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> She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes. Back then they did not know that moms are he

> She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes. Back then they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom is a full-time job.

merliossu 5y ago
they still dont know. the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children
- mschuster91 5y ago
  The difference is payment of time in care work, and not just for childcare but also for other forms of care (disabled, elderly). Another very big issue is poverty. Time used for raising children doesn't count into pension payments, meaning that women who divorce from their husbands end up without anything in their name in the worst case.
  - monoideism 5y ago
    This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor, just among middle class and up women (and men), typically left-leaning. Most poor mothers I've know would love to be stay-at-home moms because they're only working to survive and not for personal fulfillment, and because they love their kids.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Many middle class women and up also do housekeeping and care work. People are just different, and not everyone finds fulfillment in working outside the home. In fact with the pandemic making it so much easier to work while staying at home, some of these women might choose to find such work.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor Any women's shelter will disagree with you here. The rate of women that go back to abusive partnerships is immensely high among those who don't have any other option to survive.
      - monoideism 5y ago
        I didn't downvote, but what does this have to do with what I wrote?
    - klyrs 5y ago
      Stay-at-home parenting being unpaid work is not an "attitude," it's a fact of life. The leverage that abusive wage-earners have over their "non-employed" coparent is pretty strongly tied to their respective affluence. This isn't a "left leaning" problem. It's a problem of poverty, lack of education, and a lack of society's willingness to pay parents to stay home and work there. I'm pretty sure that infrastructure to pay parents to stay home counts as "socialism" which is vilified by the right.
      - tehjoker 5y ago
        Different family configurations appeared in many societies throughout history. The nuclear family is encouraged by capitalist states because one parent (the mother) staying home allows maximum flexibility for the male to be at work making money for the bosses. Importantly, the work the stay-at-home parent does is free, meaning the ruling class can pay them as little as possible. Nuclear families take up more real estate too, earning more money for banks and landlords. The liberal feminist movement in the 1970s changed this equation somewhat. Now two parents work constantly, can barely afford their lifestyle and no one cares for the kids (or the latent gender role of the mother requires her to effectively work two jobs at full capacity)! The ruling class again wins at (again) the expense of the future as the family configuration has become biologically insufficient to reproduce. The additional workers contributed by women also makes the labor market more flexible for employers, another win. Basically, we should ALL be doing less work and getting more services. Some poorer people are again looking at alternative family configurations because the nuclear model isn't sufficient to sustain life under these conditions.
    - sharikone 5y ago
      You claim correlation but that's not causation. My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder. Also, the stigma against stay at home moms is nothing, nothing, compared to stay at home dads.
      - monoideism 5y ago
        > My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder. That was pretty much my point.
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      My wife worked for several years. She stopped working when we had our 4th and child care was too expensive. Now that she is a stay-at-home mom, our quality of life has improved a lot. She has more energy in the evening to read with our kids, she follows up with friends and we are both more social, she makes better food than either of us could do before. Having a stay-at-home parent is DEFINITELY a luxury and a good decision IF you can afford it.
      - mschuster91 5y ago
        The thing is, for those parents who can afford one parent to stay home, in 99% of cases it's the mothers who end up as stay-at-home parents, and their careers (and with it, their post-childraising perspectives) go down the drain. The current world abuses schools as whole day care institutions so that both parents can be exploited and worked to the ground, and when parents and children are home they are so tired they lack the energy to do anything meaningful besides eating some kind of processed food, play a round of video games, and go to bed. In an ideal world, a full working week with a living wage would have 20 hours so that both parents can work four hours a day and then enjoy life with their children in the afternoon.
- dctoedt 5y ago
  > the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children I was about to respond with a snarky-yet-witty comment refuting this, but then probably both of us would be running afoul of HN guidelines.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    >> the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children Why is this comment running afoul of HN guidelines? FWIW, I've heard this exact narrative expressed strongly by certain Feminists. (Note: not all feminists are the same; "woke" is a derogatory term that I do not assign to "feminists")
AussieWog93 5y ago
To be fair, motherhood is a critical job and it's definitely in our interest as a society to give it a higher status than it has.
- api 5y ago
  Same with teachers. The people who raise the next generation have absurdly low recognition and status in our culture.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    Teachers would have more recognition and status if there were concrete evidence that their methods are effective and based on reproducible research. Is there a 10x teacher or even a 2x teacher? Surely there is, but how would we know? In Asian cultures a handful of teachers make a million dollars a year because they do test prep: it's easy to tell when their students pass or fail the big test. The most successful ones are treated by parents and test-takers as A-list celebrities, or even beyond that. They'd sooner swoon meeting Gwen Lee than Scarlett Johansson. But if you're teaching something harder to gauge, like "writing" or physical education, then it's hard to know if you're a 2x teacher or a 0.5x teacher. And you can't point to your research-backed methodology, because everybody else's methodology is also research-backed (n=22, observed over 3~6 weeks, as usual). The people who raise the next generation should have recognition and status if they're doing a good job. Are they? Would any random person off the street be doing an equally good job? We don't really know.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      > it's hard to know if you're a 2x teacher or a 0.5x teacher. Their students know. Even if it's a noisy metric, over the course of a few years a teacher will have 100+ students.
    - api 5y ago
      Teachers teach thousands of students at a minimum over their careers. Surely this can be measured. If nobody is doing it it’s because of either teachers unions, other bureaucratic restrictions, or not caring enough.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
robertlagrant 5y ago
> they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom is a full-time job My experience is that being a full time mum is valued less now.
kleiba 5y ago
My wife would prefer to focus on being a mom but feels too pressured from outside into having a job. Also, it's hard to afford a house these days with one income alone.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  My wife is getting pressure to home school our kids. Peer pressure sucks. I hope you get through it.
riedel 5y ago
Bored heroes might still be bored. It is all about choice and it is OK to chose not to be a heroes. We do not need to glorify that individual choice I guess, but make sure that there are choices. (Me and my wife are happy that those choices existed for us and my daughter has happy and fulfilled parents even if they are no heroes)
pjc50 5y ago
I mean, they did, and that's a large part of the early feminist movement, getting that recognized? As well as the important truth that not woman is suited to, likes, or wants to do 100% of the time.

> She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes. Back then they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom is a full-time job.

merliossu 5y ago

they still dont know. the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children

mschuster91 5y ago
The difference is payment of time in care work, and not just for childcare but also for other forms of care (disabled, elderly). Another very big issue is poverty. Time used for raising children doesn't count into pension payments, meaning that women who divorce from their husbands end up without anything in their name in the worst case.
- monoideism 5y ago
  This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor, just among middle class and up women (and men), typically left-leaning. Most poor mothers I've know would love to be stay-at-home moms because they're only working to survive and not for personal fulfillment, and because they love their kids.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Many middle class women and up also do housekeeping and care work. People are just different, and not everyone finds fulfillment in working outside the home. In fact with the pandemic making it so much easier to work while staying at home, some of these women might choose to find such work.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor Any women's shelter will disagree with you here. The rate of women that go back to abusive partnerships is immensely high among those who don't have any other option to survive.
    - monoideism 5y ago
      I didn't downvote, but what does this have to do with what I wrote?
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Stay-at-home parenting being unpaid work is not an "attitude," it's a fact of life. The leverage that abusive wage-earners have over their "non-employed" coparent is pretty strongly tied to their respective affluence. This isn't a "left leaning" problem. It's a problem of poverty, lack of education, and a lack of society's willingness to pay parents to stay home and work there. I'm pretty sure that infrastructure to pay parents to stay home counts as "socialism" which is vilified by the right.
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      Different family configurations appeared in many societies throughout history. The nuclear family is encouraged by capitalist states because one parent (the mother) staying home allows maximum flexibility for the male to be at work making money for the bosses. Importantly, the work the stay-at-home parent does is free, meaning the ruling class can pay them as little as possible. Nuclear families take up more real estate too, earning more money for banks and landlords. The liberal feminist movement in the 1970s changed this equation somewhat. Now two parents work constantly, can barely afford their lifestyle and no one cares for the kids (or the latent gender role of the mother requires her to effectively work two jobs at full capacity)! The ruling class again wins at (again) the expense of the future as the family configuration has become biologically insufficient to reproduce. The additional workers contributed by women also makes the labor market more flexible for employers, another win. Basically, we should ALL be doing less work and getting more services. Some poorer people are again looking at alternative family configurations because the nuclear model isn't sufficient to sustain life under these conditions.
  - sharikone 5y ago
    You claim correlation but that's not causation. My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder. Also, the stigma against stay at home moms is nothing, nothing, compared to stay at home dads.
    - monoideism 5y ago
      > My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder. That was pretty much my point.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    My wife worked for several years. She stopped working when we had our 4th and child care was too expensive. Now that she is a stay-at-home mom, our quality of life has improved a lot. She has more energy in the evening to read with our kids, she follows up with friends and we are both more social, she makes better food than either of us could do before. Having a stay-at-home parent is DEFINITELY a luxury and a good decision IF you can afford it.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      The thing is, for those parents who can afford one parent to stay home, in 99% of cases it's the mothers who end up as stay-at-home parents, and their careers (and with it, their post-childraising perspectives) go down the drain. The current world abuses schools as whole day care institutions so that both parents can be exploited and worked to the ground, and when parents and children are home they are so tired they lack the energy to do anything meaningful besides eating some kind of processed food, play a round of video games, and go to bed. In an ideal world, a full working week with a living wage would have 20 hours so that both parents can work four hours a day and then enjoy life with their children in the afternoon.
dctoedt 5y ago
> the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children I was about to respond with a snarky-yet-witty comment refuting this, but then probably both of us would be running afoul of HN guidelines.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  >> the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children Why is this comment running afoul of HN guidelines? FWIW, I've heard this exact narrative expressed strongly by certain Feminists. (Note: not all feminists are the same; "woke" is a derogatory term that I do not assign to "feminists")

AussieWog93 5y ago

To be fair, motherhood is a critical job and it's definitely in our interest as a society to give it a higher status than it has.

api 5y ago
Same with teachers. The people who raise the next generation have absurdly low recognition and status in our culture.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  Teachers would have more recognition and status if there were concrete evidence that their methods are effective and based on reproducible research. Is there a 10x teacher or even a 2x teacher? Surely there is, but how would we know? In Asian cultures a handful of teachers make a million dollars a year because they do test prep: it's easy to tell when their students pass or fail the big test. The most successful ones are treated by parents and test-takers as A-list celebrities, or even beyond that. They'd sooner swoon meeting Gwen Lee than Scarlett Johansson. But if you're teaching something harder to gauge, like "writing" or physical education, then it's hard to know if you're a 2x teacher or a 0.5x teacher. And you can't point to your research-backed methodology, because everybody else's methodology is also research-backed (n=22, observed over 3~6 weeks, as usual). The people who raise the next generation should have recognition and status if they're doing a good job. Are they? Would any random person off the street be doing an equally good job? We don't really know.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    > it's hard to know if you're a 2x teacher or a 0.5x teacher. Their students know. Even if it's a noisy metric, over the course of a few years a teacher will have 100+ students.
  - api 5y ago
    Teachers teach thousands of students at a minimum over their careers. Surely this can be measured. If nobody is doing it it’s because of either teachers unions, other bureaucratic restrictions, or not caring enough.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

robertlagrant 5y ago

> they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom is a full-time job My experience is that being a full time mum is valued less now.

kleiba 5y ago

My wife would prefer to focus on being a mom but feels too pressured from outside into having a job. Also, it's hard to afford a house these days with one income alone.

geoduck14 5y ago
My wife is getting pressure to home school our kids. Peer pressure sucks. I hope you get through it.

riedel 5y ago

Bored heroes might still be bored. It is all about choice and it is OK to chose not to be a heroes. We do not need to glorify that individual choice I guess, but make sure that there are choices. (Me and my wife are happy that those choices existed for us and my daughter has happy and fulfilled parents even if they are no heroes)

pjc50 5y ago

I mean, they did, and that's a large part of the early feminist movement, getting that recognized? As well as the important truth that not woman is suited to, likes, or wants to do 100% of the time.