Women, motherhood and modern society’s values
As a “stay-at-home mum”, I can safely say I feel no guilt about choosing to abandon my professional career in order to look after my three children (Working mothers don’t need to feel guilt, 26 June). Any guilt that working or stay-at-home mothers have is a result of a society that constantly peddles the belief that us mums can have it all. We can’t, and we have to make difficult choices that usually result in us feeling that we have sacrificed either spending time with our children by working or our own education and career by not working. And these are the women that actually have a choice; many do not and end up working hours that aren’t child-friendly while plugging the gaps in childcare with partners, grandparents, and friends.
What women would really like is to have a genuine choice whether to work or stay at home with no stigma attached to either. This means an economy that pays a wage enough to live on without both parents needing to work and consistently sympathetic employers that can offer flexible working hours. Our society needs to start respecting women who stay at home with their children and appreciate that a woman’s contribution to society is not necessarily immediately financially assessable.
My life since leaving the world of work three years ago is one of sorting the children out, looking after the house, being a school governor, helping the PTA, going on school trips, attending school information sessions and events, socializing and even reading the Guardian now and again. It is as fulfilling as any job could be and none of it is paid. I consider myself extremely lucky and guilt-free.
Dr. Julia Williams
Shrewsbury, Shropshire
Dr. Julia Williams
Shrewsbury, Shropshire
When I was a young girl, my mother, a stay-at-home mum, would tell me over and over that, if I wanted to follow my dreams and have choices, I needed to get a college degree and learn how to drive. She wanted me to be safe, happy, successful. That is what we all want for our children. We are, however, losing sight of what success is. Humanity is working hard to allow individuals to live creatively and joyfully, rather than simply working to survive. A full life includes laughter, play, love. If my children make 4% less money than their peers but are not plagued by depression and stress; if they go to sleep giggling, and know the incomparable warmth of a little body melting into theirs in complete trust and dependency, I will be deliriously happy. They will have succeeded. It is not that career success is unimportant or unnecessary, far from it, it is simply that it is not the whole picture. To have only a career and barely enough energy to see your child is not a true choice.
So, to Dr Allen (Daughters of working mothers do better in life – and sons may be more caring too, 25 June), and her concern that “women who don’t [work] … have to think hard about how the role they have within the household is going to impact their children’s perceptions of what it means to be a woman and to be a mother”, I’d like to answer: I hope my being at home will signal to my children that loving them, enjoying them, and enjoying myself is more important than an extra 4%. I hope it tells them that women, and all people, are more than workers. We work to live, we don’t live to work. I hope it tells them that we must fight for real choice: for a society that values caring, and structures paid work so that both women and men can participate in caring and thus be truly fulfilled, successful humans. (And, by the way, I followed my mother’s advice.)
Dr. Karem Roitman
Oxford
Dr. Karem Roitman
Oxford
• I was delighted to see Alice O’Keeffe write that the left should stand up for “stay-at-home” parents (theguardian.com, 26 June). The right has certainly cast adrift parents who wish not to use third-party care for their children, and it is becoming a revolutionary (and firmly feminist) concept to imagine that equality is not only achieved via full participation in the paid workplace.
In the UK, the work of caring for children goes completely unrecognized in the tax system (unlike the vast majority of OECD countries) and unpaid care is valued at £343bn per year by the ONS. Someone needs to stand up for these people who contribute billions to the economy every year but nothing to GDP and therefore have no “value”.
When one parent opts to leave paid work in order to care for and support a growing family, it costs a whole salary. Meanwhile, families on two substantial incomes can continue to claim child benefit (long after the single-income family has lost theirs) and they pay far less tax. This is not about somehow indulging cupcake-baking mummies, this is about leveling the playing field so that individual families can make sensible choices about what is good for them over the entire period of having dependent children at home.
Melanie Tibbs
Shaftesbury, Dorset
Melanie Tibbs
Shaftesbury, Dorset
• Alice O’Keefe airs some important issues. Increasingly, late modern western society defines women, as indeed women define themselves, through roles/achievements external to motherhood. It is for these roles they are rewarded and valorized by society. For life, roles are about tangible and present-time outcomes – “What have I achieved?/am achieving?” “How is this manifested in my career progress/salary?” And “How good am I at juggling the different elements of my life?”.
Parenting, on the other hand, is and has ever been, a “future-oriented” enterprise – it’s not about “product”, but “process”. Therefore, raising a child, in whatever context of care arrangement, must be about parents’ grasp of the connectedness of different elements of a young life – the most critical being the first three years – and the ways in which early experiences can significantly affect later life. As Daniel Barenboim recently pointed out: “It’s the total structure that matters – in life as in music.”
Parents and expectant parents would do well to inform themselves about this connectedness. To help with this they might access the latest findings from neuroscience concerning infant brain development highlighting ways of ensuring and securing emotional health in youngsters. They could start by taking a look at the research summaries on whataboutthechildren.org.uk and my Facebook item: Motherhood – challenging the zeitgeist.
Parents, in general, need much greater valuing and support than is currently available to them. And children’s needs should be at the forefront of all our concerns, both in policy as in practice.
Dr. Carole Ulanowsky
Nottingham
Dr. Carole Ulanowsky
Nottingham
• My eldest daughter has just turned 40. Ever since I became a mother I have striven to read the Guardian every day. All that time there have been conflicting articles about the value or not of going out of the house to work. When my mother was forced out of teaching in 1945, her increasing resentment at this treatment was a permanent feature of my childhood after I arrived in 1947. The notion of her returning to work when I was small was impossible. How I wish she had left us with a childminder.
When my daughter was born, I was given a choice whether to return to teaching or stay at home. I am grateful for this option. Of course, it was wrong, but when I married my salary could not be taken into account. However, it enabled me to do what I wanted. I could stay and bring up our four children before returning to teaching. My children do not have this luxury. I deeply resent the assertion by the academic quoted that because I did this I was giving my children the wrong message. They all went to good universities with subsequent good careers.
I was never bored, in part with thanks to the Guardian, Mary Stott and the now almost forgotten National Housewives Register, inaugurated by the Guardian women’s page. It’s the ability to choose that matters.
Janet Mansfield
Aspatria, Cumbria
Source:>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>HereJanet Mansfield
Aspatria, Cumbria
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