To feel sad some women are forced to go back to work

[JTT95]

I think it is messed up that these days a lot of women have to go back to work after maternity leave whether they like it or not. It seems like everyone is sending their babies to nursery at 1 or even earlier. I know that some women want to and are happy to go back but there are many women who are heartbroken to leave their babies so young. I wish it was like the olden days where a man’s wage was enough to suport the whole family.

I feel the same way. I had a good education, went to a good uni and can fall back on that if I need to. But being at home with my children is so much better than any career.

The problem is fundamental - too many of us have no choice as to whether to go back to work or not, because delivering care is not sufficiently valued by society.

A more family centric society would include properly affordable childcare options and or tax breaks for child raising.

I said „in my experience” , i.e. from what I’ve seen. There may well be families out there where the men would be more fulfilled being a SAHP. For me it was also practical things like breastfeeding that meant it made more sense for me to stay at home.

Women should be able to stay at home if they would like to without it harming their future pay prospects and careers.

How though?

Employers want people with up to date experience. If someone takes 5 or 7 years out of the workforce to raise a family then obviously they won't be as valuable to an employer as their peers who kept working during that time. So of course the choice to absent yourself from the workforce for a period is going to impact on your "future pay prospects and career". It's not up to an employer to subsidise someone's lifestyle choices.

If you marry someone who makes decent money then you can be a sahm

You can, but you risk making yourself and potentially your children completely financially dependent.

What if your husband runs off with another woman?
What if he loses his job?
What if he becomes ill and can no longer work?

None of these things are terribly unlikely. Giving up any semblance of financial independence is a serious risk.

My dad is 85 his mum always worked, he went to nursery, child minder, then boarding school. My mum’s mum met her husband at work and was devastated to have to leave when she married. She went back when he died prematurely in his ‘50’s.

I have always worked and I’m about to be made redundant. I don’t think I will be able to get another job that fits around my caring for disabled child and my chronic illness, so our family will be worse off.

I don’t have to work but I enjoy it and also like having my own pension in case of emergency. My DH earns a good 6 figure salary but I still enjoy having my own money. I will be a reluctant SAHM.

I breastfed my children past a year for each and for that I needed maternity leave. By the time I went back to work, they didn't need daytime feeds anymore. There isn't a biological imperative for women to stay at home forever.

I am all in support of more and better choices for everyone. But women's rights and the progress we've made are fragile and they're under attack right now. I want to live in a world where parents can make the choice to SAH or to work, but not one where women are made financially dependent and disenfranchised. I want my daughters to have the option to pursue careers they love as much as I love mine, and to always have their freedom.

But what if you don’t want someone based solely on their capacity to support you to stay at home?

Some of us don’t want to stay at home
Some of us don’t want to select someone purely on the basis of their ability to “provide” and want a broader range of more interesting criteria in a partner
Some of us want more equitable relationships
Some of us are frightened of the prospect of being wholly dependent on one other person for all if our financial needs
Oh, and some of us are led to believe that we have met someone who will support us to remain at home only to find that they renege on that…

And who is going to fill the gap in the workforce? Are child free people supposed to endlessly work with no breaks?

Are they under attack though? There is more funded childcare than ever before and from a very young age too so the majority of women can go back to work if they so wish.

I was brought up to always earn my own money and never rely on a man. I am passing that down to DD because it means you don't have to settle and you have freedom to leave.

Agree. I have passed this on to both my young adult son and daughter. Thankfully they agree completely.

It is affordable to live off one wage still. I have four DC and DH earns 28k roughly. We manage fine. We chose a cheaper part of the UK to live which means I have been a SAHM for 17 years now. It can be done🤷‍♀️

How is it different if we both work 50% of the time to one of us working 100% and the other not at all? Childfree people are also free to request part time hours regardless. Are you against flexible working in general?

In an ideal world (workforce wise), both would work full time so you’d have 200% of the workload being completed and not 2 x 50%.

But then I guess it frees up that childcare worked that would be looking after my kids to fill the gap?

I love those olden days. My grandmother had 14 children, constantly pregnant, and worked to the bone - but at least she was at home I guess….

Again, if we’re just talking outside of the home productivity, two people working full time are likely to use more childcare than anyone with a part time job involved in their set up.

Which then puts more into someone else’s work, adds more into the economy, etc etc.

If you want to have women hospital consultants, judges, senior police officers, ceos etc, you have to accept that they will need to spend some of their childbearing years building up their careers. I quite like have women in positions of responsibility, making decisions that affect women. And that’s just one of the reasons why I support women working even when they have kids.

I guess if that’s not your thing and you enjoy the big decisions being made just by Men in their Very Important Jobs, carry on being heartbroken for working mums I guess and stay home.

So why don't they stay at home if that's what they want, if the only reason they're working is to pay for childcare?

@JTT95 If your husband left you tomorrow , could you afford to get a mortgage on your own as a SAP? Could you pay your gas and electric and buy food ?

The reason many women were stay at home parents in the ‘olden’ days was that in many professions and even regular jobs, there was a marriage bar, so married women were expected to leave the workplace. Even my own mother could not open a bank account without my dad co-signing it. It is only relatively recently in historical terms that women have been able to be educated to the same extent as men. Etc.

I started writing this, and then I wondered what you feeling ‘sad’ for women who are not able to stay at home achieves? How does this help anyone? What do you think the solutions are?
I mean, I have worked since my DD was four months old and she is now 22. I spent most of that time as a single, working parent as her dad met someone else when she was a baby. Please don’t feel ‘sad’ for me. I don’t need it.

Unpaid domestic work and childcare should absolutely 100% be valued more than it is. But most people just get on with their lives and do what they have to do. I didn’t feel heartbroken that I was leaving DD in nursery, I felt glad that I was able to keep a roof over our heads, that I worked at a point in time where women could have professional careers and that I was leaving DD with a woman who had looked after many small babies and was both loving and competent. And I am glad that, all these years later, I have paid her university costs and everything else and will support her postgraduate as she needs it. Go me. Go her.

The olden days?

In the olden days kids and women worked, including in jobs down the pits etc.

If you believe that throughout history a man's wage has covered a household's needs, you are very much mistaken.

This x100. There’s no such thing as genders being wired a certain way in my opinion. My DH would make a far better SAHP than I would! He works to pay for things and while he enjoys elements of his work he doesn’t feel it’s a vocation the way I feel about my profession. He also enjoyed the baby/toddler years more than me and is better at domestic chores. I need the break in the day to talk to other adults, genuinely love my work and I am better at building things and DIY. Interestingly, my Mum was similar but in the 90s my Dad was the higher earner so her going part time made more sense. Thirty years later, I’m the higher earner and so had more choices.

There's a big push from the right at the moment to urge women back into 'traditional' roles. It's all over social media, it's in all the US Republican messaging and while I would love to say that's America and we are different - there is always a creep. We're seeing here a rise in anti-abortion rhetoric as misogynists are emboldened across the board. Women's rights are under huge attack. The current popularity of Reform and of far-right groups more generally, as evidenced by this weekend, is a threat to women's rights - have a look at what Farage and his supporters think about maternity leave and abortion. The Overton window hasn't been opened quite so far here yet, but it's being pushed and pushed. And here on Mumsnet there is a creeping rise in posts lamenting this long-lost past we never actually had. It's important we push back against it. Progress can be so swiftly undone.