to hate the term 'full time mother'?

[MammaTJ]

Seriously, this really gets my goat. I work. I have worked most of my childrens lives. I like the work I do and choose to work nights so I don't miss out on things like sports days etc, just miss out on sleep.
This does not make me a part time mother!! I never stop being a mum and putting my kids first for a second!
Also, their dad 'babysitting' while I work. Does that mean I babysit while he is at work?

We are all mums all of the time.

I think full time mum is an old fashioned term which has been replaced with sham.

I find comments such as those from scottishmummy breathtakingly crass.
You sound JUST like my OH who also thinks that unless you are bringing loads of cash into the home then you are not working.

Sham! Freudian slip?

There are crass comments on both sides though. Some people suggest that having young children, and combining all the home chores (including getting them up, dressed, fed and dropped at nursery by 8am) with doing a days paid employment is 'time off'!! I have actually read posts where people say they went to work 'for a rest' !

Would love to know where there are employers in 2012 who can afford to pay people to sit around doing bugger all.

Surely it's obvious that running a home consists of tasks, or work or whatever you wish to term it. Even before you have kids, you have a home to clean, meals to cook, bills to manage etc. Then when you have children, there are a whole load more tasks it involves. You do those as a parent whether you work outside the home or not.

Terms like this never bother me, infact I had never really given them much thought until this afternoon when I collected my children and realised I wasn't much of a mum, I see them for short periods of time each day and that's to hustle them through dinner/bath/stories. So part-time mum would be accurate for me.

The babysitter thing for dads, it's kind of true though isn't it. Let's face it, they do tend to be babysitters and not much more.

tinkerbel72 - "This thread has got ridiculous - with the post upthread suggesting that most successful families adopt the model of one partner working and one not working , being the peak of ridiculous (so far, that it. Let's wait for it to be topped wink )"

And where, precisely, did you read such a comment in a post?

Bonsoir - you know it's your idea. You've been displaying it on these fora for years.

Do you also need remedial reading lessons?

Thanks for the offer. It would really max out the efficiency of my family.

Oh come on Bonsoir!!!

You said it was no wonder that the most ambitious and successful families often adopt the model of one working parent and one SAHP.

And you have said as much ad infinitum on MN.

The thing is, it can indeed be a very successful model for a family. But there are so many other models that work equally well.

It is a foolish thing indeed to look at ones own model and assume that it is the only one that can work well.

I said: "It is little wonder that the most ambitious and successful families often adopt that model - specialisation has always been the most economically efficient way of working."

Which is hardly the same as saying most successful families adopt that model.

The difference between most and often is fairly significant.

footballfriend

Then it's a bit of a non-statement no?

Some choose it as a model. Some don't. Meh...

There was a good and quite long article in the Economist a year or 18 months ago explaining why the specialisation model of marriage was the most economically successful and the most divorce-preventative.

Marriage based on economics? It's the 21st century. I'd have thought some is about mutual respect, love, happiness, that sort if thing, not just preventing divorce.

Family is the fundamental economic unit of society. There is nothing odd or outdated about that.

Bonsoir - that comes across as very wooden.

You really are scraping the barrel to try to find something to contradict what is entirely basic self-evident knowledge .

Bonsoir, I'm not contradicting you. I think it's called making fun. You are on auto-pilot when it comes to threads like this and you just sound a bit unreal. Like a North Korean textbook: the economic unit is the family.

Can't you scrape a different barrel? Or, better still, read a decent newspaper or a good book on economics (and accounting, while you are at it).

Sense of humour bypass or what?!!

I read the Economist, and remember this whole debate and from what I remember the results were fairly inconclusive - its impossible to make a wholesale judgement on this.

From The Economist

But do children benefit? Empirical research on this issue is tricky, as it is generally unknown exactly why a parent chooses to stay at home, and these unknown reasons may affect the child in numerous ways. Which part of a child?s development is therefore caused by the mother staying at home, and which by these unobserved factors? We don?t and can?t know. Unless, of course, we find a change in mothers? time at home that was driven by an outside force, that is, which was unrelated to the unknown reasons

well from that pish the economist should stick to numbers

The benefits to children of a SAHP largely depend upon the skills of that particularly SAHP, and his or her drive to impart them to their children. Hence the very great difficulty of drawing conclusions at a macro level.

The benefits to children of a SAHP largely depend upon the skills of that particularly SAHP, and his or her drive to impart them to their children. Hence the very great difficulty of drawing conclusions at a macro level.

Quite. And likewise, the ability of a WOHP to achieve exactly the same results as a SAHP depends largely on the skills of that particular WOHP, and his or her drive to confer those benefits on his/her children. Hence the pointlessness of the argument.