| Author | Comment | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Matthaeus Flexibilis
|
What good is stay-at-home motherhood? |
Lead | ||
|
Why is stay-at-home motherhood to be valued and esteemed? Why should one want to undertake such a calling? What is its worth to us, besides the obvious of
perpetuating the species? Isn't it mind-numbing drudgery piled atop repetitive, menial labor with no remuneration?
|
||||
|
|
||||
Perisseuo |
#1 | |||
|
Apparently, you have not held many jobs. They may pay good but glamorous they are not.
Motherhood is a calling by God and with it requires responsibilities in raising children through training them in the admonishing of the Lord. Why would the parents want to sub-contract out that responsibility, though it may only be for a partial amount of time. Child-rearing should be esteemed greatly but for some reason in our society it is not. We no longer hold to a biblical view of family. It's kinda ironic that child-rearing is not respected, but we worship our children. At least we say we do. Sadly, we mostly idolize our children, not train our children. It may be because we spend so little time with them.
John Chaney
"having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith . . ." (Colossians 2:7 NASB) |
||||
|
|
||||
Matthaeus Flexibilis |
Jobs | #2 | ||
Perisseuo wrote: I am not denigrating motherhood or elevating office or other types of jobs, though some are more "glamorous" (or at least enjoyable) than others.
I am looking for others' theological, cultural, and personal opinions on the motherhood. Why should someone pursue stay-at-home motherhood rather than a
job providing economic income? What good is it?
|
||||
|
|
||||
JohnStevenson1 |
#3 | |||
Matthaeus Flexibilis wrote: It depends what you want in life. If you want to raise godly, intelligent, respectful children who love the Lord, then that takes time. If you want to make a bit more money and allow your children's peer group to be the primary educators in their lives, then that is also an option. It seems to me that if you don't want to raise children, then I think the better option is not to have them in the first place. |
||||
|
|
||||
deins |
Homemaking | #4 | ||
|
Try Titus 2:4,5. The biblical mother lays up treasures in Heaven rather than economic treasures on earth. The answer to your question is obvious.
|
||||
|
|
||||
Goldberry of Withywindle |
More on this later, but... | #5 | ||
|
as you probably realize, the "household drudgery" thing is quite the logical mess.
If I were to stop being a SAHM, the laundry would not begin to do itself, nor would clothing instantaneously become dirt and wrinkle-repellent. Someone would still have to do it. Either I would be adding to my "household drudgery" by incorporating "workplace drudgery" and then coming home and having to do the "househodl drudgery," or someone else in the family would have to do it (still no net gain in the number of potentially creative human beings engaged in "drudgery"), or I would have to pay someone else to escape "household drudgery" by coming to my home and performing...."household drudgery." And of course, laundry is a rather trivial example -- the whole idea of hiring a baby sitter to sit home with your kids because no woman wants to be stuck home with kids is a little confusing as well. And contrary to Hollywood image, "drudgery" accurately describes the work that the average woman (as opposed to the denizens of movies, sitcoms, and "Sex in the City") performs when she leaves behind "household drudgery." My husband works at an electronics manufacturing plant, and he has daily interaction with numerous women who would far rather be home watching over their kids, than glamorously assembling printed circuit boards. Every time you go anywhere and see a tired waitress, a harried female service employee, or a middle-aged female operating the cash register at Walmart, ask yourself how well she's self-actualizing on the job. On the other hand, one can recognize that keeping a family clean, well fed, smoothly functioning, and having "margin" to recreate and relax because someone's regularly taking care of the basic needs, is only as mind-numbing as you let it be. I know women who have raised homemaking to a genuine art form, and not because they "fuss and overdo," but because they won't allow their minds to be numbed, but insist on using them on the job they actually have. So there's a lot that can be said about the positives of stay at home motherhood, some of which has been said, and some of which I may get back to saying later, but IMO it's almost unnecessary even to go there. Simply defeating the baseless proposition that stay at home motherhood consists wholly and solely of "mind-numbing drudgery piled atop repetitive, menial labor with no remuneration" is sufficient to answer the question as posed, ISTM.
~Jane~
Suddenly I was abuzz with ideas. What about issuing stickers printed with the words, "This apostrophe is not necessary"? What about telling people to shin up ladders at dead of night with an apostrophe-shaped stencil and a tin of paint? Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas? -- Eats, Shoots and Leaves
Last Edited By: Goldberry of Withywindle 06/08/08 11:08:45.
Edited 1 time.
|
||||
|
|
||||
Matthaeus Flexibilis |
I get your point, but ... | #6 | ||
|
what about an arrangement that split the household duties more evenly, like what is described in this lengthy article? An excerpt:
|
||||
|
|
||||
Goldberry of Withywindle |
How does that solve the problem? | #7 | ||
|
Why is two people "wasting" half their lives doing "meaningless drudgery" really better than one person doing it all? You're still
getting net, one wasted life.
And again, that all depends on the premise that doing laundry or taking care of a sick child or making sure somebody gets to a soccer game is somehow more demeaning and "drudgeful" and whatever than slamming plastic parts together, or doing exactly the the same job at someone else's home or restaurant or clinic, or whatever, and in fact that it's such horrible work at all. A single warrant for the premise, please? I know a guy who earns a decent salary as a "facility manager" for an industrial plant. He's basically doing the same tasks as a stay-at-home mom, minus the nose-wiping, only a bit more mechanical-looking and on a larger scale than family home would be. But since his wife is a post-op nurse at a Shriner's hospital, their family careers add up to pretty much the same thing as a SAHM's, only on a larger scale. And yet, oddly, neither of them considers their work demeaning drudgery. (In fairness, they're not the sorts to look down on home-and-child oriented work, either.) How can this be?
~Jane~
Suddenly I was abuzz with ideas. What about issuing stickers printed with the words, "This apostrophe is not necessary"? What about telling people to shin up ladders at dead of night with an apostrophe-shaped stencil and a tin of paint? Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas? -- Eats, Shoots and Leaves |
||||
|
|
||||
Matthaeus Flexibilis |
Drudgery | #8 | ||
And again, that all depends on the premise that doing laundry or taking care of a sick child or making sure somebody gets to a soccer game is somehow more demeaning and "drudgeful" and whatever than slamming plastic parts together, or doing exactly the the same job at someone else's home or restaurant or clinic, or whatever, and in fact that it's such horrible work at all. A single warrant for the premise, please?Jane, I see that I need to clarify. The questions as posed were intended to be provocative, not an accurate statement of the matter, though a friend recently put such questions to me in similar fashion. My hope was that someone (really, my hope was for you in particular, but all insights would be welcome) to come along and lay waste to said premises from the vantage point personal experience. I can formulate significant arguments against them, but I do so as a man who works outside the home (a fact which doesn't matter logically but does matter emotionally). Now then, the rejoinder I would anticipate is, What if the woman can get a different, higher paying job and with her income hire someone to run the house? That way she can pursue nursing or pharmaceuticals (or whatever), for which she has been trained and which she enjoys immensely, while the "drudgery" (read: repetitive house work) is passed on to hired help. Or adopt a split plan like in that article. It sounds as though the godly wife in Proverbs 31 works outside the home, as it were, in addition to overseeing the household. |
||||
|
|
||||
Goldberry of Withywindle |
As for Proverbs 31.... | #9 | ||
|
her "outside the home work" seems to be an extension of overseeing the household, not entirely distinct from it. ISTM that's a is a good lesson
for those who advocate some of the stricter, narrower views of what homemaking is or should be.
I realize you weren't framing those questions as accurate -- but ISTM that if I can defeat the accuracy of the propositions, then the whole premise of "why would anyone want to do anything so disgusting, boring, and stinky instead of something else" vacates the entire question. If you want to ask why anyone should make homemaking their profession, I suppose that's a different question, but it's not based on the false premise that it's a disgusting profession that any sane person would properly despise and seek to escape. Why do I have to defend it against the putative greater inherent desirability of other professions, if there's no reason to see it as undesirable in the first place? If money's the issue -- yeah, many homemakers could make more money elsewhere. (OTOH, a high percentage of them would barely break even, since they lack the skills to pursue an exciting, rewarding career that brings in significantly more than the increased overhead costs of paying someone else to do some of your domestic tasks, and doing others of them in a less economically efficient way -- e.g., convenience food.) But unless money's the only issue, you still have to explain why the nurse or pharmacist is automatically assumed to be more challenged and rewarded doing nursing or pharmaceuticals than homemaking. The common assumption is that she would be, but -- why?Why is every outside professional career considered a better fulfillment of one's gifts and desires than homemaking? There's hardly a gift I can think of that can't well be put to use in homemaking. Anyhow, I doubt that anyone engaged in this conversation is willing to make money the prime determining issue in how a person's adult life should be spent, so I'm pretty much writing that off as being of limited relevance from the outset. What you're doing and what I'm doing are clearly different -- but what I'm doing is questioning a lot of default assumptions that, when carefully examined, IMO make the question a lot different than the way it's ordinarily considered. I'm not attributing what I consider the unthinking simplemindedness of the question to you personally -- I suppose you could say I'm being provocative right back atcha. Or, to put it yet another way, too often I see the answers to this question boil down to, "Here are the reasons why a woman should lay down her life and forget about having any work-related pleasure out of the decades of her children's childhoods, out of noble Christian sacrifice. Isn't it worth it, for the eternal benefits reaped by the family?" And my answer is, "Yes, it would be, even if it were that kind of colossal self-sacrifice. But viewing it as giving up everything worth doing for the sake of doing a lot of frustrating, unfulfilling stuff that can only be considered endurable because of the 'ultimate' benefits reaped, is begging a VERY large question."
~Jane~
Suddenly I was abuzz with ideas. What about issuing stickers printed with the words, "This apostrophe is not necessary"? What about telling people to shin up ladders at dead of night with an apostrophe-shaped stencil and a tin of paint? Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas? -- Eats, Shoots and Leaves
Last Edited By: Goldberry of Withywindle 06/12/08 17:21:09.
Edited 1 time.
|
||||
|
|
||||
| What good is stay-at-home motherhood? | 06/06/08 16:09:41 | Matthaeus Flexibilis |
| Re: What good is stay-at-home motherhood? | 06/06/08 16:34:43 | Perisseuo |
| Jobs | 06/07/08 11:26:18 | Matthaeus Flexibilis |
| Re: What good is stay-at-home motherhood? | 06/07/08 21:19:27 | JohnStevenson1 |
| Homemaking | 06/07/08 22:28:58 | deins |
| More on this later, but... | 06/08/08 11:04:44 | Goldberry of Withywindle |
| I get your point, but ... | 06/12/08 13:49:00 | Matthaeus Flexibilis |
| How does that solve the problem? | 06/12/08 14:46:20 | Goldberry of Withywindle |
| Drudgery | 06/12/08 16:26:45 | Matthaeus Flexibilis |
| As for Proverbs 31.... | 06/12/08 17:16:21 | Goldberry of Withywindle |
|
|