In the past week, there have been a string of negative articles about parenthood. Derek says that it costs more to raise a kid than it did in the 1960s. Elizabeth Wurtzel, who doesn't have kids of her own, says that much of mom-work isn't really that important. In thick, pedantic prose, Christine Overall tells us to think before we procreate. This woman says that she doesn't want alien-parasites.
I am about to enter into the long summer of parenting. The kids have a week of half-days at school, which annoyingly count as full days of school. Then they are home. I have jerry-rigged various camps for a few weeks of the summer, but they'll be around the house quite a bit. (Camp is VERY expensive.) At the same time, I need to get some work done. Kids + Work + No Childcare = the perfect recipe for hair-ripping frustration.
Still, I am pretty glad that they are around. I can take my book to the swim club, after all. We'll take day trips into the city. Dinner with dad at a BBQ joint in Times Square. Bike races at the park. Afternoon movies. It will be splendid. Mostly.
Apt. 11d 
Generally speaking, I can’t stand those types of articles. But my kids have been off school for over 5 weeks straight, no camps/no childcare. I think I could write one of those articles myself by now.
(Camp IS expensive. We are only doing 1 week of camp for 2 of the 3 kids this summer.)
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Do they REALLY believe this? Or is it just another ploy to get page views? For me in my cranky not-so-old-age-yet, I find these articles of the “I’m too cool to have a regular life like the rest of you” genre.
On summer – the girl is done grade 1 next Wednesday. She is in various day camps over the next few months – soccer, karate, farm camp, biking, art. Some full day and some half day. Net net it’ll be a huge shift for all of us – less time for writing/blogging/photography. I’ve been getting organized to do the usual more in less time.
But it’ll be lots of fun too – bbq’s, cottage, drive in movies, berry picking, etc.
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Yeah, these articles are a waste of time, but I just read it anyway. She does make it clear that she is talking about very wealthy people: “Failing as a feminist is a unique problem of the wealthy …To be a stay-at-home mom is a privilege, and most of the housewives I have ever met — none of whom do anything around the house — live in New York City and Los Angeles, far from Peoria.” It’s hard for me to imagine a world where housewives/stay-at-home moms do nothing around the house – I don’t know anyone with nannies – but I guess in that rarefied world she lives in that could really be the case.
I’m intrigued by the statement “A job that anyone can have is not a job, it’s a part of life” and by the statistic that moms with full-time jobs spend 86 percent as much time with their kids as unemployed mothers.
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“She does make it clear that she is talking about very wealthy people”
Yes and no. The headline and her personal experience refer to wealthy people, but there are quite a few sentences that aren’t just aimed at the rich. (Of course, maybe she’s just a lousy writer.) Examples:
“Let’s please be serious grown-ups: real feminists
don’t depend on men. Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own.”
“If you can’t pay your own rent, you are not an adult. You are a dependent.”
“To be a stay-at-home mom is a privilege, and most of the housewives I have ever met — none of whom do anything around the house — live in New York City and Los Angeles, far from Peoria. Only in these major metropolises are there the kinds of jobs in finance and entertainment that allow for a family to live luxe on a single income.”
[This previous one is mostly about the rich, but I’m including it because it demonstrates that EW knows nothing about the actual demographics of the American SAHM. Back in the real world, single-earner families have less money on average than double-earner families.]
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I just hope that the Ivy-educated wealthy stay-at-home moms to whom Wurzel is referring have negotiated 401k or Roth IRA contributions so that they have retirement funds established if their husbands trade them in for new models 10, 15, 20 years into the marriage. (I got very cynical after reading Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood.)
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True, she does make those statements about how you can’t be a feminist if you don’t pay your own rent (aaack!) but I saw that as coming out of her very limited worldview, where women who have housekeepers and nannies and get pedicures and hang out at the gym all day live in billion dollar homes they don’t pay for and want to call themselves feminists. I’d like to think that she would acknowledge that real partnerships between men and women exist elsewhere – but I think I’m being too charitable towards her.
I still can’t wrap my brain around a world where that’s the norm. Shoot, my friends and I (moms and nonmoms alike) are judgmental about one friend’s wife who by choice only works half time, with one kid in high school. These are the wealthiest friends I have, too.
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This is our first summer where both kids have serious camp schedules. We spent a lot of money (I’ve been putting away $100 a month for camps all year and it’s all gone now). Of course, in our climate, it’s so hot that just going outside during the summer months is often not an option (during last year’s record heat, we had over 60 days over 100 degrees).
Here’s the list:
1. half-day horse camp out at the therapeutic riding ranch for C (one week)
2. full-day gifted building camp for D (one week)
3. three day beginning sewing class for D
4. two weeks of gifted classes for C (crafts and robotics)
5. full-day gifted garden/outdoor camp for D (one week)
6. two weeks of Red Cross swim classes for both kids
7. four days of quilting class for C (3 hours a day)
8. one week horrifically expensive fancy pants art camp for both kids at a ceramic painting place (half-day)
That sounds like a lot, but there are only two weeks of full-day camp for my youngest on the list, the rest being half-day camps and classes. Especially toward the end of the summer, the calendar gets very blank. Our other planned activities are:
1. moving and unpacking
2. C has a paying gig as a mother’s helper for a disabled preschooler whose mother is my good friend
3. pool
4. see grandma and grandpa on the West Coast (may not happen due to move, medical issues, etc.)
I have physical restrictions and am not allowed to lift or exert myself, so my husband is doing most of this. It looks like real work when he does it, by the way.
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“Shoot, my friends and I (moms and nonmoms alike) are judgmental about one friend’s wife who by choice only works half time, with one kid in high school.” But why? If my husband had the opportunity to work PT, he would in a heart beat.
Broad statements about feminism and work don’t take into account the millions of alternative work-family arrangements. In our area of the country, people have long work days, inflexible jobs, and long commutes. Outside of education jobs, people get 2 weeks of vacation. Childcare is very expensive, and there are few extended family supports. It’s extremely common for middle class (not 1%-ers) to have a full time parent at home or a parent who works PT or a low paying, flexible job. Some parents cycle in and out of the workforce. There’s no convenient label for what I do.
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Interestingly, my SIL is a housewife who absolutely hates and never wants to have kids. Her house isn’t tiny but it’s not all that large so keeping it up isn’t all that much work, they have a large garden that requires significant work, but not enough for a full time job, and she and my brother do that on weekends, so weekdays its mostly maintenance. My brother can work up to 12 hours a day, so to me it seems like a lonely life. She is very crafty, and has gotten really into quilt-making, so that takes up a lot of time, but it just seems very odd that this is the life she’s chosen. As is, she’s never had a job in her life, even though she has a BS in astrophysics from an elite SLAC. She’s from a conservative family, but even they are a bit baffled by her life plans. It does appear to work for her and my brother and she seems very happy though, so different strokes for different folks, I guess.
I guess what this made me think is that working or not working isn’t necessarily about kids, especially at the really wealthy level. Childless trophy wives aren’t choosing between careers as lawyers or hanging out by the pool, and so it seems like the author’s article is founded on faulty premises, i.e., that these women would work if they didn’t have kids. SAHM seems like the middle ground between those who can be the idle rich and those who have to work no matter what, but clearly that’s not who she’s talking about.
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I think life choices often make no sense to other people – and therefore, it’s kind of moot to criticize them. Hell, some of my life choices don’t make any sense to me. As to feminism, I always thought it should free me to do as I like, not impose a new set of rules that I have to adhere to in order to be a complete woman. But maybe that’s just my personal interpretation that isn’t shared by anyone else.
Back in college, I certainly had not planned to become a homeschooling mom of four kids, trailing after my internationally working husband. But I was aware of his career when we got married and that it would make it hard for me to even have a job, never mind a career.
I’ve had all iterations of maid/nanny-and-kids-at-school to all-at-home-and-homeschooling-without-any-help-plus-job. It’s rough, sometimes.
When I see the summer plans of Amy, well. I’m in awe, and a bit jealous, and a bit frustrated that I cannot offer my kids the same possibilities. But development work doesn’t make one rich. In money, anyway.
The parasite lady, well. She’s young. She may change her mind, or she may not. But she will probably learn that alienating people around her will make her lonely; I hope for her this will happen rather sooner than later. I don’t despise people who have no kids (my husband and I dream of the cushy and luxurious life we’d have without them, in jest, and sometimes in utter sleep deprivation). But I like mine fine enough and I would miss them.
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The whole summer camp thing irritates the crap out of me because I can afford it and my kids do not want it. These are the times I turn to my husband and mutter “*Your* genes!”
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“But why? If my husband had the opportunity to work PT, he would in a heart beat.”
Yeah, the judgmental-ness here is more of a personal thing; my friend might be said to have married “up” and their lifestyle is a little too country-club for my taste. In general I think that it’s great if people can work part time, especially if they have younger kids or projects they love (volunteer work, art, whatever). My point was just that in my world the “lady of leisure” nonworking mom is a very rare beast.
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We won’t have any camps this summer, the same as last summer. Eldest, no problem. She’s neurotypical, one year left in high school, busy saving up for college by working lots and finishing a correspondence course in chemistry.
For youngest? This is a problem caused by a change in policies. The camp she used to attend before now is only for the severely/multiply disabled. Autism & seizures isn’t good enough – they’d be happy if she went to the integration camp but they don’t provide enough care for her so we take care of her ourselves, planning weekly outings to swim at the lake, check out the park and what-not.
But, Holy Hannah, Wurtzel chaps my ass and I’m employed full-time. How can she be so self-righteous and clueless. Look at this: “Even moms with full-time jobs spend 86 percent as much time with their kids as unemployed mothers, so it is apparently taking up the time of about 14 percent of a paid position.”
Look, I spend a lot of time with Autistic Youngest but an awful lot of that time is at the end of the day and throughout the weekend (except in the summer when I hand off with underemployed spouse who’ll be free starting next week). I can spend those hours with her because spouse is usually home during the daytime to take care of all the other issues as well as illness.
And how disingenuous – nowhere in there does Wurtzel consider how much housework, errands and other labour the stay-at-home parent contributes to a joint enterprise. Bait-and-switch – condemn the 1% and use that to attack stay-at-home parents universally because what they do is just biology as far as Wurtzel’s concerned, it isn’t actually, you know, labour. Bah!
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ExpatMom says:
“When I see the summer plans of Amy, well. I’m in awe, and a bit jealous, and a bit frustrated that I cannot offer my kids the same possibilities…”
It’s fantastic living in an inexpensive family-oriented medium-sized US city with a big college where you can get from one end of the city to the other in about 25 minutes. (The gifted camps run under the auspices of the school of education, which also runs an autism center.) The funny thing is, I look at our camp list, and what I seem to have inadvertently done is replicate the summer activities of the kids on Little House on the Prairie, just at considerably greater expense.
Wendy said:
“The whole summer camp thing irritates the crap out of me because I can afford it and my kids do not want it.”
You do need buy-in from big kids. Last summer, I sent both to a zoo camp against their will, and they really did hate it. (There was too much walking across the zoo under the brutal sun.) I consulted very closely with the kids this year, discovering that the boy didn’t want to do the super cool college basketball camp and neither kid wanted to do the pottery camp. C says she is only interested in sports that involve being in the water or riding an animal, which really narrows things down.
My husband also pointed out to me that for the week after our move, I planned the following schedule: drop off 8:30, drop-off 9:45, pick-up 11:15, drop-off 1:15, pick-up 2, pick-up 2:45. In my defense, that’s the only week that looks like that and at the time, I honestly thought I was going to be doing most of the drop-offs and pick-ups.
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I actually do know a fair number of upper middle class housewives who don’t work and who have kids in full-day school — and I do find it a bit baffling. The default around here (South) seems to be that women who do not work do aerobics all day — unless they’re born again, in which case aerobics alternates with Bible study.
I have at one point wondered exactly how one eventually writes an obituary for a woman who spends four hours a day at the gym and what it might say. (“she was tightly toned and seldom missed an aerobics class. Her spin bike will observe a few minutes of silence this morning before being handed over to another housewife.”) My MIL spends HOURS every day cleaning her house and we’ve joked about the fact that someday someone is going to have to write a eulogy which will mostly be about how there were never any crumbs on the counters.
I know that everyone makes their own choices — but I can’t imagine having all that free time and choosing not to volunteer, keep up with current events, educate oneself further, etc.
Unfortunately, the other option in these parts seems to be becoming a SAHM who spends all day, every day in school, raising the bar for the rest of the moms who don’t actually want to be THAT involved in grade school.
Personally, I want to know how the Ivy-educated, law school educated SAHM’s that I know manage to pay off student loans while making zero dollars a year.
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“Personally, I want to know how the Ivy-educated, law school educated SAHM’s that I know manage to pay off student loans while making zero dollars a year.”
I met a mom at a birthday party this spring who is a trained orthodontist. She quit after discovering that she was thinking about her patients while with her kids and thinking about her kids while with her patients. The mind boggles at the financial side of being a trained orthodontist who is not practicing, but her husband is a doctor, so they’re OK.
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I hate articles like these because the needlessly combative language overwhelms small nuggets of truth, like that we devalue the parenting work of poor moms but we overvalue the parenting work of well-off moms.
I recently saw a Facebook comment where a PhD trained scientist noted that his PhD trained scientist wife was no longer working because she’s “managing the development of our 10-month old.” I’ll admit that I thought, huh? There are exceptions of course, but most children do not need a person managing their development to turn out fine.
I find personal satisfaction a more compelling reason for not working. But people can’t say that they’re not working simply because that’s what they want to do, can they. If you’re not working or working less than full-time is has to be for the children.
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What I find interesting about these conversation is that they are rarely placed into a larger context. In the case of EW, has she given any thought to what unemployment numbers would look like if all SAHP suddenly tried to enter the workforce? It is not like there are ton of jobs out there right now, waiting for men and women who have been out of the workforce for 6 months, let alone 1 to 10 years. Has she actually considered any of those issues, or does she really think that everyone needs to be “paid by an outside employer” to be considered to be doing worthy work? Does she take into account the amount of care and volunteering done by many SAHP – issues that you, Laura, have brought up in the past.
I’ve been out of the workforce for over a decade. Graduated from a top 10 university and all of my children are now in school “full time”. From time to time, my spouse and I have discussed the idea of whether going back to work makes sense. However, we really can figure out how it would make sense for us.
He works crazy long hours (always has, probably always will) and at this point, I would be lucky to get a job paying $40-50K a year. When you remove the flexibility we currently have, add in the child care costs we would incur from my loss of flexibility, and the add in the headache of following three children’s schedules which include not only competitive gymnastics, but also therapy appts and the usual gamut of activities – it seems to make a lot more sense for us to live on 1 salary and 1 dedicated person to deal with the household, the children and the mundane aspects of life that needs to be taken care of. Especially when it comes to the therapy issues. As an educated person who has the time to navigate the systems in place – we are slowly getting necessary care for our child. I cannot imagine trying to navigate the same issues while working full time. So much of my time right now seems to be research, phone calling and waiting. At least, right now I can do those thing during regular business hours and actually make progress.
Of course, I keep saying that SAHP should be allowed to contribute to some sort of retirement plan besides a spousal IRA. Why shouldn’t 2 parent families be allowed to put equal money away for both people’s retirement? Or perhaps we should put our money where our mouths are, and give a tax credit for a SAHP that equals an IRA or 401(k) contribution if there is only 1 income in the household.
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Hmm Wurtzel seems to be taking her experience and extrapolating for the rest of us. I moved to little, tiny Kinderhook (NY) where I found a number of SAHMs, much more than in the Bay area where I moved from. If these SAHMs aren’t in Peoria, they are in some of the other inland areas where families, at least for a time, can get by on one income.
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