to feel sorry for Amanda Holden re her article about Mumsnet

[GrowSomeCress]

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2305111/Why-I-hate-negative-judgmental-Mumsnet--Amanda-Holden-Britains-Got-Talent-star-accuses-site-fuelling-mothers-guilt.html

Seems to be newly posted.

I think sometimes it's forgotten that famous people are actually real people with genuine feelings.

Don't agree with her about mumsnet just being negative and judgemental all the time though, really excellent support available on here.

So, is that report by the AAT as study of AAT members? Does it say anywhere? Are they a representative group of mothers?

I do wonder if we worry too much about 'confidence'. If you have to pay the bills and need to work surely you just get on with it and do the job. You don't sit about fretting all day about whether you should be there because you need to be there. I can't imagine Xenia has ever fretted about being able to do her job for example and I am sure she would have stepped right back on the treadmill if she had taken longer than 2 weeks off.

I also think it is a bit of red herring because it makes it sound like motherhood and maternity leave have some profound effect on confidence like nothing else but everybody, male or female, parent or non-parent has the potential to have their confidence knocked if they move outside of their comfort zone and need to make adjustments to their working life and lifestyle for both good and bad reasons. I have seen it several times in DH over the years as he has chopped and changed in his career. It doesn't have anything to do with having children. I think some of the time it is just an excuse to not take control of your own career.

Could the dip in confidence at 11 months be because the women are just preparing to go back to work after a year's maternity leave so it has been at the forefront of their minds? Jeez, they have been a bit disingenuous about extrapolating the results from that one.

Xenia have you been reading the Facebook COO's book, Lean In. It seems to be your favourite phrase on this thread. Or maybe you are her....

It was Xerox, no?

Sheryl Sandberg is COO of Facebook.

I haven't read her book but it is a good phrase to use to summarise what men and women need to do if they want to do well in most of what they do - you lean in not out. Now most people are not up to leaning in or doing well at work as they are basically lazy or not talented. However if you do want to be one of those rare men or women who earn over say £400,000 a year then you need to lean in. You cannot expect if you are hardly ever at work that somehow people will say poor diddums she was sick or has a child or a sexist husband or sick dog - so we will still give her the £400k anyway.

Helena M writes in tonight's Standard about it to (the mother of 9 who works in the City and is rather good).

On BBB's point about fretting - well that's for wimps surely? More seriously I was interviewed by a journalist who was doing a series of profiles of successful women once. She said we all had the same thing in common - a kind of internal belief we were doing a good enough job at work and good enough at home, rather than a perfectionist I am never good enough at work or at home beating of the breast guilty mother thing.

Ha ha ha, I am definitely leaning OUT

I have leaned into other things apart from a job. Surely, leaning in isn't reserved only for the relatively small portion of our lives we work (once you take out holidays, evenings and weekends, the work bit is actually quite small or should be if you have your work life balance sorted).

Some people I know work to earn enough to do a hobby that they are very good at. They lean in to their hobby and have got recognition for that. It isn't always about a career and bucket loads of cash.

You can also lean into work, get recognition and be very good at your job without earning £400k a year - lack of a big salary isn't always the result of being lazy or untalented. Some of the most important jobs in society don't pay that well but then money isn't really fool proof as a marker for success. Think of all the high earning city types getting massive bonuses for sitting around playing with other people's money. Not particularly a worthwhile job compared to a surgeon for example, yet they get paid more.

And sometimes I think we are own worst enemies with this talk of confidence. We talk ourselves out of jobs or lifestyles we want for fear that somehow we are doing something wrong. It becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. Career women who are so afraid that they will ruin their careers that they don't dare take more than a few days off for maternity leave. Other women who want to work but are afraid that they will never get a job they want or deserve. It we stopped worrying about confidence and whether we were good enough and just got on with it I am sure we would be a lot happier and probably, if we just assumed that we were right in what we did, men would assume the same too and allow us to get on with it. It is after all what they do.

Surveys like the AAT one just try to convince us confidence is an issue but it doesn't have to be.

Some people lean into nothing. They work part time but the house is a mess, they shout at the children and their hobby is wine or TV etc etc. Other people are so perfectionist in everything they ever do they tend to make bad parents (as being a parent is about compromise and fudge and accepting children as they are by and large and enjoying it) and some lean in only to one hobby and neglect their children/spouse and work.

I suppose the point I always think worth making is you can lean in to work as I did and earn quite big sums particularly if you own, rather than work as someone else's PAYE hired hand, that you can have a large family as I did and rather nice children and you can lean into hobbies too - I am sure I only sing as well etc because of the 10,000 hours or whatever I put in as a teenager into piano/singing and the fact I do that most days even now. I am just trying to show you can have a lovely hobby, lovely work and lovely income and large family and it is a huge lot easier to do all that if you lean into work which is highly paid.

Amanda Holden. With her fame and dosh she can live a highly protected life. A lot of women have gated properties and high walls. I have some sympathy with twhat she said about Mumsnet. In parts the manners are pretty robust

But we still keep coming back to the same old things Xenia. You want to work for yourself, largely alone, you are happy to delegate a fair bit of you childcare, you want to have other people in your house clearing up your mess and cleaning for you, you even chose to sing as a hobby. That is fine for you. I'm glad you are happy with you life.

But and it is a big but, what makes you happy, what works for you won't work for everybody.

I don't want 5 children. I didn't want to have children in my 20's so I didn't. I don't want to do your type of work and though I have the aporopriate degree and it would have easy to take that route, I chose not to. I don't have a full time job because I don't want one. I don't even want £400k a year. A one off lump sum of £400k would be nice, it would pay off the mortgage, just about, but other than sit on it, or buy more stuff I don't really need or want, what would I do with £400k a year especially given the massive sacrfices I would need to make to get it and the lack of time for spending it. I am very happy with my little business, my part time job, my coursework/hobby and my smallish family. I am quite happy working at home by myself as you appear to be but other people don't want to self employed. They want contact with others , to be part of a team. Maybe they are a creative person or a people person or very practical and they don't have the personal aptitude or inclination to be the boss. That is great too as we can't all be the boss (too many chiefs and not enough Indians and all that) and we need to play to our strengths, lead an authentic life if you like, in order to be happy. We can all lean in to whatever makes us happy without diving in head first - you stand a much better chance of having a better work life balance that way and nothing takes over your life so the children, the husband, the home and the hobbies aren't lovely things to have but just get squeezed in around the work.

You seem to be hung up on the idea that the only way to be successful is your way and that money is the be all and end all. You should know by now that that is not true but you persist with that. The fact that we aren't all little clones of you doesn't make us failures, it makes us different and all the more interesting and worthwhile than you care to give us credit for.

We've kind of got off the point of Amanda Holden, haven't we, if she ever had a point.

She might have found MN judgemental, it probably is, but it works both ways and I have been here long enough to know that for every person who slated her for going back to work when she had just given birth and nearly died in the process, there would have been somebody else who upheld her right to do just that, equally loudly. I assume that she only questioning the judgements of those who disagree with her, not those who do. Their judgements seems to have not even been noticed. However, to admit that MN has all sorts of opinions wouldn't have given her much of a vehicle for plugging her latest little telly show wouldn't it?

Well if you earn £400,000 a year you have £200,000 confiscated right back by the state to feed benefits claimants, mumsnetters claiming tax credits and childcare help, erroneous foreign wars, pointless civil servants and wasted foreign aid so you could say by earning a lot women are doing a huge amount for the nation in the taxes that they pay but no one thanks those who work hard for the benefit of the poor. They just want to throw eggs in jealous rages I suppose.

Amanda H returned to work quickly as I did and no doubt she and I have found that is best for families and hopefuilly the thread has proven that is the best path for most women.

Well Xenia when you suggested workfare for single mums on previous threads dont you think the childcare help for that would have needed to come from somewhere.

Your posts are so worth the entertainment value.

It hasn't proved it is the best path to me. I agree with BigBooboedBertha. I wouldn't have had my DCs in my 20s, I wasn't ready, I was building up my career. I was much older - 40yrs when I had my last , with enough experience to know that it was the next excitement and challenge and it was the best thing for me, and definitely my children. Success means very different things to different people- and why not? Money and status are not a measure to me.

Can I just say, I love being a sahm. I love spending time with my dc, I love the fact that I have bonded with them even more since I stopped working and i love how I can see that they are so happy I am around for them all the time. They are really lovely dcs and I can see the difference in them for having so much of my time. There is no job in the world that could mean so much to me.

My time at home was priceless, the only thing that would have made me miss it would have been economic necessity. Sadly many women don't have a free choice- they have to work.

I agree with Big,bar having the money to travel more with the dc. I don't need or want any more.A part time job which would actually keep me under the tax threshold is all I need or want.

This is the same for many,many women hence the difficulty in finding such part time work at the moment.

I know very few women who are in a 2 x full time jobs family(only on MN). Most families I know are juggling and manage to juggle to do the best for their dc in far harder circumstances than AM has.

I put a Times article on this on another thread
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/other_subjects/1729587-So-us-rotten-lot
It suggests 15% of men and women are pretty successful and I think it's true. They tend to be quite good at other things too - hobbies and children etc etc etc. That is probably all this is about and the fact we have to keep suggesting it is a female issue is just sexism. 85% of men don't earn much and aren't up to much either.

Most men and women cannot cope with very much. Some though do love their work and do well and have nice families.

(On workfare you take four single mothers and one minds the children whilst the other 3 do whatever the work that is proposed)

'Most men and women cannot cope with very much. Some though do love their work and do well and have nice families.'

There you go again being all PA about it! You are making a rather dubious extrapolation of the statistics there aren't you? 15% are successful on a particular set of criteria which we may or may not agree with - I don't happen to agree with them all and I think the kind of people it is talking about are very often massive failures as far as interpersonal relations go - all that stuff about creating sub-classes of employees and being unable to understand other people who aren't just like them sounds like personality disorder to me. Some of it sounds like it comes straight out of a book on ASDs to me if I am really honest and I am not just saying that to score points either.

Again, a big but, that doesn't make the others unsuccessful. Some of them will be (a tiny minority aren't good at anything) but others will be leading satisfying lives where they are doing a good job at some or all the different areas of their lives but not to those criteria. It isn't either we all live like Xenia or those other poor women in the article (and I do feel sorry for them if I am totally honest) or we are failures, it is a spectrum of success. I'm not aiming for perfection although clearly some people are. What is the point, it isn't achievable. Good with a smattering of good enoughs in some areas suits me fine. Trying to achieve perfection is horribly tiring and dull for all those who have to live with you I find. Their lives are often being sacrificed on the back of those who have to support them in their efforts to get what they want and that doesn't sit comfortanbly with me.

You have saved me writing a reply BBB.

I do agree with you on one thing though Xenia - I don't believe this is a gender issue as such. I have never thought I couldn't do something because I am female. If I want to do something, I do it. I do feels sorry for men who haven't realised that they can be a SAHP without threatening their masculinity as much as I feels sorry for women who think their career needs to compromised by having children and taking time off work to be with them. You should be able to lead the life that suits you and makes the most of your interest and attributes without it being a gender issue. You have to make it happen for yourself though.

Exotic - I don't know why we bother though!

She will continue to think of us as failures. I can live with that since I don't share her view of success.

I refuse to let her get away with it BBB.
She has an essay on another thread which I will reply to when time.