A secondary but important objective of parenting is the survival of the parents. When we pay for quality childcare we are investing not only in the care of our children, but also in the value that the parents can gain from having the freedom to pursue their own lives. Role models are important to all of us. It is a positive influence on children of both sexes to see that both their parents have their own lives and interests.
Other women have often had an easier time of balancing work and family. However, it’s important to recognise that women, once they have family, rarely take on the level of stress and responsibility that men often do. Women accept that they will need some energy left to spend on family. Many women are more accepting of this choice because they are less ambitious for their career, they prefer low stress employment and they do not mind too much about the loss of earning power, personal freedom and personal status.
Older women sometimes are disapproving of the modern opportunities available to women but also they simply lack the relevant experience. When I started out as a mother I couldn’t find anyone to advise about mixing bottle and breast feeding. My experience was that it is fairly easy to introduce a bottle once breast feeding is established. I used this technique to get a break for one feed of the day. By bottle feeding during the day and breast feeding overnight I could work and still keep breastfeeding for the first three months.
Dorothy Einon, psychologist and lecturer, has written a book called ‘Learning Early’. “No child needs a perfect mother or a constant diet of child-centred time. We are raising real children for a real world. … Good parenting is about selecting what it is important to spend time doing.” The Times newspaper Nov 9, 1998.
Having it all
Judy, a woman in her sixties, married in the 1950’s. Judy never expected to have a career. She positively wanted to spend her life raising a family. Another woman in her fifties commented: “I have been fortunate, to have been both a mother at home and then been able to go back to work without coming up against as many negative attitudes or conflicts as perhaps you have yourself. My choice has been to play the roles of wife and mother without any feelings of being second class …”.
Relatively few mothers work in full-time demanding careers distant from the home and family. Society has encouraged women to aspire to the same achievements as men without any consideration for who will cover the role of the housewife in future. The implication is that we can all achieve this idyllic life and ‘have it all’. The reality is that the couple has to cover this role between them paying others to help where they can.
As a result both the man and the woman have to work harder than men used to in earlier generations. Not only are the hours longer (full-time work plus work in the home) but the skills required are more demanding. Both men and women have to be good at two roles that previously were split between men and women. The skills required to manage the family home are often quite different to those required to succeed in the workplace.