Girls still seen as homemakers

[StealthPolarBear]

Girls are still being brought up to believe that raising children is more important than their own ambitions, the president of the Girls' Schools Association has said.
-from the BBC, here

I've read a few of the comments and am pretty saddened. Lots of "raising children is so rewarding...the wife is the heart and soul of the family"
from men. If it's so rewarding, why is it still the case that they only seem to discuss it in the context of women doing it and being rewarded by it?

bump this, and must NC back :o

Bump, knew I should have put this in chat

Bedtime bump

Just seen this.

Haven't read the comments, it just feels like a bit of an old discussion.

iyswim.

Don't get me wrong, I couldn't agree more, re the notion that only women can raise children. But I'm not sure why this particular news item is news.

Report this and move it to feminism

A bump from me.

Good point Mary. Inthought the reactions from the girls themselves were sad tho.
I don't want this in feminism particularly. It's an education or teen pregnancy issue imo

In a different age "having a family" would be seen as an AMBITION. The goalposts have been moved.

Women will always have the babies. So to have a career with young children will always see many women doing more of the work.

We need a compromise. How about the dad or mum looking after the child for first 4 years. A business woman the other day said my kids dont see me for 5 days of the week.

From what I've seen, the pressure is certainly on young, highly educated women especially to feel they are doing their kids a major disservice if they don't sit home doing crafts and baking cupcakes with them ad nauseam - never mind the thousands spent getting degrees or whatever. When I read complaints that government policies are 'forcing women back into the workplace' I'm slightly appalled. 20, 30, 40+ years ago that was what we all desperately wanted to do but were being held back by tradition, regulations or bullying men from achieving. Bizarre, I call it

Bit of a non-article, as far as i can see.
In it she says that girls should have the right to make decisions and choices, which i agree with and then says that no decision is wrong, which I also agree with.
But this -think that the whole idea of looking after children is really the most important thing, once you have a child. is sad.
What's wrong with putting your children first?

not really surprising judging from the many food and cake obsessed threads there are on here

"What's wrong with putting your children first?"

Nothing at all. But there is definitely a fashionable way of thinking at the moment that means 'putting your children first' means 'manacling yourself to the house or risk doing them irreparable damage'. Women leaving children in the care of others, working for a living and earning the money to give their kids a good start in life has, once again, slipped down the rankings and is ever-so-mildly despised as an admission that the woman in question didn't marry well enough to be able to afford to stay home. The last sixty years might have never happened.

It is a feminist issue...

Cog - women are being forced into the work place and some are also being forced out of it by government policy and social attitudes to child rearing/paid employment. I don't think the issue is any of the opinions or views about what women should do are what the problem is, it is that people still feel entitled to tell women what they should/shouldn't be doing I.e. with this govt mothers should be married, low class ones should work, middle class ones should be SAHMs.

Beyond the new rule that unemployed lone parents (gender immaterial) should seek work once a child hits school age I don't see anyone in government officially 'telling' women what they should be doing one way or another. What I do see, however, are acres of magazine and newspaper articles, hours of cheesy baking and homemaking shows on TV, and an obsession with vacuuous female celebs that are only famous for having a wealthy boyfriend/husband and zero body-fat rather than any individual achievement. Not malicious policy handed down from central government, just fashion.

Tax breaks for married couples, reductions in working tax credits/childcare payments, individual based taxation and household welfare entitlement, threshold for entitlement to help with childcare, the childcare system which gives parents credits to choose between private providers rather than provides places in high quality state run facilities as it used to, the changes to csa and the blaming of women for men who wont pay, free nursery places for "disadvantaged" 2 year olds, all those things and the reduction in welfare for lone parents (who are overwhelmingly women) and absence of concern over the welfare entitlement of absent parents (who are overwhelmingly men) are all ideologically driven social engineering policies (not just dreams up by this govt) which seek to control women's choices. Obviously they arent going to come out and say this because it would be unconstitutional to make policy based on that kind of ideology.

Very few women get to make a real choice about their work-life balance whether they have been forced into dependency on a higher earning partner they have children with or forced into jobs/work because of the economic system whereas the govt or socialised to keep the home because that is "what women do" (whether they work or not). So much evidence shows this stuff to be true.

The govt considers unmarried childless women as equal to men only in policy, there is still a gender pay gap which is unexplained which they conveniently ignore.

And what is this costly child benefit cut if not designed to deliberately disempower "middle class" mothers and increase their dependency on their partners?

I'd like to see better opportunities at work and for family for women. So far it's dire. My grand kids might be lucky but I don't think dds will be.

Children should come first, for both parents.

It can be a balancing act as sometimes DCs have to play second fiddle to parents keeping their jobs and money coming in.

But I can't conceive of having DCs and both parents working long hours and putting a baby in 8-6 nursery 5 days a week or having a full time nanny.

Why have children?

I kind of think things could be much more balanced and respectful of parenting commitments in the workplace and also in the welfare state/taxation. I don't get how they can get away with individual taxation, a lack of entitlement to money your partner earns but loss of entitlement to benefits based on a partners income, wrong and costly to administrate.

That's funny startail, I don't remember you, or anyone else, offering to pay my mortgage for me when ds was a baby. I had to go to work to keep a roof over his head and food in his tummy. So he went to nursery.

'Why have children' indeed. Perhaps in the hopes that I can bring ds up to be less judgmental and ask fewer stupid questions than some adults I can mention...

As women, we need to make it clear to our partners BEFORE we TTC, that childcare will be shared 50%.

dH is a hospital consultant. When the DSs get sick ( thankfully not often), we take days off equally. Oh, sure, he spits the dummy about it, but he can't argue with the logic. I don't care about his theatre lists etc, when it's his turn, it's HIS TURN.

My biggest mistake was not forcing him to go p/t. I wanted to terminate with DC1 as I had a horrible feeling that I would be dumped with all the childcare. He promised me he would do his share, which of course didn't materialise. Boy, is he paying for his lack of commitment now