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Strollerderby
Should women be given a salary for their work at home?
Forget the “push present,” I’d much rather get a paycheck that shows me my work in the house and with the children is not just valued by my husband, but that he realizes and acknowledges that my time spent raising our children is just as important as his working time. And that it is inherently valuable and worth being compensated.
And I’m not the only one. In an interview with CNN, Wendy Luhabe, Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg and an international thought leader, says that women who give up careers to stay home and raise their children should be paid a salary.
Luhabe suggests that allocating a salary equal to 10% of the woman’s husband’s income would help assuage the resentment that some women feel at having to make the choice to stay home and would give more value to bringing up children in our society.
I can attest from personal experience that it really does. Continue reading »
When mom works, relationship gets a boost?
An article in the WSJ’s The Juggle column tipped me off to a recent study in the Journal of Family Psychology about how marital satisfaction is related to the workload that husbands and wives take on.
The study of 169 couples in the first four years of marriage found that when either partner works a lot, satisfaction with the marriage goes up — as long as that partner likes his or her job. When there’s no child in the picture, a husband’s workload going up correlated to higher happiness in the marriage, but when there were kids, a husband working more was linked to a downtick in marriage satisfaction for both husband and wife.
More surprising was what happened when there were kids and mom worked more:
Being away from home -- how much is okay?
I know I’m approximately the 100 millionth parent to struggle with the question of being away from her most precious human being.
I’ve read the research on healthy and happy kids in daycare (indeed, I share it with my readers a lot).
I loved my son’s daycare and I love his preschool — packed with valuable experiences like building community, learning to trust other adults, forming relationships, and yes, smearing himself with clay. That all happens while he’s away from me during the day, and it sounds pretty great.
So why is it something I struggle with on almost a daily basis? Continue reading »
Stay at home moms are economically vulnerable
A few months after her controversial Salon article, Regrets Of A Stay At Home Mom, was published, Katy Read hasn’t changed her tune. She was on NPR today telling Robin Young of Here & Now that she’d warn any young woman contemplating becoming a stay-at-home mom to rethink her position.
Katy’s reasoning is primarily financial. She quotes Ann Crittenden saying that having a child costs the average college-educated woman a million dollars in lifetime income. Those tender afternoons at the playground may seem priceless, but is staying home with your kid really worth a million dollars?
About 5 million moms (and 150,000 dads) have decided that being a stay-at-home parent is worth the costs. But do they know what those costs really are? Katy says no, and I think she’s right.
That's Dad, not the manny, engaging in unpaid labor. (He's probably Danish.)
What makes a good dad? Lots of things, not the least of which is participation in the daily grind of life. But a lot of men who may even be considered great dads are let off the hook in their countries, creating a huge gender gap.
A new study on the so-called unpaid economy (aka: housework and childcare) found that in all of the 29 industrialized countries considered in the study, women do more of everything at home than their male partners. On average, women spend almost 2.5 hours more per day on tasks like childcare, laundry and making dinner.
The good news for some countries,though, is that the amount each gender takes on is becoming more equal. The bad news is that there’s still room for lots of improvement in terms of equality (especially if you’re South Korea!). Continue reading »
Life is going to knock us down, in ways we won't see coming.
Yesterday, I read Katy Read’s “Regrets of a Stay-at-Home Mom” piece on Salon.com, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. She writes the article as a “warning to new mothers,” describing her own experience of how she opted-out of full-time work years ago to focus on her family, and now, after a divorce, is “permanently, financially screwed.”
I feel for her. She did what she thought was best for her family, and now she feels that she’s paying the price for it. Regret is a heavy burden. As I sat there reading her piece, I thought: “So, what’s the takeaway, here?” I mean, I may as well be Katy Read, in the years before she wrote this piece. When my oldest was born, I opted to forgo a full-time job with benefits in order to be at home more. I’ve been working in contract jobs ever since, taking on as much work as I can, while still trying to strike that balance between having time for the kids and all the things that need to happen for our family and our household to function. I have the sweetest, most supportive spouse. I believe that our marriage is strong, and I’d like to think that it will last ‘til death do us part. But, Katy thought that, too.
Dutch women work less than Americans, and are happier
Fewer than 10 percent of Dutch women are employed full-time. The pay gap between women and men in the Netherlands is the highest in Europe, and few Dutch women hold leadership roles in business or government.
That makes the Netherlands sound like the land feminism forgot. But women there are happy. Fewer than 4 percent wish they had more work hours or professional responsibilities, even though a quarter of them make so little money they can’t be considered financially independent.
By contrast, over 75 percent of employed American women work full-time. We worry constantly about our careers. Many of us define ourselves by what we get paid to do. But it doesn’t make us happy.
Careers, it seems, just aren’t that important to Dutch women. Overall, they report higher levels of satisfaction with their lives than American women. Are we doing it wrong? What do the Dutch know that we don’t?
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