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WillyAL
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And yet, everyone seems to have survived - with all body parts intact.
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Kelfa28
Guest
Not really if the kids are exposed to it and the back yard is fenced in.
In fact, we had an old school push mower for a little while and I have video of my oldest, when she was 15 months, helping daddy push the mower.
She grab the lowest bar and my husband had the top part and they’d mow the lawn.
Now we own a regular mower and the older girls like to run around while daddy mows.
I’d only be worried if the yard wasn’t fenced in and hubby couldn’t hear what they were doing…but our backyard is probably one of the safer areas of the house.
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Hoosier_Daddy
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My kids literally fear the mower. They do not like it at all! But yet are fascinated by it. They watch from a safe distance and a look of worry on their faces. All five of them…
One of my daughters asked me if it hurt the grass…
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Kelfa28
Guest
I’ve told the kids that daddy just gives the grass a haircut.
Seems to work well with my kids.
They’ve watched daddy use clippers to cut his own hair…so I told them it’s the same thing.
They don’t have a fear of load noises anyway…there fears center around the dark.
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Giggly_Giraffe
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I may have the wrong impression of history, but it seems to me that SAHM typically had help from a nanny/maid. It seemed common in colonial up to about 1950 that hiring additional help was common for women. I’m surprised that the machines have diminished these extended family additions. In the households with greater incomes, men too had hired help with their chores (gardeners, butlers, drivers). Now we just seem so independent and proud to get help.
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Xantippe
Guest
Or, in poor families, there might still be a grandma, an auntie, a sister or an even poorer relation to lend a hand. You had to live with family members because you couldn’t afford not to live with them…
I feel like that a lot of our cultural norms represent a weird hybridization of “traditionalism” and feminism. There is a traditional ideal in the US of independence and self-sufficiency (but it’s largely a masculine ideal). Combine that with the pop feminist belief that women aren’t allowed to ever be weak or sick or need special consideration because of female stuff, and you have a very nasty synergy.
It’s an interesting fact that in the past, people had a much stronger (and I’d say much more realistic sense) of the physical vulnerability of the female state–pregnancy, breastfeeding, “female troubles,” etc. In contemporary times, though, the ideal is to just keep going with whatever you normally do up until the last minute, no matter what, be it work or running marathons.
runnersworld.com/newswire/woman-finishes-boston-while-34-weeks-pregnant
To not be able to keep up that pace is to be defective or a weakling, rather than a normal woman.
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Demetra2
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When I was a SAHM I did most of the housework because physically I was there and I had the time. It made sense. When my husband came home he pitched in with dinner cleanup and helping to put the kids to bed. Often I did those things too because he worked some evenings. My husband worked hard at his job but he also took over all the yard work and house projects. It is really a team effort and each couple has to figure out what make sense for them in a respectful way that involves appreciation.
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GreyWings
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Women should not be the bearers of all. Men should do their part.
If both work, both need to help around the house.
If one works and the other doesn’t, the one who doesn’t does the housework/cooking.
That’s only fair, IMO.
If both work, both need to help around the house.
If one works and the other doesn’t, the one who doesn’t does the housework/cooking.
That’s only fair, IMO.
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Xantippe
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I feel like that doesn’t account for the presence of children in the home.
A 100% home/work split with no home responsibilities for the working spouse might make some sort of sense in a family with school age children and an SAHM, but if you have a family with kids under 4, children that age need constant supervision during the hours that they are awake, which might easily mean 16 hours of on-duty time for the mother 7 days a week (particularly if there are two or more under 4s at home).
If dad is working 40 hours a week and mom is on duty 112 hours a week, that’s not very fair.
I feel like there needs to be some sort of rough parity between the amount of leisure that spouses get. Also I feel like saying “that’s not MY job!” a lot is not a recipe for a happy marriage if the person saying it is obviously enjoying a lot more leisure. (And that applies to either the primary at home spouse or the employed spouse.) There are lots of times when everybody needs to step up.
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pensmama87
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That’s pretty much the basis for how we divvy up stuff around here - making sure we get roughly equivalent leisure time. With all young children, we’re pretty much both always “on call.” I used to try to do everything at home including all the child care and almost had a mental breakdown. No bueno.
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Xantippe
Guest
One piece of propaganda I use on my family (and one child in particular) is, “Saturday is a work day.”
We try pretty hard to keep Sunday free of unnecessary work (school work, husband’s work, shopping, projects, etc.) but Saturday is not a holy day in our home. Everybody should expect to work on Saturday. If we don’t have to, if Saturday turns out to be a family fun day–fantastic–but nobody should expect to have no work on Saturday.
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pensmama87
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I think we adopted a similar model after you mentioned it on another thread.
We were actually able to get projects done for the first time ever since having children, and I quit feeling resentful that DH spent his Saturdays snoozing in front of the TV while I kept doing the same stuff I did the rest of the week. (A big part of that, of course, was that we’d never actually talked about it, so he thought everything was fine while I was going crazy.)
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Xantippe
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Awww! That’s very sweet.I think we adopted a similar model after you mentioned it on another thread.
It took us a long time to establish the system, but I’m very pleased with our Saturday-is-for-projects system. My husband is so fast when he has a block of two or three hours to do stuff and it almost never takes past lunchtime. At least for our family, doing a block of projects is so much more efficient and less stressful than doing one little project every week night.
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