November 12, 2019

Why is this article — "New mothers who took leave in California were less likely to work a decade later than those who didn’t" —  illustrated with a photo of a father?



And why is this "A Surprising Finding"? It seems completely unsurprising.

The title on the article page is "A Surprising Finding on Paid Leave: 'This Is Not the Way We Teach This.'" It's surprising mainly because other studies had shown that paid leave would improve the chances that women would return to work. I guess logically you might think that not every parent takes leave and that the ones who would take unpaid leave are those who don't need money so much and might be likely to drop out of the working-for-money way of life. If there's paid leave, you'll get some people who need the money, so paid leave should swell the ranks of the parents-on-leave with people who need to work for money, and they'd be going back to work when the paid leave runs out.

The research looked at California women who took leave before the state required payment during leave and those who took leave after that point. In this large set of cases, women who got paid during parental leave were less likely to return to work.
The new paper is solid and the results plausible, said Maya Rossin-Slater, an economist at Stanford who has researched California’s program extensively. “They have fantastic data and large sample sizes relative to the prior papers, and that’s a big advance,” she said. “This paper cautions us that paid leave is not a silver bullet. There are other policy tools we need to implement.”
A silver bullet?!! Is the woman who chooses to stay home with her children a werewolf?!
[T]he researchers concluded, something about taking paid leave seems to have encouraged mothers to scale back at work and spend more time with their children.

Mothers who took the leave spent more time than those who didn’t reading to children, sharing meals with them and taking them on outings, the researchers found. They also had fewer children, consistent with the style of intensive parenting that entails investing lots of time and money in each child....
Maybe rational women, who respond to the incentive of paid leave, also analyze other aspects of life in economic terms and figure out the value of the work done in the home, the costs of going to work, and the good reasons to institute division of labor within the family, with only one parent engaged in  money-earning outside the home.  Maybe you get some perspective on life and economics when you've got the time to reflect and plan. When you're outside of the workplace, you may develop a sense of the meaning of life that isn't workplace-based? Does the government want that not to happen?!

In the end of the article, we get around to dad:
If the mother — but not the father — is out of work and doing most of the child care at the beginning, the division of labor could get locked in.... Just 15 percent of bonding leave claims in California in 2014 were by men, and the average man took just two or three days off. Men’s employment and earnings did not decline after they had a child.
I guess this is the place where we are not supposed to talk about gender. But if we really believe in gender, why isn't gender the explanation for why women are much more likely to take the home-based role in the division of labor? I've known men — cis-gender men — who've taken the home-based role, and these are men I greatly respect. I'm just saying that if gender has real meaning, then maternal nurturing is the ultimate in things that are not surprising.

97 comments:

Wince said...

"A Surprising Finding on Paid Leave: 'This Is Not the Way We Teach This.'"

Shorter title...

"Unexpectedly."

exhelodrvr1 said...

He self-identifies as a mother.

gilbar said...

Mothers have beards, and ball caps, and penises, and Y chromosomes too!

Shouting Thomas said...

I have no idea how ideology enters into this.

I care for my grandkids. Caring for them is not an ideological struggle.

It's sorta what needs to be done, and I'm doing it.

It's really kinda fun. I much prefer it to banging out code in some Dilbert office. Or even painting pics and composing music in some Dilbert office, which I did.

Children are not a burden to be lifted from us by government. Caring for them is a joy and a blessing, not a begrudged detour from a time when we could be earning a salary.

exhelodrvr1 said...

He is probably menstruating.

Original Mike said...

I hope the paper authors are tenured.

Leland said...

Journalist no longer assume pronouns and genders.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

Don't mis-mother xim, or xer.

Iman said...

It's a crazy, mixed up, shook up world...

buwaya said...

Hardly anyone respects men who have taken on a "home based role".
Unless of course said man is independently wealthy and has the means to hire servants.

Women probably respect a man they have to support least of all, no matter what they may say at some point. The biological fundamentals will kick in sometime.

When evaluating opinions one must watch for what people do, not what they say.

gilbar said...

At my insurance company, the Standard thing was.
A woman (a CisWoman; but back then, we just called them women) would get Pregnant
*She would work up until the day of the delivery
*Then, she would take Paid Maternity leave;
*During which time we could Not replace her, so the rest of us did her work
*(oh! And, we weren't allowed to schedule vacations, 'cause we were short handed
*Then, when her Paid Maternity leave was used up, she'd come back to work
*AND, THAT 1st Day Back, she'd give her resignation 2 weeks notice
*Then,She'd use her remaining Vacation for those 2 weeks

When those two weeks went by; THEN HR would start looking for a replacement.
When I suggested that 'this isn't fair to guys', was told that, IF i said that again; i'd be fired

It turns out, that women (cis women anyway (well, Some cis women (well, Most))) want to take care of their little ones. Who'd have thought?

Nonapod said...

As you say, none of this seems suprising or particularly bad. It just seems like women making rational choices, and having the freedom to do so.

Skeptical Voter said...

So a new mother gets a chance to bond with her new child (or children) while on paid leave. She's relieved of the stress of worrying about income--still getting paid by her employer until the leaver ends. And the bonding process takes. And several years later she still has not returned to work.

Well duh! I never would have thought it would work out that way--sarc!

Michael K said...

Corporations want those women at work ! To drive down wages of men. What is all this propaganda for if not to drive down wages ?

rhhardin said...

The sexes differ in that sustains their interest.

robother said...

Having raised a fair number of my younger siblings, I would venture to guess that these women discover that interacting with a growing child can be a hell of a lot more interesting than most of what passes for white collar work. At its highest level, work in law or medicine can be stimulating, but if you can't get to that level--and sometimes even if you can-- work becomes drudgery. The feminist notion that child rearing is low level unrewarding labor is, among other thing, just wrong.

Carol said...

Reminds me of all the telephone operators I knew who were dragged kicking and screaming into management back in the 1970s. Most seemed perfectly happy with there lives as they were, especially if the kids were in school. But Bell got sued and stuff.

Freeman Hunt said...

"silver bullet?!! Is the woman who chooses to say home with her children a werewolf?!"

Rawr!

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

@Iman at 9:33 irons the kinks out of this mystery


He's not the World's most matronly mom, but...

AlbertAnonymous said...

“Cis gender men”

Sorry. Redundant.

Why not just say “men”

Why use 3 words when one will do?

I’ve gotten to the point where I refuse to play these semantics games. Made up words will not be part of my vocabulary. If my ordinary words “trigger” you then, as they say often in HBO’s Succession, “fuck off”

Freeman Hunt said...

Wife: "I guess I'll have to start thinking of what I'd like to do after all the children grow up."
Husband: "Ah, hobbies!"
Wife: "No, I mean a career."
Husband: "Why would you want a job?!"
Wife: "Good point."

Chris N said...

As a privileged and problematic cisgender non-identifying Patriarchal type, I reject the ideas put forth in this article.

Downtwinkles!

Greg the class traitor said...

Michael K said...
Corporations want those women at work ! To drive down wages of men. What is all this propaganda for if not to drive down wages ?

1: To drive up taxes
2: To drive up housing prices (same number of "great housing locations" to live in, more income because both adults work, therefore housing prices go up)
2a: This drives up property taxes
3: To increase the pool of available workers, which does drive down the price each can charge

Mary Beth said...

Maybe being paid to stay home helped them realize that being home with their child has value. When you grow up with the implication that your career is all-important, and women who stay home with their kids are werewolves, having that validation that comes from being paid to be a stay-at-home-mom (for a while) might just be enough to let you quit work altogether.

Greg the class traitor said...

"silver bullet?!! Is the woman who chooses to say home with her children a werewolf?!"

Worse, she's a threat to the "real women", which is to say, she's a threat to the "feminists" who always wanted to be men with boos, not actual women

Fernandinande said...

Is the woman who chooses to say home with her children a werewolf?!

Well? Is (s)he?

I liked that story about a lizard who turned into a werehuman after somebody bit him.

stlcdr said...

More women [people] in the workforce, lower wages.

And: keeping women's wages low since childbirth.

(Dunno what i'm saying, here, but when you - generalized - start wonking on about first world problems, ludicrousness seems to be appropriate).

Haven't some people (probably enlightened Europeans) proposed a mandated paid leave for men equivalent for women?

Chris N said...

Downtwinkles I say!

Not Sure said...

I believe this is the problem:

Mothers who took the leave spent more time than those who didn’t reading to children, sharing meals with them and taking them on outings

This type of behavior by mothers will only serve to widen the achievement gap between their Privileged children and Others. You may think no one is harmed by this, and indeed you may think that society is better off because of it, but that would simply demonstrate that you support the white cisgendered patriarchal oligarchy that has enslaved and impoverished billions of people for millennia.

CWJ said...

"Maybe rational women, who respond to the incentive of paid leave, also analyze other aspects of life in economic terms..."

In this case, paid leave may equal severance pay. The employee has quit, but the employer doesn't know it yet.

Chris N said...

We've got merit, yes we do!
We've got merit, how bout you?

Beth B said...

As an old werewolf, myself, I am often bemused by the way the "smart people" view common sense & autonomy as things best to be avoided.

BarrySanders20 said...

The new parents discover that wokeness has no effect on the father's inability to lactate or breastfeed.

fleg9bo said...

Reminds me of all the telephone operators I knew who were dragged kicking and screaming into management back in the 1970s.

My sister was a telephone operator who became a manager back in the 70s. After a while she requested a demotion back to a non-managerial position. She said she got tired of pulling the load for the new unqualified diversity manager hires. That might have been part of it but I think there was also a desire for less responsibility. She's never been particularly aspirational, NTTAWWT. But she could tell you the location of every area code in the country - quite impressive.

hawkeyedjb said...

The new mother identifies as a man who says "screw this" to that not-very-glamorous career. Just like a lot of actual men would like to do.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Having done it, I will tell men not to be the stay at home parent. Women don't respect you if you do. Men don't, either. It's far easier to work more. Staying home has economic and social consequences for men which women don't have to deal with. It's not fair, it shouldn't be that way, but that's they way it is.

LYNNDH said...

Then they say there is a Gender Pay Gap.

CJinPA said...

“This paper cautions us that paid leave is not a silver bullet. There are other policy tools we need to implement.”

Why? Society, and most women, have not deemed this a "problem" to be solved.

The dominance of feminists in academia and media has meant a constant reordering of society to accommodate their priorities. The result is fatherless homes and massive government growth to replace fathers.

Is this what most women want? According to a (not so recent) Huffington Post poll, only 23% of women identify as feminist.

Dude1394 said...

Women that stay home with their children are not as likely to vote for a democrat. So it is an existential threat to mankind.

PM said...

Appears to be a luxury these days for moms to stay at home and tend to kids until school age. However, if grandparents aren't around, whatever job she's not giving up better be well-paying because a good 8-5 nanny costs about 50K a year, at least in Cali.

richlb said...

Are you assuming a parent with a penis is a father? Transphobe!!

Yancey Ward said...

I am old enough to remember when the drive for mandated paid leave was started and started to be implemented. It was definitely sold as a means to keep mothers in the work force. I thought at the time this was all but certain to not be true, and that the people saying it were either stupid or mendacious. The effect found in this paper is exactly as anyone conversant with human nature should have predicted. Now, the authors of this paper should turn their attention to the 99 weeks of unemployment insurance that was the norm during and in the years after the Great Recession- circa 2008-2014. How many of those workers who received the full 99 weeks ever worked again?

Also:

"Men’s employment and earnings did not decline after they had a child."

This also should follow from knowledge of how men behave. Pretty much anyone should be able to tell you that the hardest and most conscientious workers are married and have children. Such responsibilities focus the mind and hone the character, especially that of men who stay in the work force (probably for women, too).

tcrosse said...

The large company where I worked in order to expiate my sins was renowned for being Good for Women. But for the ones with kids there was always a fine calculus of how much of their salary they'd net after childcare and, if they had a high-earning hubby, taxes. Add to that the cost of commuting and clothing, and a gal could lose money by keeping a job. Welfare moms face a similar calculation.

chuck said...

Why can't a woman be more like a man?

bleh said...

I agree. There’s very little exploration or even curiosity about the idea that women who fall out of the workforce might actually want to be out of the workforce. The assumption is, “no, of course not, that’s unthinkable, a woman’s worth and meaning in life is about being a worker bee from whom employers can extract value and the government can collect taxes.” It’s perverse how feminism has been coopted by The Machine.

bleh said...

I’m a fairly young man and I’d retire right now if I could afford it. I have a good career and I like what I do but there are a million other things I’d rather do with my time. I’d like read more, exercise more, visit family in other parts of the country, spend time with my son, have leisurely lunches, learn how to do electrical and plumbing work, take some courses. I really don’t think I’d run out of things to do. I wouldn’t miss work one bit.

I don’t understand the modern fetish with a career and how people are supposed to derive meaning from it. “Hello, nice to meet you, I spend my days making some rich people even richer, it’s so fulfilling.” Of course not all jobs are the same, but I think this holds true for like 95% of people.

Mattman26 said...

If you want and/or need to work for pay, then work for pay! If women don't do it in the same proportion as men, is that problematic?

I'm hearing that men also have higher pickup truck ownership rates than women. Is that a problem as well? What must we do to equalize the incentives?

Jeff Weimer said...

I suspect the disconnect between the studies that showed paid leave - and used to justify the mandate - suffer from a form of selection bias. That is, those women that chose those jobs partly or solely for that perk were already inclined to return to work afterwards. When it became mandatory, the pool of those jobs now expanded from a subset to *all* jobs and the perk didn't matter anymore. I would like to see how the numbers matched up before if all jobs, paid leave and not, were included in the studies. I suspect that they would be fairly close to what we see today.

Ken B said...

I agree with Jeff Weimer. Selection bias in earlier studies. This is hinted at in Ann,s quotation, the reference to good data and a large sample. Of course this result is not surprising.

JAORE said...

Unintended consequences?

The opposite of what was (well?) intended?

Who'd have ever guessed?

Yancey Ward said...

"I'm hearing that men also have higher pickup truck ownership rates than women. Is that a problem as well? What must we do to equalize the incentives?"

Obviously, pickup trucks need to be banned.

You think I am joking, don't you?

JAORE said...

I'm hearing that men also have higher pickup truck ownership rates than women. Is that a problem as well? What must we do to equalize the incentives?

Has anyone seen a stripped down,suitable for a work, pickup in a showroom lately? I expect pink interior packages soon.

Howard said...

It's the rule of unintended consequences. So liberal feel-good paid family leave encourages more women to be stay-at-home Mom's, which is a conservative family value. Not unlike how conservative support for term limits that ultimately gutted California Republicans power.

Howard said...

BTW, my genius pre-med drop-dead gorgeous varsity athlete wife dropped out of school to raise our kids, so my patriarchy credentials are impeccable.

Gabriel said...

@Michael K:Corporations want those women at work ! To drive down wages of men. What is all this propaganda for if not to drive down wages ?

Class traitor Greg already mentioned some but not this:

Anything you do for yourself, but could pay someone else for, is imputed income". No one has yet figured how to tax it under US laws.

If you have a one-income family where the child care and housekeeping and outdoor work is done by the parents, the government misses out on a lot of taxation.

But the two-income family that pays for child care and housekeeping and outdoor work is converting the imputed income to real income (for the people providing the services) which the government can now tax.

Assume for the sake of argument that the services paid for are equally good from the perspective of the two-income family, then the winner is the government. The people providing those services to the two-income family presumably also need those services and since they can't provide them to their own family if they are providing them to others...

Howard said...

Please, it's not one way or the other. Get outside of your zero sum game ideology. Encouraging women to play team sports and seek careers makes America stronger. We are still in the infancy stage of the transition.

Gabriel said...

@Howard: Encouraging women to play team sports and seek careers makes America stronger.

I often think of all those women, disproportionately women of color, who have to give up time rearing their own children to look after the children of upwardly-mobile white women of privilege.

Kevin said...

“This paper cautions us that paid leave is not a silver bullet.

The Left is always selling silver bullets that turn out not to work, only to then argue the system is much more complex than that but their latest proposal will surely deal with the remaining issues.

This is how the party that screwed up healthcare stands on stage telling us they knew their "fix" really wasn't the right answer after all.

But trust them. This $52T will really do the job.

No wonder they're dependent on the youth vote.

Michael said...

Yancey Ward @11:19 said

Obviously, pickup trucks need to be banned.

You think I am joking, don't you?


Especially the white ones. We demand an end to White Pickup Privilege

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

robother said...

Having raised a fair number of my younger siblings, I would venture to guess that these women discover that interacting with a growing child can be a hell of a lot more interesting than most of what passes for white collar work.

Based on some of my past work experience; I tend to wonder if they don't look at their young children's behavior, compare it to their former co-worker's behavior and conclude; "At least I can spank the kid if I need to."

TRISTRAM said...

Not sure what this means

"silver bullet?!! Is the woman who chooses to say home with her children a werewolf?!"

Silver Bullet is a common enough term in tech and business to mean a magical solution to an intractable problem. The problem being women as underrepresented in work place / over represented at home.

As for the more women staying home, well econ 101: Subsidize something and you get more of it. (See also headline like, 'SF spent $100M on the homeless. Unexpectedly, there are more home now!').

See, subsidize pregnancy, get more pregnancy, and after some N number of children, staying home pays more than working + paying childcare for N ...

Iman said...

"BTW, my genius pre-med drop-dead gorgeous varsity athlete wife dropped out of school to raise our kids, so my patriarchy credentials are impeccable."

So... who's the father?

buwaya said...

"We are still in the infancy stage of the transition."

You are at the terminal stage. This has happened before you know.
Your elite are failing to reproduce. A symptom, or perhaps a cause, of the collapse of the Roman republic was the decline and disappearance of the old Patrician Senatorial and Equestrian families due to failures to reproduce. This was often noted as a phenomenon even as it was happening. They were replaced, and replaced, and replaced again, by new men, without the implied status and sense of continuity and noblesse oblige of the old families. There is and was an almost supernatural reverence for the old families.

It is possible that this sense that these "new men" were disposable dross led to the frequent mass proscriptions of these people. They were, by Marius' time, often seen as lacking legitimacy of birth.

Even the Emperors noted it, about this failure to reproduce, hence things like Augustus laws on marriage, among others. Though this was quite late of course. But Augustus was spitting into the wind. The subject makes a neat bit in "I, Claudius".

From "I, Claudius" Episode II -
Augustus - "Hey! Hey! Boy! Boy, come here! Come! Come! Stay with me. Here. I've called you here because I'm sick and tired... Look, look, up, up. ...of the constant complaints that I've been getting from you and others about the severity of the laws that I've made against bachelors. Do you know what I say to that? I say stop complaining and get married! Because your complaints, they don't impress me that much. And who in Hades do you think you are, Vestal Virgins? You make me sick, the lot of you! Look at that. Do you know what that is? That is a child. A Roman child. And how in Hades do you think he got there? By a Roman man and a Roman woman coming together in the same bed. That's how. That is a fine product of a proper Roman union! Look, can't you stop that twitching?"

Martin said...

As Douglas Murray says, "Suddenly we believe we know all about things that we really know very little of, and forget things we knew very well the day before yesterday."

hstad said...

"..Paid Maternity Leave..." Just another 'Social Justice" theory which is inherently difficult to defend in its purer formats when confronted with 'empirical data'. But the Liberal 'Elites' will invent even more 'sophisticated' ways [move the goal post] of analyzing them so that such theories from the 'Liberal Tribe' avoid a single fatal blow.

Susan said...

"silver bullet?!! Is the woman who chooses to say home with her children a werewolf?!"

Mama Bears are notoriously hard to bring down.

MD Greene said...

1. One bit of research in recent years found that, on reflection, senior citizens' greatest regrets were often that they had not had more children.

2. That old saw -- Nobody's tombstone ever has said, "I wish I'd spent more time at the office" -- is true.

3. I am friends with several families in which the moms (typically name partners in law offices) make the money and dads mind the home front. The parents seem pretty happy, and their children are doing great.

Government does not know best when it comes to family formation and careers for parents. If it did know best, we wouldn't have so many children being raised by single parents, typically stressed and overworked mothers.

ThunderChick said...

As for the more women staying home, well econ 101: Subsidize something and you get more of it. (See also headline like, 'SF spent $100M on the homeless. Unexpectedly, there are more home now!').

My thoughts exactly!

gilbar @ 9:35 AM

Unfortunately, I've seen that happen many times as well (a woman taking maternity leave, stating that she's coming back, and then giving her resignation once back to work), without ever considering the negative impact or consequences on the employer.

Due to my husband's demanding job, we made the decision for me to stay home with our kids to give them some sense of stability and continuity. We were able to afford to do so. Now that they are teenagers, I am back to work part-time, and while I will never be at the top of my field, I don't regret it for one second.

n.n said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rabel said...

I read the study, bypassing only the heavy stat portion.

In their conclusions they admit to a lack of a clear understanding of their results which show that new mothers who take advantage of paid maternity leave have slightly lower long term employment and income numbers than those who did not.

They missed it. It's right there slapping them in the face and the professional academic women who conducted the study missed it.

Let me explain:

Women who spend more time with their infants during the first weeks of their life tend to form closer bonds with the child than do women who stay at work and thus spend less time with the infant.

This somewhat closer bond leads to a somewhat stronger desire to be with the child during it's early years.

In the medium to long term this desire leads those mothers to spend less time in the workforce and more time at home.

This is reflected in the somewhat lower employment and income numbers identified in the study.

It's about the strength of a mother's love for her child.

That shouldn't be surprising. What is surprising is that the four professional women who ran the study never saw it and never, by my reading, seemed to even considered it.

lgv said...

I've only worked one place that had paid maternity. This is what I remember. Somewhere around 90% of the women resigned as soon as they got their last check during their paid time off. So, you kept their position open for 8 weeks, paid them, then got no notice of the quitting, delaying the replacement search.

n.n said...

Taxable commodities, government, and commercial interests. Ideally, the market, and people, not experts nor minority regimes, will select an optimal solution.

That said, sex and sex-correlated gender attributes are destiny and parents will reconcile with that in mind. Still, life is long, there are choices, there are priorities, and people, as mature individuals, understand the necessary short and long-term compromises and adjustments.

reader said...

There are so many factors that go into the decision to become a stay home parent.

When my husband and I got married I made more money than he did. Once I got pregnant that changed...not because I'm a woman and I was pregnant but because my husband is awesome at his job.

Then once I had our son I hated being away from him. The closest I could describe the feeling I had would be that I pined for him. That feeling faded as he got older. My husband loved/loves our son but never in that manner. Maybe it was a biproduct of nursing the first year?

My husband's job required a lot of travel. If your child is sick they can't go to daycare and court appearances with a sick child wasn't going to happen.

Our son hated daycare. So much so our entire family would do unscheduled drop-ins to ensure that there wasn't something going on.

When my son turned two we were at a point that I could stay home and I did. It was a fantastic decision for our entire family.

About fifteen years after that decision my husband was supposed to give a speech to some of the younger employees at his company about what allowed him to do as well as he did. My sister (who by then also worked at the company) was upset that he didn't attribute it to me and the support I provided him. He looked at her and said there was no way he could say that even though it was true. Divide and conquer isn't just a saying.

Michael K said...

Your elite are failing to reproduce. A symptom, or perhaps a cause, of the collapse of the Roman republic was the decline and disappearance of the old Patrician Senatorial and Equestrian families due to failures to reproduce.<

I have read that an effective contraceptive herb grew in north Africa in Roman times. It was used so actively that it became extinct.

It was called "Silphium.

What we do know of it, is that it was cultivated in the oldest Greek city in North Africa, called Cyrene (now Libya). Legend suggests that the Greek Battus and his men were led to a place called Apollo’s Fountain beyond the fertile grounds of Israsa, for the Libyans said the place had a hole in the sky (likely because the area received an unusual amount of rainfall) [I,ii]. Battus settled there and named the city Cryene in 630 BCE. Silphium became so important to the Cyrenian economy that the plant appeared on almost all of their currency.

Perhaps that is our fate,.

rhhardin said...

2. That old saw -- Nobody's tombstone ever has said, "I wish I'd spent more time at the office" -- is true.

Not if you have a play for pay job.

Anonymous said...

I'm one of the werewolves they're aiming for. I worked in BigLaw -- I was paid over $200,000 per year and earned it in long hours, ruined weekends, and constant stress. Then I had our first daughter. I took my 18 weeks paid leave, telling the firm quite explicitly that I was not fully decided on whether to come back. I stayed home with my sweet infant daughter. We took walks, we snuggled, I played with her. I drank in all those sweet little moments that you can't predict or schedule for non-working hours. I got all of the household work and errands done during the weekdays so that weekends and evenings with my husband were relaxed family time instead of frantic to-do list tackle-sessions. After about a month I knew there was no way our family could be happy with two full-time working parents. I was absolutely unwilling to abandon our new peaceful happy rhythm, even if we had a lower net worth. (Although honestly the financial hit wasn't as big as you'd think. After paying for childcare, commuting, wardrobe, drycleaning, household help, more dinners out, etc, it's not as big of a sacrifice as you'd think.) Eight years and two more children later, it's the best decision he and I ever made. We've agreed that I'll most likely never go back to work, and I'm thrilled.

There's so much good to be done in the world that isn't in the confines of a paid job. A quiet fact of life is that stay-at-home moms and wives are very often the backbone of community life. I'm the "room mom" for my daughter's third grade class. I bring cookies for the teacher's birthday to my son's kindergarten class. I help make costumes for the church Christmas play. I teach women's Bible Study once a week. I'm the friend who's around for a glass of wine after a bad day. I'm the friend who can take your child when they're sick and you have to be at work. I bring dinners to friends who've just had a baby or a death in the family. There's a lot of agonizing about the decline of civic life and neighborly ties in this country and one of my theories is that a lot of that drained away from our communities when fewer moms were at home.

Just some thoughts from a werewolf. -- Jessica

Howard said...

Blogger Iman said...

"BTW, my genius pre-med drop-dead gorgeous varsity athlete wife dropped out of school to raise our kids, so my patriarchy credentials are impeccable."

So... who's the father?


It doesn't matter. I get all the credit and benefits of being the paterfamilias.

virgil xenophon said...

So...Jessica. Tell us why your life as been nothing but a living hell again..

Kirk Parker said...

John Lynch,

"It's not fair..."

What the hell?

"...it shouldn't be that way"

What the hell on steroids???


Yancey,

"I thought at the time ... that the people saying it were either stupid or mendacious."

If ever there were a time to embrace the power of AND, this is surely one.



"Obviously, pickup trucks need to be banned.

You think I am joking, don't you?"

Not at all, but I do wish you'd stop giving them ideas. ;-)

Jessica said...

Virgil Zenophon, stay tuned. I'll soon discover my life is hell, or at least that I have false conciousness. :) -- Jessica

RobinGoodfellow said...

“Blogger Iman said...
It's a crazy, mixed up, shook up world...

11/12/19, 9:33 AM”

ISWYDT!

Matt said...

For the same reason the Journal-Sentinel ran a Father's Day article a few years back where the author extolled the virtues of his single mother (the author was black, too. Who'd have guessed? Ha!)

What that reason actually is, though, I confess I don't know.

Greg the class traitor said...

reader said...
About fifteen years after that decision my husband was supposed to give a speech to some of the younger employees at his company about what allowed him to do as well as he did. My sister (who by then also worked at the company) was upset that he didn't attribute it to me and the support I provided him. He looked at her and said there was no way he could say that even though it was true. Divide and conquer isn't just a saying.

Yeah, I'd love to see that speech:

If you want to get ahead at work, marry a woman who will stay at home, take care of the kids, and take care of the other things, so you can give your full effort to the job. The Leave it to Beaver family is the best and most productive family

Followed by a lunch mob, and termination for "sexual harassment" / "creating an unwelcoming environment for women"

RobinGoodfellow said...

“Blogger chuck said...
Why can't a woman be more like a man?”

A man should help support his family. It is the right, and proper thing to do.
A man should help support his family, but, with a little bit of luck ... they’ll go out and start supporting you!

Greg the class traitor said...

"lynch mob", not "lunch mob"

Seeing Red said...

Which smart poster used to say the Dems want women available for sex and taxes?

Seeing Red said...

A Surprising Finding on Paid Leave: 'This Is Not the Way We Teach This.'"


“They didn’t listen to us.” Martha Coakley 2016 election night. It never gets old.

Michael K said...

(Although honestly the financial hit wasn't as big as you'd think. After paying for childcare, commuting, wardrobe, drycleaning, household help, more dinners out, etc,

Would you mind talking to my older son's wife? Just kidding.

n.n said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
n.n said...

Dems want women available for sex and taxes

Sex, taxes, and [democratic] leverage.

JamesB.BKK said...

When you're outside of the workplace, you may develop a sense of the meaning of life that isn't workplace-based? Does the government want that not to happen?!

Somebody has admitted here to not following along with the government-media-academia axis social engineering over decades to create tax and consumerism mules in order to offer "full faith and credit" (a promise to put guns to the heads of people born and yet unborn) on endlessly (for a time) increasing sovereign debt. Was the person also part of the engineering effort?

JamesB.BKK said...

A quiet fact of life is that stay-at-home moms and wives are very often the backbone of community life.

This is a milquetoast defense of something that no women should feel ashamed of or have to defend at all. Don't allow yourself to be whipped or feel demeaned by the professional harridans and hags. Women have the capability to make miracles and to build solid societies. Why squander that for a few bucks dogging documents? Would you do all that law school and jostling and preening again with what you know now? If not, there are plenty of young women that could benefit from hearing more from you and less from the social justice warriors bent on indoctrinating them to go work for someone else in a cubicle (or even the perquisite of a small windowed office) so they can pay transfer taxes that finance votes.

Bunkypotatohead said...

You misspelt werewife.

Laura said...

"Don't allow yourself to be whipped or feel demeaned by the professional harridans and hags."

I wish they were so easily dismissed, but they are the gatekeepers for reentry into the workforce when the time comes to return. Hole in your resume? Discard pile.

SGT Ted said...

Why do Progressives and feminists think that peoples home and work lives should be shaped around their narrow visions of what family is?

The people who are the most toxic and judgemental towards other womens choices these days are feminists and Progressive women.

Freeman Hunt said...

If you go back to work, pay for play. Let the hiring managers eat their hearts out.

Kirk Parker said...

I thought "lunch mob" was fine; surely some of the SJW's are cannibals at heart.