To be confused by the two working parent set up

[Angels1111]

As I return to work from my Christmas break I return to the same conundrum I've been having since kids were born...
...that is confusion at how to handle my multiple roles in life.

I can't help but think that in my mother's generation they had to do the same stuff as us, but with no work. And, there was more of a community to fall back on too - she could get the neighbours to watch us if needed, relatives had more time to visit and play with us, etc. But she had time, to keep herself healthy and to keep us healthy.

Now it feels like a lot of us work in careers which are not conducive to taking long career breaks or going part time. Or, we can't afford to. So we end up juggling everything that comes with having a family with work. My partner does lots but it feels like two people splitting three jobs between them (work, children, house) is more of a stretch and a juggle and I wish every day that I could just focus on the house and kids.

I feel resentful that if I hire a nanny or a baby sitter or get family to help, they'd just play with the kids, feed them lunch, and maybe wash up after lunch wheeras I'd be doing all of that plus the food shop, house cleaning, admin, cooking dinner, washing, homework etc etc simultaneously, and if I wanted to hire someone to truly replace my roles it would take 2-3 people just to do the home stuff let alone work.

But this could just be how I'm handling life! I have a chronic condition so potentially have less energy than the general population, I do handle it a lot better when I'm not flaring.

With respect, how old and/or what job did your dad do so your mum didn't work?

My mum worked 3 part time jobs around us and dad worked full time.

I work part time in a professional job and DH full time. One child rather than two. We are much better off than they were.

People are living a far higher quality of life on average than 50 years ago

I say on average and that means I don’t care that you had a foreign holiday every year as a child in the 1970s

and it means that the fact that your home is damp and mouldy is also irrelevant

on average people have more house space. You have studies and guest rooms not 4 girls in one bedroom. You have Cars, holidays, central heating , greater variety of food, more money for fun rather than just surviving. you have more than one pair of shoes, a selection of coats and bags, I could go on

its crept up on people / bug until the last 10 years the average quality of life was going upward with wages growing much faster than inflation
the wheels started to come unstuck 20 years ago with the start of the housing problem but it’s taken a while for that to really filter through to living standards

there is loads of data out there if you have the patience to search for it

Yanbu

We're not having it all, we're doing it all

I am mid 50s, my Mum would have been mid 70s now. She was a SAHM to 5 children. She didn't need to work, but I recall her telling me there was a pressure to return to work once the youngest was at school. Most of the Mums worked at least part time I think.
This was a medium sized town in Norfolk.

My mum went part time at 24 and has never worked full time since. I'm childfree but have a chronic health condition, a full time job and a 'hobby' (that does make a little money and I'm trying to slowly turn into my full time) and I struggle to keep up to the housework etc, especially the deep cleaning sort of stuff-it's tidy and hygenic but skirting boards haven't been dusted for ages for example. My mum cannot understand why I don't have time...I work 37.5 hours a week, she used to work 15!

My mother's generation (born 1930s) were the first women to work in our family going back hundreds of years. My mother married well but she divorced hin quickly for violence. With her settlement she took herself to university (her father had refused to pay).
Im 60 and my mother worked nearly full time. She had a top job when i was 7 and there were four of us. My gran lived with us until i was ten and my father cooked as he could work nights. He was so good with children he later became my Manny.

Ive been very lucky as a high earner but as i got older and after the crash my contracts dried up. I also had to do unreasonable commutes to just sit in an office in London. My DC missed out.
I think wfh has allowed mothers to have a life with their families. I didn't. We live in an expensive area to access my work and I wish i had moved to the Midlands when I first married. It would have been cheaper. We had plenty of family there.
Even now that i am sick and disabled i still need to financially contribute as we have a student DC.
The only women n my niece's (35) orbit that dont work are single mothers on benefits (they have no spousal support or feckless ex partners) . Everyone else uses wrap around care.
At my school gate my mother was the only one that worked and I was one of three mums for my DC (early noughties).

Fwiw I have autoimmune disease too. Started in my late thirties.

Indeed. A disproportionate number of Mners struggle with the idea of saying hello to their neighbours or chatting to people on the school run, never answer the door, dread play dates because of ‘having to make chitchat with the parent’ and regard the idea of having people in their houses as a virtual infringement of their civil rights.

I mean, you have to be fundamentally ok with the idea of other people for ‘the village’ to be a thing.

But being a village, to me, isn't about over ruling another parent, its about backing and supporting that parent to parent- in that scenario I'd go directly to the parent and make them aware so they can sort their kid accordingly. If they opt not to then i will deal with it to protect my kid. If there was no parent present and the child had walked themselves to the park for example then I absolutely would deal with that child directly because there's no alternative. Soft play in particular isn't always fully visible to parents sitting waiting so it's not always possible for parents to see their kid is causing bother.

I also think we're also (thankfully) more aware now of SEN and trauma that requires a slightly different approach and that you won't always know by looking at a child. So attempting to remove a random kid from the toddler area (presumably physically if they aren't going willingly) would absolutely be inappropriate when you could just ask staff to locate and deal with the parent/ carer.

I don't know
my
mother and my grandmother both worked.

Yup. I'm 60. My mother is 90. She worked from school leaving until retirement age. If one of us kids was sick, we had to go to work with her and sit in the cloak room while she worked (full-time so a LONG day).

I'm a grandmother now. I've got friends who do childcare for their GC and people on here are right. The parental demands are off the scale. I'm never surprised when GP don't want to do childcare. Being treated like a servant is even less fun when you're unpaid. If parents want free childcare, they maybe need to just accept what is on offer and drop the demands.

It does get a bit easier as the kids get older as they can do more for themselves. It is still very overwhelming though! Outsource anything you can afford, we eat out quite a bit. Also let somethings go, my oven is currently disgusting but is not on my priorities right now.

I created a village when my daughter was small - I had no choice as the only family anywhere near were PIL and they were still 30 mins drive away. So while I was on mat leave I went to every local baby group I could find and made friends. Those babies then went to school with DD and became our village.

We recorded my Mum (b 1933) talking about her childhood for DD’s school project. My great great gran and great gran had a clothing business, and everyone was supposed to help out. So my Nan was a supervisor in the factory in the East End, my Great great and Great Grans ran the business side from the office in Bloomsbury. My Mum said that her entire school holidays were spent doing things like collecting cottons and buttons from suppliers and taking them, on public transport, to the factory - they were heavy, so she had a little cart to pull them in. Sometimes her elder brother would help, but he was more often at home with the younger children - he was two years older and trusted to set the fire, heat up lunch and make tea. They didn’t get evacuated during the war as they were needed to help with the business. It didn’t sound like much of a childhood for my Mum and her brother, or much of a life for my Nan.

Agree with this. We moved into our house 26 years with a mortgage based on 3x DH’s salary, payable over 25 years, as I was just starting 6 years as a SAHM. With people now able to borrow much more over a longer period it comes as no surprise that house prices have risen so much.

Friends I made amongst the neighbours were in a similar position with none of us working. Anyone moving into the street with young kids now needs two good salaries. The local toddler groups are filled with childminders looking after other people’s children and it’s a different world. The “menial” tasks traditionally falling to women of cooking, cleaning and rearing children still need to be done. Both partners can do them and it’s work that needs to be valued.

I'm glad you've recorded that, @toomuchcrapeverywhere . Not only is it interesting for your family, it's actually fascinating social history. It also shows how much work went undocumented.
So many had childhoods like this.

Not disagreeing with you at all, but I would query your description of a nanny. Of course they don't take on everything, but they can do more than you've described if you are paying for that time too (shopping, cooking, homework, cleaning and household chores related to kids). I've nannied for several families and they would ask for different things, and that was always fine as agreed from beginning. It always felt good to know I was lightening the mum's load a bit especially if I did something unasked for or random like sewing name rags into uniforms (and yes, always felt like it was the mum's load and not the dad's).

But my grandparents were quite poor and my grandma never worked. She was born in 1911. They had their own modest house. He worked in a cotton mill I think as a supervisor and had a big allotment so grew a lot of their food. They had a very simple life, no alcohol or going out, basic food but they seemed to manage very well. Of course, part of the reason it worked was because my Grandad was the kindest man you could wish to meet.

I think expectations have changed. There is an, assumption you will provide each child with their own bedroom, set of hobbies/sports, academic attention at home and/or tutoring to fill in gaps from school, supervised playdates, cultural enrichment, fun activities (theme parks, winter wonderland etc.). Plus two working parents brings further costs (more childcare, two cars, work wardrobes, cleaners, prepared food etc.). And the default of two FT working adults has pushed house prices up. We were not all all well off, but I was SAHM for 8-9 years and went back to work in a self-employed, casual basis. DH was not a big earner and had a max salary of £32 and we lived in the southeast. But we prioritised me being home which cut a lot of costs, and did shocking things like living in the cheap part of town, having no car or tv, no abroad holidays, home haircuts and limited paid-for activities for the kids. Not saying everyone can do that, but most people make choices. Be honest about your priorities.

I still can't figure out why women joining the work force and realising themselves and their ambitions has led to such a terrible situation. Surely, when women started looking for careers outside of the home, there should have been some sort of agreement made with their husbands to get involved in the home. Society worked best when one income could sustain the home and children had a parent at home. We should have forced men to stay home when we decided to go out and work.

My mum is 90 and worked. I was born in the 1960s. The majority of kids in my primary school had working mothers. There was ‘play centre’ in the holidays (bunked off because I hated it) but left to our own devices after school.

Agreed. I’m in my late 40s and my mum always worked. No grandparents to help, although I had a couple of aunts who filled that role a bit. Most of my peers at school (working class area) had mothers who worked too.

This is one of the less discussed reasons for the collapsing birth rate IMO.

Not everybody’s mother who didn’t work, had relatives anywhere near, or neighbours who’d willingly help on a regular basis. Mine certainly didn’t. Plus we had no car when I was small, no central heating until I was 14, and my Dm had no automatic washing machine until I was late teens.

So there was a lot more to do in the house - washing nappies (no disposables then) and drying them with certainly no tumble dryer, laying fires and disposing of messy ashes, not to mention no fast or convenience foods to speak of - except perhaps for baked beans.

And even for women who wanted to work, in the 50s and 60s at least, there were precious few nurseries or daycare facilities, so unless you had family or friends willing to step in, you had no choice but to be a SAHM.

My DM didn’t return to work until I was 14, and considered old enough to mind siblings 4 and 6 years younger, after school.

Agreed.

@Angels1111 I can't help but think that in my mother's generation they had to do the same stuff as us, but with no work. And, there was more of a community to fall back on too - she could get the neighbours to watch us if needed, relatives had more time to visit and play with us, etc. But she had time, to keep herself healthy and to keep us healthy.

Yes, it probably makes more sense for one parent to stay at home with the children. But this is no longer possible because of mismanagement of the economy by the wealthy.

Clowns in the car manufacturing industry decided to make expensive cars the standard. So now driving is a lot more expensive.

Clowns in government decided to reappropriate housing as an investment. So now your house is probably 5 times more expensive than what it's supposed to be. Contrary to popular belief, home owners do not benefit when the price of housing goes up; only the bankers do.

So now your car and your house is extremely expensive. Which is why everyone needs to go to work and there is no option for anyone to be a stay at home parent.

It's the sad truth.

But I doubt the village would have been taking our kids to the myriad activities they now do, all with associated uniforms and paraphernalia which need washing/sorting, or helping make models of a motte and bailey castle out of shoe boxes and loo rolls. I think the fundamental shift is how actively we all "parent" now, compared to previous generations. We are all much more involved with (and, dare I say it, controlling of) the minutiae of ours kids lives than ever before.

My parents were ace and very available to me, but there was way less expectation that they would do homework with me, arrange trips and play dates all the time (and if I did have a friend round we'd just crack on, not have activities organised), elaborate parties which parents stay for, loads of activities, themed dress up days at school etc. All of which takes huge amounts of time and emotional energy.