Why do so many posters hate mothers/children

[Sundayschool]

Inspired a bit by the current thread on SMP!

Why does Mumsnet, predominately/historically a forum for parents, attract so many posters who seem to hate children and mothers? It surprises me how fast posters are to tear down any women who want better conditions for themselves or their children or indeed anything to make life a bit easier (parent/child spaces, better SMP).

Why do such people choose to post on this site in particular? Surely if you really feel so strongly this is the last place you would think to come and post?

No, I think we're talking about different threads.

The content (not even vibe, just stated content from the OP on) was that women who aren't mothers should be allowed have sabbaticals but not mothers because maternity leave. I argued that sabbaticals should be available, but to everyone and nothing to do to mat leave, but no that wasn't enough. It was just an intention to punish women for taking maternity leave. I was honestly very surprised by some of the posts.

Can you link? I saw the one @musixa referenced but not this one.

Governments all around the world are paying women to have children. (Have a look at what's happening in South Korea).

Why? Because children are a NECESSITY.

I agree OP. Those threads annoy me.

Question: Things could be better... Discuss...;
Answers:
"Why?!"
"Things weren't better for me, why should they be for you"
"Things used to be worse, be more grateful"
"You want these things better, well what about this thing and that thing?!"
Blah, blah, bloody blah.....

I’ve been on MN since the 00s and no it has always been political but I don’t recall lots of debates about entitled Mothers and calls for maternity leave to be slashed!

Sorry, I'm not going to link the thread as I was under a different username.

No, the UK is definitely not Denmark, I have family in Scandinavia but I am British and I think of the differences in my experience of having children, particularly when my second was born under a Tory government, would have been vastly different if my Great Grandparent hadn’t decided to move here!

But I digress, I am trying to follow your logic so the declining birth rate in the UK, highest in the G7, is ‘irrelevant’ so by that logic the replacement rate is ‘irrelevant’ then? But not having enough children creates problems for public finances and the Labour market. As you point out there are waiting lists on the NHS, a majority of which are as a result of providing health care for an ageing demographic. If we don’t have young people how are we going to pay for this healthcare and the corresponding pensions? So we have a housing shortage, how do you suggest we build houses with an ageing population where are the workforce coming from. Don’t say AI as building houses (DH is an Architect and knows the challenges of the Labour shortages in this area and the delays it puts on projects) is not going to be done by robots anytime soon!

Why would you advocate for limiting maternity rights and in turn advocate for a hostile economy to young families the puts talented, skilled workers out of the workforce when we need that talent to grow the economy- this is inherently regressive and counterintuitive! Woman taking one maternity leave after another looks like a practical approach to a hostile economy to young families as childcare costs are simply unaffordable. I didn’t have to do this when I had my DC in 2007 and 12 and I knew plenty that had a break in between especially around the mid 00s!

@Goldenbear we can't keep having kids because we have an aging population. Eventually those kids will get old and we'll need more kids to support them. People should (and do) have the number of kids they want and can support. We address our societal problems by training people who are of working age, targeted immigration, incentivising people to return to work, not wasting excessive money on government vanity projects and people's freely made life choices.

Personally I don't think having 6 months of paid leave would be that hard going or unreasonable to expect a return to work after that point

Six months doesn't work well because babies don't wean until six months, so if they don't take a bottle (thanks DD ) they can't really be left.

Are you sure it wasn't an AIBU thread? I can't find anything on the Childfree board suggesting mothers shouldn't be able to have sabbaticals. There is another thread about sabbaticals but that one simply proposes that everyone should be able to have a 52 week sabbatical during the course of their working life.

I've googled and there are several possible candidates for your thread in AIBU which I can't be bothered to trawl through.

The reason I'm querying is that I really don't think the Childfree board is a nest of mother-haters or child-haters. It's actually the 'Mnetters without Children' board and there are posters there who would have chosen to have children had it been an option for them.

Generally, I see far more dislike of other people's children across the whole of MN; post about, say, children in restaurants and you'll get tons of responses from parents who claim they only really like their own children and have no time for any others, and don't want children in restaurants because they go to restaurants to get away from children for an evening. (For the record, I have absolutely no problem with children in restaurants).

Feck it, it was this one. @fitzwilliamdarcy had linked it above but I think she withdrew the post when I said I didn't want to link them. www.mumsnet.com/talk/childfree-mumsnetters/4947526-maternity-leave-equivalent-wild-speculation?page=1

@ObelixtheGaul

well said!! 👏🏻

But many of those comments were posted by parents. One Mum actually was accused of lying when she said she had two young children simply because she disagreed with the poster.
A small number of posts came from people who were not parents and would not ever be parents.
What irks me is that whilst so many agreed on the necessity of children (and I don't disagree with that myself), it would be a different story if it was a Mum living on a council estate with 5 children desperate to be moved into bigger housing. Then we would see all the, 'shouldn't have had all the kids, then' posts, and nobody would mention the declining birthrate, the need for children, etc.

MN as a whole is not supportive of benefits. SMP (which I fully support, think should be more and longer) is, actually, a benefit. When some talk about it in the same way others talk about the 'welfare state', parents and non-parents included, there's uproar about 'not supporting women'. It's funny how support for women seems to be limited to those in professional occupations, whilst women in low paid jobs struggling with finance get told they should have tried harder at school, or asked why they had yet another child.

SAHMs come in for stick from working mothers and vice-versa. Parents sending their kids to private school get stuck from parents who don't/can't. And don't even get me started on the endless child behaviour threads where all the perfect parents come out to talk about how their children has been sitting perfectly in restaurants since the age of three.
But one or two child free people comment on a thread which as taxpayers they have every right to have an opinion about, and suddenly it's 'what's with all the child haters?'

Eh? So you think address the problem of an ageing population with no worries about having any young people around and no taxpayers to fund the huge social care bill. Also, why would you incentivise people with all other options but not people with young families whose much needed skill set and taxes are absent from the workforce due to inadequate maternity and childcare provisions.

Babies are not robots that can align themselves with the capitalist economy they inhabit as said above unfortunately their needs cannot always be neatly wrapped up in six months! Not accommodating that just pushes mostly women out of the workforce longer than is necessary which makes zero economic sense.

People aren't going to stop having babies because we have them for ourselves, not societal benefit. I'm massively in favour of good childcare provision etc. I'm just not in favour of paying women their salaries to sah for a year at a time, while the employer pays the bill. All that will happen is that employers will be reluctant to hire women where there's a male option. Unless you make men share leave after the first 6 months, so no tiny baby is in childcare. Which again I'd be supportive of, since mothers are disadvantaged by being the default parent at every stage.

If a person wants to be a sahp they can. What they can't do is be a sahp and bill the state or employer for it.

Increasingly, employers are offering significant paternity leave - some are offering six months at full pay. Perhaps the answer is to offer generous packages to men and women. Reduces the impact on careers, and if men were engaged in the day-to-day care of their DC from the off that would do more for women than just about anything.

Your summary wasn't very accurate was it?

Why, how does an Employer’s package of paternity leave impact you detrimentally? Employers who offer lucrative ones obviously realise the advantages for the company in doing this so why does it bother you?

Care to expand?

I read through it earlier and I think my description was pretty accurate.

To be fair, I read some of my comments on the thread and I was a bit embarrassed - I was having a horrible time at work as someone had reported me to HR for refusing to work Christmas again and "discriminating" against working mothers, so I think I took that out on posters. I'd hope to be a bit less angry and more balanced these days.

That's very decent of you.

FWIW I don't think anyone should get out of working Christmas just because they have DC. If anything, I would have suffered more from working Christmas pre DC as Christmas happened 2.5 hours away at my parents so I would have been fully alone. Now, Christmas happens in my house, commutable to work. I'd just miss a few hours, but you can work around that - we always did the years my dad worked.

Why will Employer's default to employing men, does the Equality Act no longer apply to women as that very much feels like what you are advocating? Yes, if we want to regress as a society with women’s rights, not acknowledge the contribution they make to the economy when some of these selfish women ‘opt’ to give birth, lets just chip away at maternity rights, whilst all the while suggesting we are doing it for women’s benefit by preventing men from taking their jobs- are you a man by any chance?

There does seem to be a lot of disdain and condemnation of mother’s and children on here compared to a few years ago. Cries of “it’s just disagreement” are so disingenuous. The difference is quite noticeable to those who have been on the site a while.

I do think intolerance of just about every type has increased, but it is strange that mothers can get a tough time, isn't it?!

Having children is a societal and economic necessity and the government should be paying parents to be responsible parents and have children.

Raising a lot of children that will not contribute of course does not help the economy all that much.