to honestley wonder, why have children if you WANT to work fulltime and are not prepared to make ANY sacrifices?

[milkgoddessmakesthefinestmilk]

i don't mean parents that HAVE to work to provide.

i mean the ones that choose to for no other reason, other than they enjoy their job so much.
if you enjoy your job so much, thats great.
but what i really do not understand is why have children?
no one makes any of these parents have children, you can go though life without having children.

this is 100% genuine question, i just do not get it.

Posie, the JRF report - one thing published by Francesconi - was published in 2001 I think. But his method was to look at social change over time using population surveys. So he looked a cohort of kids born in 1970 and then looked how they did 20 years later.

I was tryiong to illustrate that the reason working mothers feel the need to defend their position is that some use words like neglect, whereas people would be more open to reconsider if studies were merely informative and not emotive.
I guess it's as useful as reciting the situation of one family as some sort of model for success.

I can't think of a single mother or father who would want their 6 week old in nursery for that time. I imagine a very few people feel they have no choice, if they want to keep their job.

And I imagine they are heartbroken about it everyday. But they probably have to wrangle with putting a roof over their kids head as well as all the other issues discussed on this thread.

I've got sucked in. I now know why I usually keep out of completely idiotic threads like this.

I think it stands to reason that children will have some affects of their parents not caring for them for most of their waking hours during the early years. My relationship with my partner would suffer if I only saw him an hour a day when he was tired and then at the weekend.

I can't imagine it's a career choice to put a baby into childcare at 6 weeks, probably a house or no house choice.

miklkgoddess, did you just cut-and-paste from your previous posts on this thread? I am getting a serious sense of deja vu.

Just as well it is your last post, you haven't said anything new or original. Feel a bit sorry for you that you 'don't get it'. Glad I am not you as well.

milkgoddess - you sound really um how shall i put it - well i spose put simply youre as small minded as you say that xenia is, and i agree witht he other posters that you cannot be as contented as your flouncy-matyr-mother post makes out if you feel the need to pick apart other parents parenting whilst looking for reinforcement of your own you seem bigoted AND closed minded

if you had started this thread with a real true question you would have been open mided to its response, you havent you posted this to defend and create an arguement, and gain reinforcement. get a life, one of your own.

I agree with OP.
I do not have a problem with women being SAHM, working full time or part time. Quite frankly, I couldn't care.
But I thought that OP was raising a slightly different issue. Not the thing about working becasue you want to, rather than needing the money. That is a red erring and it has clouded te discussion unfortunatley.
But I do know a lady who works almost all day. Her mum looks after baby on saturdays. And I too wonder when she is actually being a mum. Why did she bother havving children. She seems to make no adjustment/no sacrifices what-so-ever, for this change in her life. Very odd.
And others have quoted similar situations :
Nailpolish did, and Sophiebbb:"my SIL works full time (7.30am til 7.30pm) and then gives her mum the baby on a Saturday so she can go to the hairdresser/shop etc. She is on a course this week 3 hours drive away from her DS. I must admit I do sometimes wonder at that.... "
I too wonder why .

milkgoddess, when you saw mother and baby in the supermarket or wherever, did you say or do anything? if you didn't you are pretty much saying it was none of your business.

working and using childcare full time is not child abuse and i find it deeply offensive you have made such a comparison.

it is none of my business what your set up is, so i am not going to comment on it, and i object to other's commenting on mine.

it is of no concern to me what choices other parents make in terms of working and childcare or staying at home with DCs. that is their decision and they will live with the benefits, pitfalls and consequences in much the same way as i will.

morning paper makes a good point, the model of heavily supervised children at home is no more tested than that of working full time parents. my mum never played with me, she worked part time and spent the rest of her time cleaning. we didn't need to have such a clean house, really, we didn't (bank holidays were always venetian blind cleaning day) but she obviously felt happier with a spotless home. i just went out to play, unsupervised, with my friends. my son does something similar, supervised, at mursery. my mum and i had very little to do with each other even though she was at home a lot and i feel i really had a brilliant childhood and my mum was a fantastic mum.

If we expand the sample to countries that have shite maternity provision - notably the USA - you're looking at a lot of babies put in nurseries from six weeks. My BIL/SIL's two children, for starters - both in full-time daycare from six weeks old until they started school. That's not a choice I'd ever make for my children (although, to be fair, their kids are nice and normal, and not gunning down classmates as of the last Christmas round-robin).

I agree with PosieParker that you don't have to look much further than the disparity in earning power between mothers and non-mothers to find a large part of the answer to this question. I also agree with those who have fingered the government's maniacal devotion to getting parents 'back to work' (because FT parenting isn't work, hoh no), especially if they are lone parents, instead of valuing the work that SAHPs do.

However I completely agree with Casbie and RosaDLuxe that this is overwhelmingly a social/political issue, as much about men as it is about women, and that women should get off each other's backs. My MIL likes to complain to me on the sly about my US SIL 'prioritising' her career over the children; I have stopped her doing this by sweetly saying 'But BIL could have given up his job to stay at home with the children, couldn't he?'

It is funny though that Milkgoddess has been flamed on this thread yet Xenia with her ridiculous posts has had much less negativity and in fact a fair number of kiss arse posts. It is as I have always noticed when this debate comes up a case of majority rules. I always get a definite feeling that the WOHM brigade are a lot sharper and quicker to get personal than the SAHM, they seem to have a much stronger need to defend their choices.

FWIW I think it is wrong to put small babies into childcare when not totally necessary. Have your baby and stay at home with him/her for 6 months. Is it really going to make that much difference to your career and if you really cant stand to be a full time mother/father for even that long then I agree with Milkgoddess why are you having a baby at all?

why so perplexed about how other people raise their children?please dont seek to perpetrate a sahmVsWork divide. move on, make your own choices, allow other's to make theirs

Message withdrawn

Anyone for elective caesarean debate!!!

I dont seek to make a WOHM V SAHM divide. That has already been done many times before me and on this thread too. I do make my own choices and I am happy with them but then I have the likes of Xenia telling me that my choices are "disgusting" and that I am "damaging" my children. Sort of feel the need to respond to that.

I'm not actually disagreeing with lots of the (sensible) things people are saying either. The real advance would be to enable: enable parents to have the right balance. Change work so that people didn't feel they had to be there all the time. Allow career progression in professional jobs so that more senior bods could work par-time. Enable women on low incomes out of the poverty trap that keeps them out of work even when they want to be in it.

...And in the middle of all this, enable children to have the best possible care either in or out of the home by providing parents with support and by providing excellent childcare options and flexible working when they do wish to go back.

I'd be quite happy paying more tax to support a Scandinavian model where working parents can take a full year or similar of leave on full pay. I'd be equally happy to pay tax for SAHPs to have benefits that reflect the job they do that others pay for.

But I don't think this is the debate we're having here. I just think some people wish women were still barefoot and pregnant; yet this gets wrapped up in moralising ideology about the sanctity of motherhood and our poor deprived neglected children. The other debate is MUCH more interesting.

As I said Chequers Majority rules.

Absolutely agree Monkeybird.

Message withdrawn

by quizzing other mn opinions and a spontaneous poll about day care?why does it matter to you.someone else childcare has no direct impact upon you

I have yet to meet a woman who didn't have some misgivings about her choice, SAHM missing out on her career or security should dh bugger off, working mothers full or part who don't feel that they can't give enough to either and on the flip side I have never met a man who has, even for a moment, felt that he needed to justify his choice. So perhaps we should just support choice and ensure that all can be achieved and felt good about.

can give (typos galore!!)

"and if you really cant stand to be a full time mother/father for even that long then I agree with Milkgoddess why are you having a baby at all?"

So what do you do then? Give it back to the stork?

Childcare from 6 weeks isn't right IMO either but that's not what the OP was about, was it? She's just one sad person who obviously hasn't got enough inetllectual stimulation with her choices and needs WOHMs anger for some entertainment in her life.

i have no misgivings, none, nada, no siree

scottishmummy I noticed that no one had addressed the point that the OP had made about leaving a 6 week old baby in full time childcare while addressing other points made in her post so I was interested to see what the general opinion was on that.