Letters to the Editor
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At home with David Brooks
Regarding the paragraph about enjoying memories whether made at home or at work. I don't stay at home because it is more personally fulfilling to clean my home and drive an old minivan than to make money. I stay at home because my children need me.
They need me on the good days with wonderful memories and the lousy days when the dog vomits, gum gets stuck in my daughter's hair and I have to tell my son that he is only allowed 2 hours of video games per day - 84 times. They need me to play games with them, discipline them, teach them, love them, hug them and help them learn how to conduct themselves in this big world. They need me to volunteer in their school.
I worked outside my home for 18 years. I have stayed home for 9. Staying home and taking care of children is much more difficult.
Children need thier parents. No one loves them as much or has thier best interests at heart. Why is there a debate? Does anyone know someone who was raised by babysitters or nannies who is happy about that? Mothers and children belong together. Mothering at its best is putting the needs of your children before your own.
If a woman can stay home and take care of her kids and actually does it, why don't we give her respect? It is a difficult, thankless job and having fellow feminists disrespect our choices is for a lack of a better word; rude.
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vocation vocation vocation
Hey, Al--I read that article in Scientific American. It also said that there is some evidence that childcare smartens up men, too, and why wouldn't it? childcare is a challenge. But I digress.
I think the missing variable here is the motive for the choices women and men make. I have a friend who is in publishing and has worked hard now for thirty years. Her husband is in Public Relations. She used to say, "I have a career; he has a job." And it was true. She had a true vocation to be a book editor, he more or less needed to support the family (since there was more money in PR than in book publishing). Because she felt a true vocation, things organized themselves around her desires. It didn't matter where they came from or whether they were "selfish" or whatever. She was motivated to make it work and she did. It is ambivalence that is the problem, not choice.
After surveying the scene for thirty years, now, I think that true vocations are fairly rare. Most people, women and men, want to survive and reproduce. Most people do not have a driving desire to write music, paint pictures, start a company, etc. And so they will be worried about whether to stay home or have a job. If they had a true vocation, they wouldn't be worried about things outside their vocation. That's just the way it works. So, if you're worried about it, do the thing that seems right, conform to the highest norm of your society, and hope for the best. AS for Ms. Hekker, I thought her article was appealing and gracefully written, but not generalizable. She had a vocation;in the end, it didn't work out to her economic benefit. That might have happened no matter what her vocation was. At least she has five kids to give her a hand (which is what they should do).
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Why has everyone avoided
mentioning the factor which could alleviate at least the practical problems everyone is obcessed with?
PAY the person who devotes 24/7 to the various tasks of "home-making". Pay Social Security on that pay. This at least gives the stay-at-home individual some safety net. As someone who collects retirement based on salary earned in the 60s and 70s (at admittedly pretty good levels) having some of the intervening years, even at minimum wage, would probably be a big help.
I know, this did come up before and was deep-sixed, evidently for good, when (men) said they couldn't afford it. If raising children full time is so immensely important for the future of human kind, how can it cost too much? *sarcasm alert*
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good work Salon
Thanks Salon, for Rebecca Traister's fabulous feminist analysis of the gender wars in the New York Times. It's been ages since I've read something so intellectually satisfying on an issue that everyone has an opinion on.
I vote for more smart cultural commentary like this from Traister and fewer articles on topics only a few people care about like "Farwell from Ashbury Park, NJ."
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Brooks is a hypocrite
If David Brooks really believed there was power in changing diapers and baking cookies he would be a stay at home dad.
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At Home with David Brooks
Oh no. Not the freakin' Bell Curve again, the Bible of those who seek to justify their prejudices with junk science.
As to the article, the whole debate strikes me as a bit silly. Yes, silly. The economic reality of our society in 2006 is that the overwhelming majority of women MUST work to support themselves and their families. In this respect at least women have achieved parity with men, so the "debate" about choice feminism is a non-issue--how many men or women actually have a choice whether to work or not? But, according to the media, women do not work because they, um, NEED TO, but because they have fulfilling, life enriching careers they have chosen to pursue and to which they desire to return after taking some time off to have children and handing them over to the family retainer (who, not to put too fine a point on it, probably is not all that agog about her career as a nanny because it is just a JOB). The whole argument, from both sides, misses the fact that for MOST PEOPLE--men and women--these are luxury problems.
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Re: At Home With David Brooks
Rebecca Traister is up to her usual eloquence and doesn't really need help from me. However, I've got to say I am continually amazed that even brilliant women take issue with the obvious truth revealed by the often cited data showing that generally "men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people." Sounds right to me. That's why women make better heads of state (Elizabeth I, Victoria Regina, Indira Gandi, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Mier, Katherine the Great, and etc., etc.) Leading a country requires more than anything, a deep interest in the welfare of the people one governs. It is, in fact, amazing how many successful women rulers there have been proportional to how few women have had the chance to rule. Also, it's seems antidotally true that men generally make better mathmaticians and law enforcement officers. However, more work on both sides of this thesis must be done, more data gathered.