clothe them. We have to be ever more involved in their education, extra-curricular activities and their social lives. We have to support them for a lot longer too - ideally through uni and putting a deposit on their first home, and we have to care about 'quality time' and 'precious moments' ... it's simply not the same job it used to be.

There is even a 24 hr nursery where you can leave your kid all weekend! A bus drives round at the crack of dawn with sad looking kids en route to said nursery

Because God forbid shift workers should have access to childcare.

I think that sort of minutiae carving up of finances is only an issue in fairly poor relationships tbh. Most people don't work like that in real life. And arguably, in a poor relationship which bases itself on financial power struggles, the woman is 'better off working, if for no other reason than to give herself some financial security

all weekend georgie??

jesus that sounds good, I have't had a break for ages

where's the bus stop?

Oh absolutely god forbid georgie!

And rofl at the mental image of desperate MNers peeping through their net curtains to register the facial expressions of the children on the
childcatchers nursery bus!

Oh dearie me

24 hour nursery.................Oh lord I think thats called foster care where I live.

You have to very stubborn or very stupid not to understand that the people who use a nursery open 24 hours are shift workers. Which is it?

Or someone who likes a joke.................................

Unconvinced by your sudden claims to humour tbh.

I think that is even worse getting a child dressed and ready for bed then taking them to the nursery.

Where will it end?

Pmsl georgie

Soverylucky-
And also remember that THEY ARE ONLY A NUMBER!! Not skilled professionals playing a worthwhile and necessary role in society!

Of course they are skilled but if they left there would be more to take their place.

The country is full of proffessional and unskilled labour waiting for jobs to come up.

Where I live there is no 24 hour nurserys I cannot find one [google] in my county. But all the hospitals are manned day and night.

Perhaps they don't want to leave. Perhaps they are really good at their job and enjoy their career. This sounds like you projecting your own feelings again liketherain. Perhaps your experience of work was like being on a treadmill and left 'you feeling like a number, but that doesn't make it true 'for all of us.

Yeah sure, if all the professionals with kids stopped working, we could just fill their jobs with untrained people instead. As long as they're male or childless, and don't have kids in nurseries with sad faces, it should be fine.

We might just have to instruct the nation to stop getting I'll, having babies etc while this new childless workforce is trained up.

As long as the kids are at home with their mums...

ill not I'll. Bloody iPhone.

no such thing as a 24hr nursery,or else shift workers wouldn't struggle so much
if there is a 24hr nursery post it details as it would be an invaluable resource