mothers with young children are the most discriminated against at work

[paddingtonbear1]

I haven't actually found this in my company, and it's very small - only 18 employees. But I can imagine if I looked for another job, I might find it hard to get one, being a mother still under 40. I couldn't believe some of the comments in the 'have your say' on the bbc website though - most people seem to think that women who can't afford to stay at home shouldn't have kids at all! That would be me then! I don't think in this day and age, with mortgages and other rising costs, that's practical. I don't take advantage though, fortunately dd isn't sick very often, and dh does his share.
I think most of the people making the comments were men, or people with no kids...

i knew soeone who had a kid and the dad was italian and the mum french.

the kid thought all men were italian and all women french.

the kid ended up very fucked up and murdered people over 86 years old with red hair and real teeth in their head.

ok i lied about the last bit

It goes in waves of fashion on biligualism, whether it damages or helps children. I thought in general language was a bit held up if they were learning two languages but overall probably does them good long term but you need the foreign parent always only to speak their language and the school the local language or whatever.

I think all boys schools are great by the way for helping boys. All my sons went to them. My 8 year old twins are taught only with boys, no girls to compare with, no thinking everyone at primary school should sit still, boys books used in class, lots of rugby and the boy as normal, boy level of attainment etc etc. Perhaps the best thing you can do with little boys is keep them away in school from girls. Even at GCSE girls and boys taught in separate classes do better.

Even so boys are find it hard to keep up at university and in work, which is inevitable given the overall superiority of women anyway. Perhaps it's as well we have extra domestic burdens on women as a kind of ball and chain so men get to try to level out the playing field a bit??

On recruitment most employers have 2 - 5 staff in the UK, I think and for them flexible working rarely works very well. The law is fine - there is no right to flexible working if the job won't take that as many jobs won't. If you need to do 12 hour negotiation meetings you can't work flexibly although clearly some jobs are not in that category.

Just for a moment there Custardo, I thought MIL was a gonner as she has reddish hair, her own teeth, and turned 87 in January!

Re co-education, my understanding has been that boys generally do better in mixed schools while girls do better in single sex ones.

It's nice to know boys don't keep up at university. I guess that's why my two have only got to PhD level so far.

I went to a school and lived in a country when I was a teenager where everyone was bilingual (and learnt at least one, and sometimes two or three other languages), in my extended family there are lots of bilingual people in my generation and plenty of children growing up bilingual in English and French and of course we all have lots of friends in the same boat and it really is a huge advantage providing a child is normally bright - it improves a person's general cognitive/analytical skills. But it's quite a lot of extra work for parents and you do ideally need to be supported by the school in your endeavours, or it will be a very hard slog at home. My daughter will be starting school (not nursery) in September (aged 2.10... they bundle them off early here) at a bilingual school where she will learn to read and write in both languages. And she's pretty good at both languages already - she reads little picture books to herself in her bedroom in English and then repeats them in French and we spy on her very fondly... (sorry for being mushy about my child).

There's plenty of scientific evidence these days that bilingualism is an advantage. They even know where in the brain the mother-tongue(s) lodge and the other languages lodge.

Xenia - on the boys doing better at boys school business, girls at girls, I'm sure you're right, all the evidence shows that to be true. But I have serious misgivings about single sex education. I went to all girls' school until I was 12, then to an equally mixed school, then to University where there were a lot of girls around, then somewhat later to a higher degree where girls were definitely very much in the minority and then I worked in a deeply male environment for quite a few years. The environments I enjoyed the most and found easiest to succeed in were the ones where females were in the majority (not the all female ones) and the ones I found the greatest challenge were the deeply male ones - and that is the nature of the workplace. I found that my female colleagues who had spent more years in a mixed educational environment were better equipped to deal with a male-biased workplace. I have no brothers and my mother had no brothers, so my home environment was pretty female too.

I have no choice of school for my daughter since all schools here except deeply religious ones (which I would never contemplate) are mixed, and she has two older brothers, which I'm glad about. But if I did have to choose, I would want to equip her fully for a male-dominated workplace.

My girls of 22 and 20 have had no problems with men at all despite single sex schooling. They don't have to flirt or dress up at school and girls do lots of science in the schools they went to which are Haberdasher's and North London Collegiate, which are selective independent girls day schools. They do have brothers and they're both very sociable.

In the UK it's more a question of which school gets better grades and that's the girls (and boys) single sex schools virtually all the way. Usualyl private schools go mixed sex when they can't get enough pupils so it's a good indicator of the school's performance. Even Westminster helped its A level grades by letting girls into the sixth form. Eton has resisted.

Bilingual children do fine and it's the easiest age to learn a language.

Hmm, I never had "problems with men", especially at that age (...), it was more when the workplace got very competitive when I was around 30 that I thought that other women were better equipped for the (brutish) fight.

Single sex education can make girls confident of their abilities but like the stay at home parent/childcare issue I don't think it's hugely material to outcomes for children which is a huge mixture of factors probably 50% of which is your genes anyway.

Parents need most to be laid back, relaxed, stop worrying and just enjoy their children, life and work. That's probably the best thing they can do for the children, remove the angst and don't treat bringing up the children like some sort of extend PhD thesis exercise and don't feel always to blame for what children do or turn out either or make them you be all / end all or life's work because therein lies the path to martyrdom and unhappiness.

Hmm, I think choice of school is pretty important to child outcomes and there are masses of factors involved. And in particular I think that school has a huge influence on whether children grow up to be autonomous individuals with their own minds able to adapt to multiple environments or whether they need to remain within a known structure in order to function. And I think that one of the greatest barriers to male-female equality is the lack of general ability to see and appreciate individual men and women for who they are, as opposed to what we might wish them to be.

We certainly put a lot of effort into choosing the right schools for them and I think the things they seem to be doing at university/jobs etc is in part because of the schools chosen (7% of UK children at fee paying schools and 50% of university entrants etc etc) but having been a parent for 22 years I get more and more relaxed about it and see them changing and developing and being as how they were born, as much as what was done to them and even things like were they the first born may have more an impact on what they're doing at age 40 than that they went to XYZ school. You just have to compare some families with adopted and natural children to see some wide differences which I also see every day with my non identical twins who are not treated very differently but are very different.

Xenia, I've skimmed over this thread (being a SAHM I can't deal with too much serious debate; 5 minutes of adult conversation and I'm desparate to get back to discussing re-usable nappies, or my dd's toilet habits) but there's something I have been wondering for a while - what sort of hours do you work to allow you to post so often, and so lengthily on MN? If you do a FT job outside the home, it sure seems to be flexible!