Recently I found this aritcle on the hard choices mothers make every day on the website Essential baby. It concerns very controversial statements made about stay at home mums by Australian Federal Sex discrimination officer Elizabeth Broderick
“Federal Sex Discrimination Officer Elizabeth Broderick recently issued a call to arms for all slack-jawed, dead-eyed mums who overdose on Playschool and one too many conversations about bowel movements. “Your brain isn’t delivered with the placenta,” she lectured. In other words, tell your grey matter to get out of parenting hell and back to work.
Has Broderick ever met a mother? Heavens above – we’re the most tiresome over-thinkers. Modern mothers don’t drift through parenthood in a cloud of Bex and stunted emotions: we think the hell out of it. Whether it’s gender stereotyping, cognitive developmental theories or educational advancements, some mother somewhere is delivering an impassioned treatise on it in the local playground. It’s not that we don’t use our brains, it’s just that Gina Rinehart can’t attach a drill to our heads and mine our thoughts for shiny new coins. And that’s what bothers Broderick.
‘Rhetoric around getting mothers back to work en masse, or positioning parenting as an intellectual dead-end, risks devaluing the role of stay-at-home parents
Not that Broderick is shaking her fists at mums’ failure to contribute to the collective money-pit; she’s actually concerned that as a full-time, or even part-time, stay-at-home parent, mums compromise their earning potential and financial autonomy. In a few decades, if Mum ends up on the wrong side of a divorce statistic, she may find herself empathising rather than sympathising with her student offspring’s eat-or-pay-rent dilemma.
Broderick’s desire to see more mums back in the workforce does have merit. But the flip side is that to do so, mums would need to exit their children’s lives to a certain extent, and that separation can provoke anxiety. But should it?
Still, this doesn’t seem to stop mothers from either staying at home completely or arranging their lives so that at least part of the working week is spent with their children. Research undertaken by The Australian Institute of Family Studies in 2008 showed that part-time employment peaks for women during child-rearing years, and while some women do return to full-time employment later on, over 40 per cent of women continue to work part-time.
If we have access to quality childcare, and when even part-time work can have a detrimental impact on women’s lifetime earnings (current forecasts estimate women will earn 40 per cent less than men over a 40 year period), why do we persist in trying to stay at home?
Clinical psychologist Vera Auerbach says that innate instinct is an important factor, and she says that the desire to be with our children is “a natural and healthy response. Their survival is the survival of the family”. While we’re not necessarily warding off hungry wild animals, Auerbach says we want to be with our children because ultimately “you know you will probably look after your child better than another caregiver”.
Essential baby.
This kind of guilt being put on stay at home mum’s makes me very angry and is totally wrong.
Babies need their mothers.
Where and when did we decide this was not the case any more?
Mothers ( and fathers) are their child’s first teachers!
You teach your child to speak
You teach your child to live in the world and all the skills needed to manage themselves.
I also agree that part time work is necessary for families to survive these days but as a mother and grandmother I say
please do not be bullied into thinking you are becoming a vegetable because you choose to stay at home with your baby.
This time is so short in the big scheme of your children’s lives and it will never come again.
As Germaine Greer once said ” I never wanted women to become men. I just wanted them to have a choice” ( about the role they wished to play in society)
So if you have chosen to be a stay at home mum for now you have made your choice and should be able to do so without feeling second class and that your time is being wasted by being with your babies.
There is an urban myth around these days that babies need childcare to learn to socialise!
This is rubbish.
They need to be played with ,sung to read to and loved every day to develop early social and early literacy skills.
So just remember what an important role you are playing in your baby’s development .
teachbabytotalk 