College women, take heed: Prioritize marriage and family!

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Is it too late to bring up the idea of the “marital debt”? But I think @VonDerTann will lecture me… 🙃
 
Right. Paid daycare labor is replacing many of these networks. Also keep in mind the middle and upper classes (who really were the only ones where women stayed home full time and didn’t have some sort of income-earning job, post industrial revolution) frequently engaged maids or nannies.

And outside of Catholic circles, most women nowadays use birth control to limit their number of children, even stay at home mothers. Expecting a woman unsupported to take care of a significant number of children while her husband is at work isn’t always that realistic.
 
27lw said:
I think it’s important for all young people not to take on too much debt. Because Dad’s debt will hurt the family in financial ways, too, right?
I think the most practical advice for young women who hope to marry and have kids is to plan to get a career that they can do part-time for 15-20 years while the kids are young, or at least the option to do this. In other words, the most $$ per hour, if possible.
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I think that is very good advice. The reason why $ per hour is important is that you may need to be paying for childcare (or you may wind up in a high tax bracket because of husband’s income), so a working mom may need to make a lot more than a single woman to get the same bang for her work hours. Also, the more you make per hour, the fewer hours you need to work.

This is going to be hard to pull off, but it’s worth thinking about.
 
Irishmom2 said:
Plan to get a career they can do part time? I wonder if you would put the same limits on a man…So you are assuming that the mom stays home and the dad works full time. What about women that want to get married and be a doctor or something? Do that, go through all those years of training and give it up for a while, and the husband, who may make less keeps working?
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Weirdly, I’ve actually known a number of moms like that from double-doctor families at our private school. I’ve talked to a pediatrician mom who took a break while one of her kids was having trouble, a child psychiatrist mom of three who has also been taking a break (I think one of her kids was also having issues), and an orthodontist mom who found that when she had little kids, it was hard to keep her mind on work. I believe the pediatrician mom is back at work now and I know for a fact that the local child psychiatry scene is really hard to get an appointment, so I am pretty sure that the child psychiatrist mom can jump back in when she wants to.

The mind boggles, thinking about the kinds of student loans that some of those ladies may have, but I’ve seen this happen several times. As a SAHM with a much less practical degree who just went through several tight years of three private school tuitions and had to deal with some reality with regard to how much I can make an hour, I can’t help but notice that health care moms have a really nice niche in terms of flexibility and high hourly pay. Of course, we’ve got COVID now…
 
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I work with a woman who has seven children. She’s Catholic. Her husband decided he was more interested in being abusive (beat her up frequently) and committing serial adultery. He left her with all the kids and she had been a dedicated stay-at-home mom. He played games in court and dragged things out. She had to scramble to go back to school and get a job that would actually pay the bills. It would have been easier had she done that before kids. As it was, she had a rough couple of years struggling with going to school and working a crappy job before getting qualified to get a better one. She did all of this without her ex husband helping even remotely with their kids. She told me she had to rely on her older kids to help out and she wished it was different, but she had no choice.
 
Yes, if she would have had even the option of high dollar part-time work, she would have been in better shape. That’s too bad. By the end I would think he had to pay a lot in support / back support, no?
 
Lifeisbeautiful3 said:
While understanding that littles do well with their stay at home parent, I’ve often wondered what a stay at home spouse does when the kids are off at school.
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My wife would volunteer at the school(s). Who do you think plans all the parties and extra stuff? Who comes in and reads to the kids, helps out in the classroom? Who leads scouts? Who gathers the supplies for school projects?

She was also always there for a kid who was sick. My kids (in their twenties now) said that, after hearing from friends, having a parent ready to be there when they were sick instead of the parents arguing whose turn it was to stay home was something they always remembered and were always grateful for.

There is an intangible there. Also, unscientifically, I think the pace is a little slower and less stressful in a family with a SAHM(D).

If this doesn’t fit your situation or experience, I don’t mean to offend.
 
VonDerTann said:
–By the same token, we know many SAHMs who - despite being college-educated (or more) literally can’t hold a conversation about finances; current events, etc., despite their education. All they seem able to talk about is their kids - who are invariably over-parented. Many have waaaaay too much time on their hands - after doing their kids homework, school projects , etc. (our DD did her own). To many SAHMs, that’s what “stay at home parenting” really is: Doing things the kids should do.

–For that matter, in all these studies where dad works and mom “parents”…do the parents really have anything in common after a few years? In studies of deca-millionaires, (net worth of a least 10 million), what is the #1 commonality of such couples? “partners in money, partners in life,” i.e. mom & dad are each married to their first spouse and are true equals, i.e., not dad married to a housefrau.
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Two points:
  1. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but everybody with school-age kids is homeschooling right now. Any family with two full-time workers and kids has been struggling since March. A lot of schools are not going to be open in person this fall for at least a couple of months–and some of them are on track to be closed until January. In the current environment, it’s extremely helpful if both spouses don’t need to work 40+ hours a week.
  2. There’s no reason that “partners in money” requires that both couples currently be fully employed. Otherwise, every couple would be a marital failure the day either of them retired. Speaking as a) both a SAHM and b) a personal finance nerd, it’s possible to be a bad financial partner to your spouse while working (even working a lot) and also possible to be a good financial partner while not earning at all.
 
There are a lot more male nurses now. I also know a number of male nurses for whom it is a second career. Also, despite what some think, most of them aren’t gay.
 
Angel_Gabriel said:
Well I’m currently a full time SAHM…prior to COVID I worked part time (10-15 hrs a week). I do have free time each week but it’s not b/c I’m busy doing my kids’ chores and school projects. It’s mainly b/c I purposefully don’t over-schedule myself or my family. I consider myself the house manager and my job is to over see the kids doing their chores correctly and getting their school work done. They need to be taught how to clean and cook and eventually do laundry…you know, life skills ;).
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Yeah, there are a lot of different models of SAHM-ing. I personally don’t see a lot of the type of SAHM VonDerTann describes, perhaps because there are a lot of moms of 3+ in my peer group, and we moms of 3+ have no interest in doing our kids’ projects for them.

Pre-COVID, my family had paid housecleaning help twice a month. That meant that I only had to do spot cleaning and decluttering and the kids had to pick up their stuff. COVID has been a completely new parenting environment for us. For the first couple months, on top of unexpected homeschooling and a lot of other inconveniences (like frantic Soviet style shopping), I also needed to do a sort of heavy cleaning boot camp with my teens, where I’d walk a kid through cleaning a bathroom, walk another kid through cleaning a bathroom, scrub down a powder room by myself, and then clean the master bath with my husband. (Yeah, 3.5 baths.) Then, on a different day, I walked the teens through Roomba-ing, vacuuming and wet mopping all of the floors in a nearly 3,000 sq. ft. house. (Yeah, I’ve had a lot of second thoughts about having a big house during COVID.) We eventually brought our cleaners back to work once a month, but the teens and I are still doing a lot of heavy cleaning mid-month. The teens also do a fair amount of cooking and cooking help, and my oldest is now in charge of her own laundry.

I am not interested in doing all the housework for 5 people all by myself.

(Pre-COVID, I had been doing at-home editing projects for a couple of years, but my employer’s pipeline is kind of empty right now due to COVID.)
 
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Wow, Xantippe, haven’t seen you in forever! Hope you’re well.

Like a fool, I responded to my own post.

-Von.
 
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Lifeisbeautiful3 said:
While understanding that littles do well with their stay at home parent, I’ve often wondered what a stay at home spouse does when the kids are off at school.
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I don’t think I’ve ever done a full year as an SAHM with kids in school and no paying work, but here are some ideas:

–Grocery shop when it’s almost empty
–Other solo shopping
–Errands
–Doctor/dental/therapy apts. for self and kids (there may be a lot if a kid has any issues)
–Doing phone calls that need to be done 9-5 and keeping up with school emails and paperwork; other family clerical work
–Decluttering and household organizing
–Being actually caught up with laundry
–Home improvements
–Volunteering/Help local family and friends
–Showing up to daytime school events
–Exercise
–After school pick-up and childcare (a lot of schools get out way before the working day is over)
–Be home with sick kids (I see that our school is going to be requiring a 10 day quarantine for COVID exposure or getting COVID)
–Be at home for half-days, teacher in-service days, holidays and summer vacation (there are only 180 days of school in the year and the year is 365 days long).
–Be at home to deal with tradespeople and major deliveries.
 
VonDerTann said:
Wow, Xantippe, haven’t seen you in forever! Hope you’re well.
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Thanks! We’re in a COVID hot spot, but getting better. I have a college freshman! Baby Girl (age 7) and I have been homeschooling hard since the school shutdown in March. I’ve actually homeschooled her a couple hours a week all summer.

The kids are supposedly going back to school in two weeks, but I’m kind of expecting them back pretty soon…

Correction: I’ve been homeschooling Baby Girl a couple hours a day all summer. It’s pretty light fair (a variety of math workbooks, some handwriting, some read alouds, some joint reading and some independent reading), but we’ve been very consistent in working Monday-Saturday.
 
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It’s hard for a woman to take care of several children all by herself. I babysat two toddlers at once and I nearly lost my mind. How much more three or four or five.

Remember Andrea Yates? Suffering from post partum psychosis while taking care of five children all under the age of eight and having to homeschool them.

I know her case is extreme but it’s no joke to take care of lots of children, homeschool them without any support.
 
I was just thinking about the Andrea Yates tragedy. Imagine if she had had some support from other moms or family helping out. The whole thing may have been avoided! It really does take a village to raise a child…so much easier on everyone. i hate how our society has spread everyone out. I hope that if I’m blessed to be a Grandma that I will be able to help my kids out with childcare…my mother in law did that for me and it was the biggest help ever!
 
I was also thinking of Andrea’s husband.

How could he have missed all the signs? She was literally psychotic. Didn’t he realize there was something off?
 
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Yeah I honestly don’t understand that either. Were they part of a fundamentalist Christian sect? I know they push the whole “mom at home/homeschooling/make everything yourself” ideology a lot.
 
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Yes they were part of the quiverfull movement the same movement that the Duggars were a part of.

Not only the Moms at home but daughters at home movement. Women were not to be financially independent nor were they expected to have higher education. All women were supposed to be wives and mothers. Marriage was seen as an obligation for both men and women.
 
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