
Opportunity for women is a beautiful, wonderful thing.
I want my daughter to have the freedom to put her mind to whatever she likes. But opportunity has come at a cost in the form of some very complex, fundamental social complications.
We don’t seem ready to admit that taking a mum away from her kids and putting her in an office will have ramifications. Without touching a single research paper, I feel like biology is screaming this at us in the form of boobs, vaginas, hormones, mother guilt and a childhood anxiety epidemic.
The momentum on equality for women seemed to pause once we all got jobs.
It was like all the men of the world leaned back in their office chairs, breathed a collective, exasperated sigh of relief and said ‘Happy now?’ No, John, I’m not happy. I’m mad we didn’t push for more. You see, I would like to have some more progressive options when it comes to having a family other than ‘give your kids to someone else while you go to work’.
Surely we can come up with something a little more sophisticated than just outsourcing child raising duties or swapping the mum for the dad or freezing our eggs. Why can’t we freeze our careers?
Is extended maternity leave good for parents and employers? Post continues below.
I want to be able to choose to be mother, and only that, and not feel the oppressive weight of expectation to have a career at the same time.
I want my daughter to be able choose to take a decade out of the workforce, be valued by society for her choice, and then be supported and equipped to re-establish her career, rather than feeling the whole time that the workplace has moved on and that she has lost all that she has worked so hard for.
I want her to live in a society that values full time mothering as much as it values a pay cheque or a job title.
Support for women who choose to step back from their profession and physically raise their own kids until they go to school is severely lacking in this country. It’s lacking in government policy, in the workplace and in society in general.
I feel compelled to stay tangled up in this weird, unsatisfying mess of trying to have a career and raise young kids at the same time. I am an undeniable product of a society that tells girls they can and should be able to have it all.
Top Comments
This is all well and good, but the reality is, stay at home mums can be setting themselves up to live in poverty in their later years. You have no super, you have no qualifications or experience outside the home. You can't just put a career on hold for 10 years, given how much changes in that time.
It's also the case that children of working mums grow up happy and healthy, there's evidence that these children have better successes in education than children of SAHM . Women have always worked, throughout history, often with babies strapped to them. It was an economic anomaly after WWII that allowed women to choose to stay at home, as male incomes were sufficient in providing for a family. Being a SAHM is a privilege and it pays to remember that your kids don't need you at home with them 24/7, it's not about quantity of time spent, its quality. What I'd like to see is more blending of family and work life, with paternity and maternity leave and where mothers are empowered to get back into work and study with their children in tow (or with their fathers, either or is fine), or at least close by in workplace childcare centres.
What about the mums who simply don't have a choice but to stay home, at least for the first couple of years.
My daughter was born 16 weeks early, she spent 4 months in hospital before she came home. She was intubated for the first 2 months of her life and came home on oxygen, which she stayed on for 6 months. The prematurity and intubation caused chronic lung disease and she has a weakened immune system which means she is so vulnerable to infections. The rule of "kids need germs to strengthen immune systems" does not apply to prems a simple cold or cough to you can hospitalise my daughter so it's not safe for her to go into child care for the first 2-3 years and I don't have family/friends who can watch her so I can work, as much as I want to just for adult interaction that isn't baby related. Come winter we completely hibernate to keep her dry and warm and out of the elements and away from risks.
Now she doesn't have any disabilities to warrant any sort of carers allowance, there are no parenting payments because apparently my partner earns too much (45k/y and pays about 5k in child support to previous partner/child). But I still get the "so when will you go back to work" all the time.
Overall there needs to be better support for parents, there needs to be better acknowledgement that mums are working, but instead of leaving the house to work she just leaves her bed!
My work hours are from 7am- 11pm 7 days a week and that's if bubs sleeps through the night.
Why is it up to mothers to drop everything to care for a sick child? There may be "no choice" in the matter of a child needing care, but there IS the option of the father being the primary caretaker.