Sorry Xenia...

[duchesse]

...for starting that thread when I didn't believe you existed (and I genuinely didn't). I've done some proper research now, and realise that you are real person with fantastic real achievement. I apologise unreservedly for my previous thread, which was genuinely not designed to get at you since I did not believe you existed. I am aghast and incredibly impressed at how much you have achieved, and look forward to sparring with you again some time...

Xenia - I can see where your argument is coming from but in general once women have had children they choose a job that fits around them, and that generally means a lower paid job.

Also, not everybody is motivated by money (think Maslow's hierarchy). Take a nurse for example, they might not like to move up the management chain because they like looking after people, not pushing paper.

Choosing a lower paid role doesn't mean you are less intelligent. It means it suits your life. In my early 30s I was interviewing for directorships, with a young child now I wouldn't take one - in my 30's that was about status. Now I try to balance work/life/children.

In my case as an unmarried mother, whose partner had multiple affairs, I chose work as I felt it gave me and DD the best opportunity. That's my circumstance. Other people in my NCT group who didn't know the big picture may have judged me for this, but they didn't know what was going on.

zippi, that's fine

anna, I would tend to agree about high paying professional jobs being of being all-consuming. My take is that if one is good at their job, an organisation will be able to find a niche for you which will allow you to leverage your skills but allowing flexible working arrangements subject to a sometimes significant pay discount.

But because you were earning so much pre-discount, the final pay, after discount and pro-ration for reduced hours, is still very rewarding.

All or nothing professional roles tend to be client-facing, front-office, profit-centred roles, hence the difficulty with allowing flexible arrangements. But if you move into a different role within the same organisation, usually middle office or support, you find these flexible roles.

For example, in my legal field, there are scores of flexible roles within my law firm for ex-fee-earners, ranging from knowledge support, IT analysis, compliance. Some even go into marketing, HR.

So I would not necessarily be advising my dd to go for a lower paying flexible job, but to aim as high as she wants but be good at it and love what she does.

The zippib example is an interesting one. My oldest daughter is the same age and she got to a point she reached (which is different from z's daughter) for various reasons too. I suppose my other point is if we as women work in well paid careers then our children tend to have the comfort of that too. Of course a lot of women don't have the get up and go or the brains or even the luck to do well but if you have a choice then surely pick better paid work you love rather than low paid work you love given how important in this kind of life we lead money is - as I say look at all the other MN threads which often come down to problems over lack of money.

I never have started a thread about me. If people want to email on to 21 pages that's fine but I don't court it. I'm not particularly interesting.

As mothers we have huge influence over our children and perhaps most of all we want to ensure they have sufficient choices whilst also having the emotional intelligence to handle choice (not everyone actually finds choice helpful) that they leave fulfilling lives.

I think the intelligent people are the ones who realise that there is more to life than just work and earning a high salary.

I use to be work fiend, earned high salary, all consumed by my ever so important career. Jetted off here and there, travelled business class to the USA etc. I always thought that I would work full time once I had children because they were going to fit around me. DH thought the same.

Then discovered I was pregnant with DTS and before they were born, I told my boss that I was going to take 7 months maternity leave, work part-time 3 days a week on my return and move away from management into a technical role. I have never regretted that decision because once I was pregnant, I knew my life would change for the better.

DH and I always laugh now at how self-important we were to think that our DTS would fit around us. That has never been the case and we would not change it for the world.

Absolutely spokette.

Actually, my experience has been that the more educated women are the more choices they have, and often that choice can include staying at home or taking a lower-paid or lower-status job.

I'm still in touch with a couple of dozen female university friends. All but one now have children. All of us went on to have what you would call 'graduate jobs', some more ordinary than others, some really quite high-flying.

Out of all of us, only two went back to work during or straight after their maternity leave. One of those two then gave up work completely after her second child was born, and was much happier and relaxed because of that.

The rest of us all CHOSE to stay at home while our children were young. The fact we have had this choice is partly due to the fact that we are all educated, had good jobs and managed to get onto a decent financial footing before having children. In addition, we have all married men with a similar education and who have good jobs, thus making the financial aspects of losing one salary easier.

Virtually all of us have since gone back to work at some stage and in some way - some when their youngest child went to school, some when their youngest child started secondary school and the rest at various points in between. Some have returned to their original careers, although generally part-time (their choice), some have moved onto other jobs - yes, some of these jobs have been much worse-paid or lower-status than they previously had, but it has allowed them a much more relaxed life and better balance of work and home life.

So where is this artificial divide of 'women who work' and 'women who stay at home' that Xenia seems to see everywhere? Virtually all women I know do work or have worked and will probably work again at some stage. It's all about the many different stages of our lives and the choices we make to suit those stages. What works for one family at one particular stage will not necessarily work for them at another stage, so it's quite possible for a woman to work, not work, and then work again, and for that to be the right decision each time for her and her family.

hear hear ecoworrior

Referring back to spokette's point at 9.05, do you not value the people who provide an important input to the lives of you and your children - nurses, midwifes, teachers. Do you really think these people are less intelligent than you because they earn less money? What would our world be like if everyone simply chased after a large pay packet?

Its a genuine question.

Xenia, I for one would appreciate an acknowledgement from you that although you may not understand their choices, women can be trusted to know their own minds.

You, like me, seem to view women as wonderfully gifted and intelligent creatures with the ability to avhieve great things in life. Yet, as soon as a woman, no matter how successful or long her previous career has been, decides to stay at home with her kids for a bit, you assert that while she may think she's happy, she doesn't know her own mind and in fact, you know better. (Remember the "deep inside she wishes she had an interesting job" comment?.)

I find this "poor little dears" attitude incredibly patronising and paternalistic and of course, it is exactly the way men have been treating women for 100's of years. Coming from a woman, I find it a really sad betrayal of feminism.

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"In France where childcare is much more affordable" - I agree, Pitchounette. But unfortunately the quality is also, often, abysmal .

Chocolatedot, your last post is as if you have read my mind

I agree with you Pitchounette- in France, childcare is seen a whole country issue and thus centrally subsidised. In the Uk, children are generally seen as the "burden" of the person who gave birth to them. Even though the high dependency stage is not very long across an entire career and the value of retaining highly and expensively trained people, industry seems perfectly happy to throw out the proverbial bathwater for ever. This is essentially what happens if childcare solutions are made unaffordable to the vast majority of families.

And it actually makes economic sense, if you work in an environment where you are likely to be booted out of your job or sidelined professionally if you take two days out to nurse your kid through chicken pox, for one parent, usually the one with the highest income or most stable employment, to keep working while the other takes more of a back seat career-wise.

Some people have the backup of a close and loving extended family member to be the second carer to their child, including during sickness, but most people do not. And while it seen as a retrograde step professionally to have children, and childcare is seen as the problem of the individual person rather an issue that a whole nation needs to tackle, women (in the main it is the mothers) will never have equal status in the workplace.

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I am actually to think that anyone could question the intelligence of SAHMs when the ones on this thread have pretty much shown themselves to be reasonable, logical and very intelligent people.

I think that argument, ridiculous as it was has been shot down in flames.

Pitchounette - actually the crèches are less worrying a form of childcare than the nounous - every day I witness conversations between the nounous waiting at the school gate, and shudder at their comparisons of their childcare techniques

ecoworrier, i have been drafting and re-drafting a comment, and have deleted it as you have said it all! (and far more eloquently than i).

thank you!

Pitchounette "In France where childcare is much more affordable, about 80% of women are working, most of them full time. For that reason, very few women ask themselves whether they will be SAHM or going to work."

What about the women providing the childcare though? Is it affordable in France because they receive much lower pay than in the UK? If they are receiving lower pay, what happens to them once they decide to have children?

This is the conundrum with affordable childcare. We all want it but it means that somebody will be earning a low wage and then be berated as less intelligent by those who claim to know better (not you Pitchounette).

That is why I chose a nursery for my DTS that paid above average wages. The staff are loyal, it has a low staff turnover rate and DH and I just spend less on other things.

Many low paid jobs allow many of us to have the lifestyle that we want and for that reason, we should never look down on them or the people doing them and should certainly never regard them as less intelligent. Only a fool would do that.

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Pitchounette I had not realised that childcare in France was centrally subsidised so my second paragraph is probably irrelevant

spokette - the women providing the childcare are badly paid. Many of the nounous are foreigners living in France without their families - they tend to live in very small rooms with a shower in a cupboard and no kitchen.

And of course they often have no education to speak of (they often share no language fluently with the children they care for) and no specific childcare training. This is why they do not know not to hit the children or not to punish them when they are not misbehaving, just learning.

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and Duchesse, totally agree with you too. I have 2 DDs in nursery, 1 full day and 2 half days per week. This costs over £900 a month. To work 4 days/week (as i was doing before i left my old job) costs over £2000. My job also demanded some travelling / evenings too - which had an additional childcare cost/arrangement. It became impossible with dh's demanding career too and his frequent long distance travelling.

Some, but not all (by far), French crèches are run by the state. All are subsidised. At crèche you pay fees on a sliding scale depending on family income.

Anna- it's probably bad in Paris, but I think from what my sister says that it is rather better out in the provinces. Wages are low enough out in Basse-Normandie where my sister lives that people see childcare as a viable job choice (I hesitate to say career).