文章一覽：Why stay-at-home mums don't get respect (新回覆在最前面,最多列出 6 個) [列出所有回覆]
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發表於： 2009/03/10 09:16pm
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Why stay-at-home mums don't get respect<BR> <b>By Lucy Cavendish<BR> Last updated at 9:24 AM on 09th March 2009<BR><BR><BR></b>
The other day I went to see an old friend of mine. I haven't seen her for a few years. The last time we met, her children - she has three girls and a boy - were all mop-haired poppets. <BR><BR>
This time, however, she was struggling. Her husband has been made redundant and there were terrible money worries. At the same time, her children had turned into teenagers. They were, between the three of them, a combination of argumentative, rude, opinionated, surly and, at times, overly obsessed with themselves. <BR> 此主題相關圖片如下：
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They were also terribly rude to their mother. Before I'd even spoken to the eldest daughter, she'd told me what a sap her mother was. <BR><BR>
'My mum doesn't work,' she said, scornfully. 'It would be really good if she did. My friends' mothers work and they earn money, but Mum's never earned a penny. I'm not going to be like her. I'm going to have a career and be interesting.' <BR><BR>
I was gobsmacked. Ever since I started having children 12 years ago, I had held up my stay-at-home friend - who had given up a demanding and exciting job as a showbiz PR - as the epitome of how I should be. She is warm and lovely, and a wonderful mother, with endless patience. <BR><BR>
I always thought her children were so happy and well-balanced. What I had never expected was for them to somehow feel let down that their mother hadn't had a career. Later on, at dinner, I asked my friend about it and she nearly burst into tears. <BR><BR>
'They think I'm a failure,' she said. 'They don't think my opinion on anything is valid because I stayed at home and gave up work. They say they'd respect me more if I had a job, and now I wish I'd never given it up - but it's all too late.' <BR><BR>
This stopped me in my tracks. For in the war of stay-at-homes versus working mothers, aren't the stay-at-home ones always right? Aren't they the ones with the well-adjusted children, while the rest of us who go out to work, in one form or another, bring up apparently emotionally needy delinquents? <BR><BR>
Well, maybe not. For this is what happens when you give up work; you lose all self-esteem. My friend has become consumed, subsumed even, by her children. <BR><BR><BR><BR>
When they were little, she spent her time sleep training them and potty training them and cooking them home-made food, and reading them stories and comforting them when they had nightmares. <BR><BR>
This is what all mothers want to give their children: time, love, energy, reassurance, inspiration. These are the things that children need from their parents: it is what makes them thrive. <BR>
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<BR> Every child wants to see their mother or father looking at them and beaming with pride from the audience when they are the donkey in the school nativity play. What child wants to look out from the stage and see no family face there? <BR><BR>
But there are many ways of doing all this. It seems, from my experience, that by the time children get past the age of 12, they want a mother who 'has a life' - to use a phrase my eldest son says to me all the time. <BR><BR>
They no longer want to be the only thing in your life, as you are not the only thing in theirs. They want you to go out and be part of the wider working world - a world that they increasingly know more about and are interested in. <BR><BR><BR>
What kind of a role model would I be for my sons or daughter if I stayed at home, washed socks, made my husband dinner and constantly had to count the pennies in my purse before asking for more money? <BR><BR>
We live in a modern society now. Our daughters are going to go out and work. Our sons may well get together with women who earn more than them. They may well benefit from not feeling the pressure of having to be the main earner. These are things they need to understand and feel confident about. <BR><BR>
In my own case, I have been very fortunate that I have been able to juggle a working life with my life as a mother because I work from home and set my own hours. <BR><BR>
However, there are lots of jobs where this is not possible. This is often why women have to make a very difficult decision. I know plenty of high-fliers who were not given the option to work either part-time or flexible hours. They had bosses who would just not countenance it. <BR><BR>
Many of them returned to work after a much-truncated maternity leave only to find themselves pining so badly for their baby that they gave everything up. There is, however, new legislation that is being looked at which will give parents the right to work flexible hours to fit in with childcare. <BR><BR>
For women, the decision to work or not work is one that almost pole-axes them. We are fed a constant diet of stay-at-homers telling us how much they love it ('my children are so happy,' they say, 'because we spend all day making castles from loo rolls'). <BR><BR>
Then the working mothers tell us how happy they are that they have the freedom to work and to earn their own money. <BR><BR>
But what mothers really need to be effective is a huge dose of self-esteem.If you can think you are a good person, a strong person who has validity in life, who can hold your weight in the world and look after yourself rather than to be reliant on others, then it is a positive experience for everyone involved - yourself, your partner and your children. <BR><BR><BR>
Like my friend, I too have wilted at the verbal onslaught directed at me by my older children. If I didn't have something else to keep me going, to keep my head held high, to remind me that as well as being a mother, I am also a person who has a career, I'd probably spend most days weeping into my morning coffee. <BR><BR>
There is also something about working, especially going out to work, that makes you feel free. When I go into London - leaving my youngest at the childminders - I see women on the train reading newspapers, drinking coffee, doing the crossword. I have no idea if they have children. <BR><BR>
To me, they are people just like the men on the train. They may well have children. They may well have had the morning from hell. They may have had to scrape eggs off the floor and rescue burning toast and force recalcitrant little bodies into their school uniforms; but now, on this train, they are people with their own identities. <BR><BR>
Maybe they will go into an office and no one will ask them about their children and it will be a blessed relief. They have an identity above and beyond being a mother. <BR><BR>
But I don't find this is necessarily the case with stay-at-home mothers, especially those who have given up high-powered jobs to be with their children. They make children their mission. I see them willing their child to be the best, do the best, read first, have friends, do sport, take Kumon maths. It must be exhausting. <BR><BR>
But this is still about self-esteem: it's just that instead of getting it through a job, they get it through their children. <BR><BR>
Maybe they used to travel a lot for their job and earn high salaries. I can imagine it is very galling to end up at Tumble Tots, or wherever, and asking your husband or partner for money to pay for the class. Therefore, it all has to have been worth it: all that giving everything up has to mean something, and that meaning gets transferred onto the children. <BR><BR><BR>
They say: 'I'm so happy not working because my son loves me being here and he is doing so well.' But what if the boy wasn't doing well? What if you'd given everything up to be at home and he wasn't top of the class or in the rugby team? <BR><BR>
The point is that women should be allowed to make their own choices without being constantly lambasted for doing so. I know a lot of totally happy, well-adjusted women who chose to stop work and are fine with their decision. <BR><BR>
I know a lot of women who would love to work but can't find a flexible enough job. I also know a lot of women who have chosen to continue to work full-time. They seem to be the ones who, when their children are small, suffer from the most guilt. <BR><BR>
This is mainly because, instead of being celebrated, they are made to feel terrible by the endless stories of how children with mothers who go out to work (note mothers - somehow fathers don't seem to have anything to do with this dynamic) will suffer in every single way. <BR><BR>
There are constant shock reports saying that children of mothers who are not at home when they are young have a higher chance of being behind academically. <BR><BR>
They don't read or write as early. If you send them to a nursery, they are bound to end up miserable or unhappy and useless at socialising, as all nurseries are apparently toxic. <BR><BR>
Childminders are all deemed substandard, nannies are nasty, and on and on it goes until I am surprised anyone leaves their children with anyone ever. <BR><BR>
And yet, of course, this is all nonsense. The workforce of this country is stuffed full of working mothers. The current government actively encourages women with small children to go back to work. <BR><BR>
Of course, if you ask little children if they want their mother to work, their answer would absolutely be a resounding 'no'. My mother didn't work, and I loved her being there at the school gates <BR><BR>
When she announced she might get a job, we all burst into tears on the spot. But the economic and social climate was very different back then. <BR><BR>
Also, by the time I was a teenager, I didn't appreciate how much she had done for me. I was pretty horrible to her and I am sure she suffered for it. Teenagers don't care if your feelings are hurt. They are not wired that way. They are put on Earth to shrink their mother's self-esteem. <BR><BR><BR><BR>
Let's go back to my friend. It's as if she is stuck in a unholy battle with her children, and one she is without doubt losing. She can't pick up her purse, take her own money and go and do whatever she wants with it, because she doesn't have any. She can't go and let off steam and/or push her worries to one side as she walks through the door of an office and gets her head down. <BR><BR>
She is just stuck at home with three children who keep telling her how angry they are with her for not being 'a modern working mum'. <BR><BR>
Whatever choices women make, they always make the wrong one. They carry the problems of the world on their shoulders, and they shouldn't. <BR><BR>
While I would find it impossible to do a full-time job because I honestly would not want to be away from my children for long tracts of time, I do not want to aim slings and arrows at those who have made a different decision. Most women are given a stark choice when it comes to work: it's all or nothing. <BR><BR>
But when my teenage son decides to have yet another pop at me, I can take a deep breath and remind myself I am more than just his mother. <BR><BR>
I am a person with rights and opinions of my own. And if it took a couple of days a week with him in nursery or at a childminders for me to have a sense of self, it was jolly well worth it. <BR><BR>
What mothers really think about workIn a survey of 5,000 women, 93 per cent of mothers feel stressed by demands made on their lives. Nine out of ten mothers who work full-time say life is much harder than they imagined. Two-thirds felt their stress transferred to their family, causing them to feel stressed, too. <BR><BR>
Only 4 per cent of women with a baby or young child would choose to work full-time. Nearly a third of respondents (31 per cent) would rather have a part-time career or job share, 22 per cent would prefer to work from home and 43 per cent would like to be a 'full-time mum'. <BR><BR>
Only 37 per cent of working couples share jobs equally around the home, and a mere 3 per cent of men do more ironing and washing than their partners. And 78 per cent would 'quit their current job tomorrow given the chance'. More than half of British women are working - 10 per cent more than a generation ago - resulting in an 8 per cent rise in the use of nurseries last year. <BR><BR>
An average full-time nursery place costs £143 a week, with Britain's nursery industry worth around £3.8billion a year. Mums between the ages of 30 and 34 make up the highest proportion of mothers; the number of women over 35 giving birth has tripled since the Eighties. <BR><BR><BR>
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