What would you give up to stay home?
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| Sat, 08-05-2006 - 8:36am |
Hi everyone.
I have always said that staying home is so important to me that I would give up many things to be able to do that. We live in a very small home, I have no jewelry and we buy all our clothes at Walmart. I know that if I went back to work, we could afford more. But I would never trade being at home for a larger house or more luxuries.
However, after reading this board I have started to suspect that there are things I would not want to give up. If I couldn't send my kids to preschool a couple of hours a day, if I couldn't afford any after school activities like ballet lessons or if I could'nt afford any kind of summer program for them, I think I would have to find a way to go back to work. So basically, I'm perfectly happy to deny myself "things." But I would not want to take much away from the kids.
Of course I would probably have to find a new career becuase I could never work the 80 hours a week my old career entailed.

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"Since mine weren't great sleepers either, I didn't enjoy their infant months. Yet you say you "loved" caring for yours when they were little. Did you have help - family, friends, neighbors - so you could sleep when your deprivation got very intense? Without going back to WOH, I wouldn't have had any regular care and I would have enjoyed the infant stage even less."
Are any babies great sleepers in the first three months? (Except my DH, who apparently slept through the night at 1 month--but then again, I'm always a little skeptical about the accuracy of 34 year old memories of the parents who never made a baby book or kept any written records!)
SAH allowed me to take naps during the day with baby, which meant I could enjoy DS during the day (not so much at 11 PM and 3 AM). Since I was bf and I never could pump much, DH and I couldn't exactly have shared night shifts, so I would have been sleep-deprived with no chance of a nap at work.
I think DS started sleeping from 10-6 at around 4 months (and he can't wait to hit his crib for bed now at a year old), so the sleep deprivation wouldn't have been an issue after those first few months, but I can't blame you for not enjoying the infant stage if you weren't getting enough sleep.
Wow. With an attitude like that, why didn't you just go straight from the hospital and drop them off with someone and pick them up five years later?
And you say you help you them grow into who they are, but don't have any influence over how they turn out? That's a little contradictory, to say the least.
"Now those pre teen years, that's another story, IMO. Then they are interacting with peers (who I believe have more influence on how my kids turn out than I do) and making decisions that will impact them the rest of their lives."
I believe the Michigan study suggests that the peer influence is not as great with a SAHP, at least for boys.
"Maybe it's just coincidence but I've met a lot of SAHM's who are on some form of assistance. That bugs me. If you can't afford to feed your kids, GET A JOB. The rest of us who are working do not owe it to you to support you."
Are these married women with husbands who WOH? The only women I know IRL who are using WIC and don't work are (1) my former students who got pregnant while in high school and did not marry their "babies' daddies," and (2) two acquaintances who chose not to get married, despite living with the fathers of their babies, because they would not longer quailify for governmental assistance if married. In the first case, the teenagers took WIC so they could continue in high school and college; in the second, the women were uneducated and weren't very good at either WOH or SAH.
You have to remember the company she seems to keep. Remember all the SAHM examples she pulled out earlier? All the men she works with and their "high" opinions of their SAHW's?
Kathi
Kathi
Mom to Emily 16, Michael 12, and Miss Kimberley, diagnosed with autism at 2-1
ITA. 0 to 5 years olds need structure and discipline. It's very important before they reach primary school IMO, so that they do not start acting out when they enter class where they need to abide by the teacher. I'm not saying this can only be acheived by SAH.... Structure can easily be acheived if you WOH. I"m just saying that the 0 to 5 years ARE important. If you start a child off on the right track early, the teen years (I'm hoping) should be easier to help keep them on the right track.
My 2 1/2 year old copies a lot of what she sees and hears, so it's important I provide her with a good model now, and explain to her (at least try) what she shouldn't do. She shares her toys most of the time with other kids, and is very very outgoing.
And i've seen what lack of structure and dicipline could do to a small child at our playgroup. There is one child (in the 0 to 3 year old group no less) that is already a bit of a bully. When his mother tries to get him to stop he throws a fit and cries for 20 minutes, then she proceeds to bribe him to get him to stop crying. I can see how this will follow through into his school years, and he might end up with behavioral problems later.
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