SAHMs...would you encourage your daughters to SAHM or WOHM ?

[mozhe]

I ask out of genuine interest....people have often said to me that I became a committed WOHM because I had such a strong model in my own mother....and I would certainly be very disappointed if one of my own daughters chose to be a SAHM.
SAHMs what do you think ? And why ?

Squirrel, I can only suggest you reread the thread for evidence of lack of awareness of the long-term consequences of being a SAHM. Some of your own posts about sick pay for example do spring to mind but there are also SAHMs who have said they didn't fully consider the impact of their decision and had they done this they may have chosen different careers which offer more flexibility for example. There are examples on this thread and otehrs but I come across many examples in real life. My own mother for example, did paid work but received bad advice (from a financial advisor) some years ago that it wasn't worth contributing to her pension since she had taken time out for children so she didn't. She now has not got an adequate pension and so is working till she is 65 to make it up partially and is scrimping and saving when she should be looking forward to a happy retirement.

'I fail to see why that means that it is evil for a parent to take a bit of time off the treadmill to raise their own children.'

But please tell me where I said or even suggested this. Getting a bit tired of repeating myself but once again, I think there is not right or wrong way, people must do what is right for them but I wish that more women and men would think about the long-term consequences of being a SAHM. IF you have that's great but there are 1000s of women who haven't. I really don't see what's so controversial about this.

there are quite a few posts here attributing comments and opinions to b&wc that she hasn't actually expressed.

" Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."

-Oscar Wilde

I just this on the moral absolutes thread but p'haps it makes more sense on here???

b&wc - i would leave it there with your last post which is an excellent summary - if i may be so bold.

Also vast numbers of women many of whom will have 20 or 30 years as a pensioner into their 90s have virtually no pension provision. Do something about that tomorrow even if you do nothing else. I see that the Government has miscalculated for 500,000 women their state pension based on some allowance they get for being home and they aren't writing to everyone they got it wrong for so do check that kind of thing. Be interested in pensions, more so than dresses and your latter years will be happy... there endeth my lesson.... or that one... there are many more.

Gee, thanks, Xenia. I had, like, never considered a pension before. Wow. You're my saviour.

"....they may have chosen different careers...."

in Utopia, not that many women get to choose.

Thanks Bossy, and good advice which I'll follow directly. Off to bed.

No no, I'm much more interested in my pretty dresses than my pension

Er, I don't really see why my posts about sick pay indicate a lack of awareness. You are saying that your colleague's wife sick pay would have helped a bit. Yes, it would, financially. But I don't really think that the possibility of a few month's sick pay in the event of illness, would be a major factor in why someone who didn't really want to, would stay in a job when they would rather be with their baby. Women don't go back to work/ SAH on that basis. There's usually a tangled web of reasons as to why they make the choices they do. As someone said earlier, a woman in that position may well make the decision that it is more important for her dc's long term future, to have many happy memories of her and forgo the financial cushion. Who knows, I don't think anyone who hasn't been in that position could possibly know what they would feel.

It's hard. I seem to have spend quite a bit of the last few years talking to people who have had or know someone dying including my mother. Some people liek to carry on regardless, don't even want anyone to know right to the end. Others want to stop, relax and do all the things they might have done in the next 10 years.

Actually it's divorce that will hit 50% of the women on this thread, not death I think statistically.

And if you get divorced Xenia, you'll be ok will you? As a SINGLE working mother of five you'll still be just hunky dory, because evreything you do is always so shiny and wonderful and straight out of the pages of a storybook.

PMSL.

(You really do say the most bizare and totally random things, lady).

It is not just careers our DDs should think very carefully about but also their choice of DP/DH....pick a partner who will strive to share domestic burdens,( be it chores or childcare..), equally...who values your career and interests as much as his own and even is willing to take turns in looking after the newborn. AH ha you'll say but what if after all he turns out to be a crock of shit ? Well that happens, just make sure you are not financially dependant on him, have your own friends and interests and can comfortably survive without him...
There have been some brilliant posts on here,( xenia,aloha,b&wcat....), and I feel fully justified in starting off such a 'controversial' thread....I was venomously slated somewhere as a ' stirrer ' but I think we've had a really good discussion...

pmsl

I thought Xenia was divorced? She's told us that she had to make a large financial contribution to her ex-dh because he was a teacher and therefore on a far lower salary.

That makes so much sense.

unlike your last post ? pmsl ? Explain...

Yes, I'm divorced - single mother of five who paid ex husband, no contribution for children, and he doesn't help with them. No one's lives whether they work or not are always easy but if you're working in a decent career in a sense you protect your children best particularly if things go wrong.

In fact as I thnk I said on this or another thread I'm more concerned about the children thinking happy marriages are impossible because their parents divorced than concerned about mothers working or not. If you look at long term studies children of divorced parents don't do so well but there seems to be little evidence children of stay at home mothers or working mothers suffer particularly.

Do your children have other examples of cohesive families in your immediate social network or extended family?

It's sad to hear that your ex-h isn't involved any more.

His choice. He's an idiot. He hasn't contacted the older 3 children in 4 years. If he had been okay I'd have stayed married to him. Yes, we know people are happily married and in our case it was so awful at home for the children the divorce could have done them nothing but good - lesser of two evils I suppose.

That's so sad - I can't begin to understand how a teacher could do that.

It's very strange and very sad. And we still try - I invited him to the oldest's graduation and the twins' first communion (and he sees the twins for 2 hours on Sundays). I think he thinks it would help me if he saw the children and also he probably feels rejected by the older ones and may be he doesn't have normal capacity for personal relationships, some sort of autistic spectrum characteristic.

Mozhe, if any of your dds became SAHM, would you take it as a personal insult that they didn't like the fact that you worked long hours and weren't around as much as they would have liked? Not stirring, genuinely interested...

Mozhe - why bother asking this question - yes, you have turned into your own mother - nothing very unusual about that, as you surely know. However, that doesn't mean that every other woman in the world wants to become your mother... it's not a universal life-model