Quote:
Originally Posted by maciesmom
You know, I can't help but wonder, if the OP spent a wee bit less time laboring every little thing to save a penny here and there, then complaining about the habits of others, and instead took the family to a park and just enjoyed the day, without worrying about what others did or thought, or whether there was a financial or future academic benefit to be made from playing in the park, if she might be more happy and less stressed?
ETA - stress can cause illness also. Just like a poor diet can.
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Dear maciesmom and other posters,
In the end, all you guys did was pick on my personal situation and characteristics. Unfortunately, these have zero relevance to the argument itself, never mind you don't know anything about them.
So let's sum it up, granted the topic is out of the bottle.
My original intent was to see some actual behavior based on the poll.
As I expected, the results confirmed that some SAHM-s still cook from scratch, yet a good chunk of them no longer do, and some don't cook at all. Then someone pointed out that I was making "assumptions" about what the SAHM job is supposed to be. And indeed I was.
As long as you define your SAHM status as an actual
job, then yes - I will assume that it is something that has a significant and positive
economic impact for the ENTIRE family, in addition to the emotional benefits, largely defined as making yourself and the kids "happy". BY thy way, kids have no clue that their long-term happiness, strongly related to health, would be much better served by home-cooked meals than by constant drives to "fun" (read "often costly") places. Since when the back yard/around the house is a terrible place to be for a child while the mother is cooking?
Wasn't the yard desired for this very purpose during the house-hunt?
Now, if you're not defining your SAHM mom status as an actual
job...then of course it doesn't matter what you do with your free time. It is all yours and it's not even relevant to the discussion.
Just don't sell it to the public as a full-blown
"job", maybe out of decency for those who DO work actual jobs, with plates overflowing with responsibilities of all sorts - and that includes the SAHMS who do a whole lot more than "entertaining" the kids and making them "happy".
Now, I can see how this arrangement might make this type of "job" holder "happy". I just don't see how it is fair to the partner who must subsidize this kind of clearly one-sided "happiness" and how it is financially healthy for the family in the long run. That was the gist of my argument.
We are talking here about families who have mortgages and all sorts of other debts and who would surely not turn their nose up to the kind of long-term returns from the contributions of a frugal, economically productive stay-at-home spouse.
We are not talking about RICH families who can easily live off of investment income and nothing else.
I argued that this pseudo-SAHM, who DOESN'T bring any sort of income in,
neither does she make any particular effort in saving some of the income the partner brings in (include same-sex partnerships here if you wish)...are engaging largely in consumption and use "raising children" as an excuse for a full-time job. I stand by my argument.
Raising children has always involved dozens of other things in addition to "entertaining" children and making them "happy" (very fuzzy, by the way).
If your child tells you it makes him "happy" to go to on the merry-go-round and lick lollipops there every day, is this how you are going to define "raising children"? Whatever makes them "happy"?
You would think you might want to include in the job description other aspects related to children's long-term well-being, including feeding them well, teaching them about household organization by modeling behavior, engaging them in household chores, teaching all sorts of life skills (and that includes cooking from scratch!). Also, did I ever leave the impression I was only talking about mothers of infants? What about those mothers with kids in school 8-3?
Instead it appears to me that what such moms ultimately teach the kids is the art of CONSUMPTION.
Happiness = fun = consumption and it should be perfectly OK to call this "a job".
The fact that so many people have come to accept such amazing BS (especially middle-class working men), all while middle class families get deeper and deeper into debt, childhood obesity rates are through the roof and cancer is all over the place...THIS is quite telling in and of itself.
When you guys ran out of any decent argument, you fired back with "but you don't know what else those mothers may be doing in the house!!".
In fact, I know very well what they are doing. They do what they said and clearly look like they do: entertain the kids when they have them around and feed them store-bought stuff.
Because if they did DO something else that is economically helpful, IN ADDITION TO the "happy" thing, then they would simply no longer qualify under the category I am discussing.
Mothers who trade stocks or sell on E-bay don't qualify under the category I mentioned. If they do that, they contribute economically. They work for pay. Just like mothers who cook from scratch, or clean the house or any other activity that would otherwise need to be financed. These moms may not work directly for pay (they are not offense players) but they save on all sorts of life costs (they are great defense players).
Here I am discussing exclusively the mothers who do very little that is economically productive (apart from saving on baby-sitting fees), whose activities with the kids during the day involve mainly consumption, and who want to get away with calling this "a job".
In the end, no surprise marriage rates are going down, singlehood is on the rise and young women are increasingly puzzled as to why guys shy away from commitment.
Could it be that some of this fear of commitment might have to do with the prospect of working until grave so he can keep a mother both "at home" as well as "happy" - "happy" being defined as "I should do whatever I please with my time"?
It would also be nice to hear some male voices. I received some "amens" in private, not surprisingly from guys.
I do understand some people hate to hear this argument. But that's life. Sometimes we hear things we don't want to hear. Sigh.
Then we shrug it off and move on with our thing.
Thanks again to those who picked an option.
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