Why are people on here so pressed about the existence of SAHMs?

[DaffodilsandCoffee]

It’s fair enough to point out the existence of certain downsides are risks, but there seems to be so much spite and resentment on here. Why are some posters do angry at the existence of women who prefer to do all the childcare themselves rather than outsource some of it? Also, are they equally as angry at SAHDs? (I know it’s not as common but I personally know 3)

@JollyWilloughby

You were lucky to have enjoyed it and now back to the career

I went out every day but you cant stay out all day every day so there is still a lot of time to fill alongside baby sensory and coffee dates.

Im an older mum and found the change of pace harder

@almatitchmarsh

I didn’t go back to a career, I studied an OU degree whilst I was off work and broke into a new sector (that I now love).

There was time to fill most certainly but 3 kids under 5, coupled with my social life and study, I actively enjoyed it, and it wasn’t slow paced for me. It is all very variable isn’t it?

@JollyWilloughby

Well done, thats fabulous you managed a degree and three kids

It comes down to jealousy. It's an option not available to many.

Q. Why are so many women so happily willing to live off men?

The answer seems to be for an easier life, right?

@almatitchmarsh

Thank you.

I have never been a SAHM, although I worked part-time until my youngest was 7. My best friend is a SAHM and has very different personal circumstances to me. I must admit I don't really enjoy FT working and do feel that I don't offer my DC enough of my time compared to my friend who is always available to her DC. However, I would never, ever want to be dependent on someone else financially and I would worry about pensions. I do also enjoy the variety that work gives me in my life.

In my ideal world both DH and I would work 4 days each so that each of us could give a bit more time to our DC. Our employers haven't been very receptive to that idea unfortunately.

Is it the same when Sahm are awful to working mothers? Jealousy?

I don’t buy that. You are basically saying that all women want to be sahp. That, that is the default and anyone who doesn’t is just unable to. That’s not my experience of working mothers at all.

My husband & I both decided to have children - equally I expect him to help bring them up - as I’ve said earlier on this conversation I work. We both put our children first, because of me working we both equally ‘sacrifice’ part of our careers to put our children first. When my daughter had chicken pox I took half the time of as did he. We both used the parental leave at our work policy - the default wasn’t Mum. He’s had to put up with some comments from other men (& they are fathers!) that he’s on the school run or home because child is sick.
By both stepping up and parenting it hasn’t really affected our careers because we’ve shared it - my work knew I had support as did his. We’ve both done ok - maybe he could have been more successful but who knows - my children know that their parents have both attended every special moment at school and other activities. We’ve always put our children & family needs above work.

it’s also meant when my husband was unhappy with work he could look for other work as the finance pressure wasn’t just on him it was shared. I do have a friend whose husband took on too much as the main provider to the family and his mental health took a hit - they’ve made changes for him to step back and she has stepped up willingly to work part time to ensure that the family unit works. I have another friend who has not worked for 18 years and never likely to re - enter the work place, again the set up works for their family unit. And as a group of friends we’ve never judged the others on their choices!

I do believe though this is because he had a good role model in his Dad - his Dad wanted to also be a part of his childrens life his job meant he finished early enough to do the school run - it was important to his Dad to do his share. It did impact his Dads career but thankfully society is (slowly) changing and hasn’t impacted my husbands as much.

Though it is up to each home to decide how is best to raise their own children and not to judge others on their choices. As long as all parties are honest and are happy with it.

@SinaraSmith

I don’t think that is what is meant. When a choice is taken away from you it can be hard on both sides.

Not being able to afford to be a SAHM and not being able to work because you can’t afford childcare. Swings and roundabouts.

To have the choice in what you choose to do is the ideal. In real life everyone I know just gets on with it and assumes people just do what is best for their families.

i have two women on my FB who are always discussing the issue so they both must feel insecure at some level. One high flyer who is always posting about what she can afford her kids because of her choice to work full time forever and another who constantly posts stay at home mum posts about how she’s always there for her kids.

I’ve gathered they are both insecure about their choices and it’s clear to see.

But for a lot of people there is a choice.

you see it here ‘I cant afford to work but want to’ though they actually can. They just don’t feel they will bring enough home after childcare to feel it’s worth it. And that’s fine. But it is a choice.

But yes, that comment does suggest every woman wants to be a sahp.

I don’t think it’s jealousy on either side.

Stop stirring. Because it will all go sour if people start throwing shade back to you there's no need for it.

I suspect there is also an element of “wr fought for years for equality, you are letting the side down by choosing to stay home and do domestic work”. It wasn’t that long ago married women weren’t allowed to work. Councils for example made women stop working on marriage. And that was I think in the seventies.

we have come a long way but I think many working women do not see those who stay home and do domestic chores as equal partners and going back to a stereotype that as women we fought hard to break free of.

I think the sad fact is many men pretend they see their partner as equal when the relationship is on going, but as soon as things start to become difficult in the relationship it becomes very clear that often they don’t, and the older the kids get the worse that is. They pretend because they simply don’t want to be bothered by the domestic stuff. And it suits the woman to believe it.

right now only one in five women elect to stay home, and the number is decreasing. This generation of young women will have even less who choose to do it, and dual careers will become more and more the norm.

change takes time, a few decades ago it was only one in five mothers who worked, and often those women would do side jobs to make some extra money, cleaning, child minding etc, now it’s only one in five who don’t work.

my own step mother didn’t work, her mother didn’t work, and as a woman in her fifties now, I look back at them and think “what did they do all day” . It was cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry, but that doesn’t take all your time, personally it would have driven me insane, but they never had a career to speak of,they had no desire to work, that was simply their lives. The house was clean, the dinner cooked, the clothes washed, and no one ever questioned it. No one thought to say to them get a job, or even wondered about it, because it was very common for women simply not to work back then. And that’s what, only forty years ago?

I also think it's much easier to juggle work & dc if both parents are onboard so to speak. So dhs job pays more than mine but that doesn't mean mine is less important. We bother cover sick days & because I get much more holiday he buys additional leave so we have more time off together. He takes quite a few Fridays off so we can have days together with the dc.

without the dc that should say!

I have just become a SAHM. My husband works 12h+ shifts, days and nights and weekends. We could never be equal in how we parent, there are a lot of days where I have to manage everything. Life will be lot easier for everyone with me at home and that's why we've made that decision.

@Rosebuud I agree!

@Rosebuud right now only one in five women elect to stay home, and the number is decreasing.

Your stats are incorrect. The last ONS figures show that only 59% of women with dependent children age 0-4 are in employment. At all! Of those who remain working, 60% work part-time, 40% work full time. A better way to put that is only 24% of women with children age 0-4 work full time.

72% of women with children age 5-10 work butWomen with older children work but 60% work part time.

Across all age groups 27% of women with children age 0-18 are economically inactive - don't work/aren't looking for work. That's more than a quarter of women who might label themselves as SAHM.

I think there certainly are judgements on both sides.

I do get the feeling on MN that many women look down on SAHM, so I see what the OP is saying.
I've often seen people here say to a SAHM...'but I do all that (re parenting) and work too!'
And I really don't think it's true. Yes, we're all full time parents, but SAHPs (of young children at least) are also doing the work a childminder or nanny or nursery would otherwise do. And some working mothers just don't seem to want to acknowledge that. I'm not sure why that is, it always seems surprising to me, yet I've seen it said time and again.
There was a thread recently where an OP was upset that her sister's occupation was written as 'nothing' on a form (by a midwife) because she was a SAHP. And it was a bit of an eye-opener, because so many women here agreed with the midwife. It does show a lack of respect, I think.
If student can be an occupation, I don't see why SAHP can't be. What people do is important to them, whether they receive a salary or not.

Wow really? All that becayse I was 7 percent out? 🤯

@Wallaw perhaps your right. However most people are not dating a surgeon. So you still have chosen to view that fact that SAHP are left wide open and this unfortunately is the women in a lot of cases even when they work. So tbh I think it's pointless going on about the dads because I don't know any stay at home dad's for a start.

I can't believe we have just come out of a pandemic and your trying to push the narrative that a lot of stay at home mums have some sort of lucrative side in come you may well do and a few others too. But this is a MINORITY.

Children are very very experience only on MN do I hear people saying you should of saved for your future child before having them... utter Bullshit!

@Rosebuud there's a big difference between 20 and 27% . Plus significant nuances in age group/age of children. Way more people are SAHM than you said. Plus many of those who work part-time could just be doing 1 day/week.

my own step mother didn’t work, her mother didn’t work, and as a woman in her fifties now, I look back at them and think “what did they do all day” . It was cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry, but that doesn’t take all your time
It took a lot longer than it does now though - or at least it did if you had the sort of income our family did. I'm in my mid 50s and my Mum's housework in my childhood was far more physical than today. We didn't have an automatic washing machine til I was in my late teens, so whereas for me "doing the laundry" means throwing the clothes in the machine and pressing a button before I go to bed, it was a morning of fairly hard work for my Mum twice a week.
We didn't have a freezer either - not even a fridge til I was about 10 in fact, so my Mum shopped every day more or less. And on foot mostly. I remember our daily walks to the butcher and greengrocer etc very clearly from my preschool days. We only got the bus if the weather was absolutely vile as it was wasted money according to my Mum. Cooking took longer too. More or less everything was made from scratch and getting a takeaway or eating out was a very rare treat.
She also made a lot of our clothes. And repaired things. Socks that I now throw straight in the bin would have been darned, at least twice, before binning. Sheets wearing a bit thin in the middle got cut in half, and sewn back up with the outsides in the middle and reused, and so on.
Not that I am advocating a return to those days of course, and I know my Mum would far rather have been back at the civil service job that she was forced to leave, but I don't think you can draw direct comparisons between today and even the 70s as the changes have been huge, in so many ways. Seeing how hard my Mum's work was was a strong part of the reason why I made different choices in fact. And I was the youngest, so I can only imagine it was much worse when my siblings were little. I never wondered what she did all day - I saw it, and knew I didn't want the same.

I think your attitude to working versus staying at home is shaped hugely by your experience of childhood and how your own mother approached it.

My own mum had a stellar career until she had kids and basically never got it back (I was born in the early 70s and it was 100 times harder to get back into the workforce after a break of 10+ years). The whole of the later part of her life she was seething with resentment and insecurity because a lot of her peers were working and had financial independence and she was wholly financially dependent on my dad. Their marriage wasn't terrible but I think there were periods where she would have liked to leave or at least to have the financial wherewithal to leave if she wanted to. I still have that sense of frustration and resentment etched onto my memories of her as a mother: she was lovely and loving to as as kids but she was also palpably bored, frustrated and angry about being a housewife.

The one thing I took from this is that I never ever wanted to be dependent on a man for income. For me the idea of being jealous of SAHMs is laughable: there is literally nothing in life I fear more than depending on someone else's money.

Clearly not everyone who stays at home feels like this. Many people are not troubled by this at all and if this idea of being a "team" holds good (and its a big if but clearly it works for many couples) then I can see that its almost irrelevant who makes the money. There are many women who don't work but who use the time they have in much more creative ways: volunteering, organising etc. I've come to see over time that being out of paid work does not have to mean being listless and bored. It can be a ticket to freeing yourself up to do things which interest you.

On the flip side, no doubt if you felt very neglected by your own mother as a child you may feel that quality time bringing your own children up takes precedence over anything else and if you have the resources available to you you will choose this, even at the cost of financial independence.

It's not just about your politics or your family financial circumstances. A lot of this is driven by very primal ideas about how you want to relate to your children and the rest of your family.

Well said. I agree with all of this. Being a SAHM is not doing "nothing", I found that thread very offensive.