Is the SAHM the new status symbol?
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Is the SAHM the new status symbol?
| Tue, 09-23-2003 - 10:36pm |
In the 70's and 80's women fought to get into the workforce (the whole Ms. magazine generation)...and then the tide turned in the late 1990's when more women started to stay home by choice. Now, it seems like being a SAHM is a status symbol....and superior to being a working mom.
Kat

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I dispise the cold but i do miss the autumn in Sweden GEORGEOUS and New England...we always try to get back to the cape for buffet, 4 of july in chatham and cranberry harvest festival but since dd it has gottne hard to travel and with no5 i wont be traveling anytime soon and it just to cold round those parts...that is why I live on a island in the tropic's. We have a GREAT ann taylor outlet here.
Edited 10/4/2003 10:13:59 AM ET by silverunity
I live in a resort area so the service industry is one of the top jobs here it is one of the higher paying jobs.
Edited 10/4/2003 11:00:34 AM ET by silverunity
There is a really simple way to refute this claim without revealing anything personal....just write a decent sized post in Norwegian. I'm not too bad at reading Norwegian and I'll happily reply in bad Swedish :-).
Laura
Edited 10/4/2003 10:27:09 AM ET by silverunity
LOL!
Laura
First of all, I want to tell you that what you are saying in most of your posts sound a lot like I would have sounded about 15 years ago. (I'm mellowing in my old age, LOL!) I don't think there are many people who go to law school who aren't extremely achievement-oriented, or even achievement-driven, perfectionistic types who don’t really understand how people can stand to breathe if they aren’t riding herd on themselves from sunrise to sunset. God knows I was eager to be all things to all people all the time, and a lot of my self worth was related to my better-than-the-average-bear ability to pull that off. My doctor DH is much the same way. We probably either would have been divorced or had breakdowns a long time ago, though, if we hadn’t learned that it works much better for us take a long-term approach, and a team approach, to the many goals we have, and do our usual perfectionistic handling of one thing or by one person at a time than it is for us both to try to fight on multiple fronts at once. We have had more than enough issues within our family to keep us in a state of near-constant stress since my DS was born – e.g. in those 5.5 years we've lived 5 different places in 3 different states, I've lost 3 grandparents, my mother was stricken with ovarian cancer (she's doing extremely well now), every year of the last 3, DS has gone into new pre-and now elementary schools with knowing no one, my DH’s job is exceedingly stressful, and for most of that time we've also been unsuccessfully pursuing various painful, humiliating and disruptive infertility treatments (you may have seen my post 91 on the "Comments Sought" thread). It has fallen to me, for now, to have primary responsibility for a lot of the less glamorous (and less respected) but nonetheless important family tasks, such as making educational and living arrangement decisions for my family, for volunteering (usually at my son’s schools), for housekeeping (which I detest and stink at, but there it is), for ensuring that my son has appropriate social relationships, for transportation, for providing the primary role model for his moral development, and for seeing my son and husband through all these stressors. (Yes, that usually includes making them lunch, wink, wink! Doesn’t make me subservient, makes me a team player, even though no one ever makes me lunch - they do other things to make my life possible.) It has fallen to my husband, for now, to do the more visibly “societally useful” things, that is working at a job (valuable to us financially – and the GNP, wink wink! - valuable to society by way of blindness prevention), and as you mentioned in one of your posts, providing a good role model in terms of the importance of doing the same (as well as being an example of an involved and loving dad). This hasn’t been a particularly sexist or even a financial decision on our part to have me be the SAHP, just one based on our personalities, the relative societal ease of being a SAHM v. a SAHD, and the fact that it’s easier to float in and out of the workforce as a lawyer than it is as a surgeon. Only now that our lives are beginning to stabilize (knock on wood) are we able to begin to consider taking on roles which might overlap each other or require accommodations on the part of the other partner, including volunteer opportunities and career aspirations which suit our own personal interests more than familial necessities. I must say it really feels good to be ABLE to focus on something other than my family's problems now. Perhaps the career bug will hit me again sometime soon as well now that I am able even to consider it.
But enough excuses for not doing tons more being a SAHM right now. (For the sake of this argument, I'm not counting my volunteering at church of school, which I have done for a long time.) I want to take issue with your apparent claim that having a job, or even being hardworking at that job, is equivalent to making a "societal contribution." There sure appear to be a lot of hardworking career folks over at Enron who did society much more damage than good! But my main reason for pestering you about what you felt your societal contribution was actually isn’t to tease you, I was curious if you’d actually come up with the same one I do on your own. I think that by far the most important “societal contribution” that either you OR I are making is that we are doing what is best for our family. (And that’s probably why we both disdain people who do nothing to benefit anything but themselves – I just think there are as many “career people” who do that as there are SAH people. They’re just “covered” better because they can point to their incomes, even if unnecessary, as a benefit, when their real justification for what they do is the ego gratification of working.) See, I don't see there to be a viable distinction between "making a contribution to one's family" and "making a contribution to society." After all, what is a family but a microcosm of society? Really, if every person truly did what was in their own family’s best interests to the very best of their ability, only people without such capacity and people without families could need societal assistance, and I would imagine the volunteering spirit of most people would be more than sufficient to cover that need. With very few exceptions, I think the most important contribution you OR I or perhaps any parent can make is making sure that any children for whom we are responsible are properly provided for and raised to be decent, honest, moral, thoughtful, caring, and yes, hardworking and socially conscientious human beings. I can’t find where, but I know you’ve mentioned astronauts as being people you respect for their societal contribution. (A little less obvious than that of a doctor going to a third world country, which I think was another example you gave, but I’ll roll with astronaut for now.) Well, granted, in general I agree, but said astronaut might be doing society more harm than good if he or she is such an absentee that s/he ends up raising a bunch of depressed, spoiled drug dependent pregnant teens, for example. (Of course I’m not suggesting that ALL parents who end up with kids with problems are poor parents.) For the record I don’t think that there is any one answer for what’s “best” for a family. My family and I believe that having one SAH parent is best – FOR US, and for now. I perfectly well respect your judgment that your family’s interests are best served by you and your DH both WOH. Finally, I frankly don’t believe that “what’s best for society?” is more than a makeweight factor in very many people’s consideration of whether to work a child is born – granted, it can give you that nice warm fuzzy feeling about what doing whatever you DO choose to do, and there are people on both ends of the spectrum who BELIEVE that’s why they do what they do (Dr. Laura’s incessant harping comes to mind on the SAH side, for instance!) but I still don’t believe it’s significant in why people REALLY choose what they choose. I believe for nearly EVERY family, “what’s best for my family?” is, and should be, the critical factor.
‘Nuff said. How ‘bout that societal contribution of yours now, or are you content to go with the one I gave you? LOL!
Edited 10/6/2003 9:58:53 AM ET by cocoapop
Property settlements are done by equitable distribution or community property laws, depending on the state. Spousal support is rare, temporary and not a heck of a lot of money. In the case of a long term SAHM, it probably would end within a reasonable period for the SAH to acquire some job skills.
Child support is figured by formula.
Laura
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