This is all so true and well written. I have to say though, as a mother who is at home and does all the things you listed, my job would be MUCH easier (or at least less mentally exhausting) if the food in our stores was not full of questionable ingredients.
I spend extra time every week at the grocery store hunting for the one brand of butter that isn’t full of seed oils. While making my own bread from scratch, I fret about how the flour was processed. When I give a kid an apple for a snack, I wonder if I am poisoning him if I don’t take the time to peel it. I won’t even start on how many hours I wasted trying to come up with answers to the vaccine question. I have a background in microbiology, so I am better positioned than many to find and understand the answers, but the only answer I find is “nobody knows because nobody has run the studies properly”.
When my family’s health is on the line, I find that enormously stressful and maddening. Especially when there are ingredients that ARE known to be harmful that I feel like I should be checking for on every label (I don’t but I should be). Why is this my job? Why are these things still in our food?
If RFK will get the studies done, and get garbage ingredients out of our grocery stores, this mother would be massively grateful. Homemaking is hard enough without having to become an expert in food science.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying for years, as someone who grew up as a latchkey kid. When I discovered the “slow food” movement along with the fact that I had no idea how to cook or even grocery shop for myself, I abandoned the feminist ideals I was raised with right then and there. Today, I’m raising my two boys with my husband on our little homestead, and they prefer my homemade food over storebought or restaurant food. They’re often alarmed to see how their peers eat, and it’s sad how adults and kids alike in our area tend to eat such a highly processed diet. It’s hard to deny the effects, but something that is really striking to me is what a financial burden that lifestyle is, even with two working parents. My husband’s co-workers used to be baffled that he wasn’t broke all the time, and he’d tell them “my wife makes most of our meals at home. You’re eating out almost every meal. I’m spending a fraction on food.”
I’m so so glad to see more people are making the important connection between a well-tended, working kitchen, and tangible health and financial outcomes.
Well you’re right, I am very blessed and I married someone who I knew would support me as a homemaker. That said, we both worked when we got married and I also supported our family for three years when I had a lot of work as a freelancer. There are many ways in this day and age to accommodate home-oriented mothers and families, and a lot of men (and women for that matter) don’t realize how possible it is.
The best of all worlds is an at home mom working 12 hours a week for a break from the house- and some autonomous income- and women today who love to go to work for the camaraderie don’t realize if we all stayed home- we would have the sister hood camaraderie right in our neighborhood - just like moms did pre 1970. Keep fighting for this, Suzanne! As a mom, grand mom, and teacher- I see the rotten fruit of the working mom tree. (I worked PT while my kids were young -as did my daughter…. The reality is today many moms don’t even really like their children (they love them- but don’t like spending time with them because they are a ‘drag’…. Because they do not KNoW how to behave with their own children- they think their house must mimic a daycare center/preschool).
The ‘rotten fruit of the working mom tree’ is a very judgmental way of dismissing the majority of working moms who (like myself) work becuz I need to put a roof over our heads. My son turned out quite well. And he eats his vegetables.
Teach me. How should one behave with their children? My sahm mostly ignored me. I try to spend time with my kids but find them boring. Tell me how to do it right because I haven't figured it out.
You do not have to entertain your children 24/7. That is a huge misconception. You just have to physically be there. Provide healthy meals, a cozy, welcoming house, positivity and encouragement. You do not have to sit there day in and day out teaching some important skill, or learning this or that. Just be. As long as you are not sitting in front of a computer or staring at your phone…just live life with your children by your side. Give them their own room/space and let them be creative in it. Provide a reasonable amount of “tools”…watercolor sets, clay, building sets (legos, whatever), puzzles, books, non-electronic games, and tell them to “go play”. Invite a friend over. Swap babysitting days with other moms…one day they go to your house, then vice versa. That gives you a break. Go to the park, go on a walk, get a pet and show your child how to care for it. Come on, people, you can do this.
I follow a great Substack ‘Motherhood Until Yesterday’ and she mostly writes on how hunter gatherer tribes raised children. She highlighted in an article that a lot of the entertaining/engaging done with children was left to other kids, 6-13ish years old, because they were young enough to know how to play since they were just there developmentally themselves, and grown enough to know how to physically take care of kids.
I’m part way through the book “being there” by Erica Komisar which is specifically about how to be present at home- haven’t read it all the way through but so far I would recommend!
We made the decision for me to stay home for 18 years to homeschool and cook for our boys. This decision is still hard almost every single day because I miss working. It's the plight of the millennial mother with a master's degree isn't it?! They promised us the world, you can have everything! Turns out no you can't, not at the same time. Or it might look like you are having everything but you're definitely slacking in some area.
I am prioritizing health so much that we are going to move somewhere where I can have a garden and chickens. I cook 98% of our meals, and the rare time we eat out I'm very picky about where it is.
I am so grateful to have had an army wife mom who stayed home with us all 18 years and cooked as well. I don't think I would have come around if she didn't do that! Here's hoping that we can turn this around a little bit for the next generation.
Thank you for the bit about “several hours a day” in the kitchen. I am a from-scratch cook and this is what is required. If we want broth, well we have to make it, which necessitates planning 24 hours in advance to get bones out of the freezer, roast them, and then simmer in a pot of water for a day. If we want bread, I need to feed my sourdough starter by mid-day, grind wheat, mix the ingredients, wait 12-15 hours, and then bake. Want beans? We’ll need to get some dried beans from the basement and they’ll need to soak overnight and then cook for several hours the next day. This is “slow food,” really the original food. And this is only scratching the surface if you decide to grow/raise your own food. I was a latchkey kid, with two working parents. Meals came in packages from the store that could be quickly thrown together. Luckily, we didn’t eat out much because it was expensive. But I had all the latchkey kid “symptoms” listed and I had to learn to cook for myself and my family in my twenties. I love cooking now. When my mom visits, I can feel her impatience/lack of understanding around how long the cooking takes because there is other, cooler, more fun “things to do.” But I’ve committed to real, nourishing food for my family, and me, in my kitchen, is what it takes.
Keep up the good work, Melissa, you are doing the right thing. It might not seem like it, but you will be repaid IN SPADES in the future, for what you are doing now. The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world, and rocking the cradle means more than what it sounds like. It means not only rocking, but cooking, baking, planning, encouraging, going the extra mile, being available, actually caring, and saying no and standing up to the anti-family propaganda every single day. You're doing it! You already broke the cycle. You don't have to be perfect. Look in the mirror every day and be proud.
Couldn't be more true. Both of my parents worked as doctors six days a week. I ate dinner at the nanny's house many nights. Hers were the only real meals I ate. My mom fed us sugary cereal, frozen meals, packaged snacks. I was always sick. And she was a doctor! I stay home and make almost all our family's food. You are right that it is a part time job and maybe even more than that! It's an inconvenient truth that kids' health suffered immensely when women went into the workforce, but a truth nonetheless. Keep sharing it, Suzanne.
This piece suggests a larger problem indicated in the title. A problem with MAHA (and MAGA too) is that they are indeed too obsessed with conspiracies. I do not mean this in the way that the leftist media does: We should not ignore complaints about the globalists and donors and arms manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies and agribusiness and election fraud and mainstream media themselves. They are evil, and they are probably indeed conspiring against us all. But that does not explain why they succeed, why we seem helpless against them, and why we succumb to their machinations. The MAGA movement refuses to acknowledge its own failings and blind spots, and you have identified a big one. I am sure that the pharmaceutical companies and the food processing interests are poisoning our children. But they succeed because we allow it by allowing what you describe here.
It is after all a Christian principle: defeat evildoers by first defeating the sin within yourself.
Uh. No. We've been publishing about these issues for 30 years, some for 130 years, if not longer. All we get is "There would be too may people involved"? "I don't want to see that information" "I'm blocking you" "I'm going to run away" "I'm calling homeland security" "Hahahaha"... A conspiracy?? You mean two people? Or a Presidential Directive which is just 1 person? Or the 2M stock holders in Saudi-Aramco/Chevron? They're not conspiring on anything are they? It must all be one big accident!
Thank you Suzanne for speaking the truth boldly and without apology. Can you speak to the situation of gender role-reversals - when mom works full time and dad stays home? This arrangement is becoming more common, as women are out-earning men. Is this situation equally healthy for the child, or is there something specifically advantageous about the mother being the one at home?
It will not work on a large scale because the women will not stand for it. Most women are not willing to support a stay-at-home man. They will despise and divorce him.
The working wife is not “supporting him”. They are supporting each other in their different roles. We have done it both ways - sometimes he stayed home and I worked, and vice versa. Or we both worked full or part time. It is a partnership that has to be flexible due to the fact that life crap happens. I loved the day i came home from work and found my husband hunting for good recipes for dinner- what a joy!
Really what I’m getting at is this - many men understand the value of having one full time stay at home parent. If the wife has greater earning potential, the husband may rationalize that it makes more sense for him to stay home. As you point out, this arrangement often doesn’t sit well with women, although they may struggle to articulate why, because it seems so “logical” - after all, at least one parent is home with the kids, she worked so hard for that advanced degree, etc. The husband may be reluctant to accept a lower family income based solely on his wife’s feelings/preferences that she be the stay at home parent. Is there any research that supports the idea that it’s better for the children to have the mother at home, or does the research show that the gender of the stay at home parent doesn’t matter? Thanks!
Truthfully, I can’t answer to the research…. and you weren’t asking ‘me’ anyway.
But I do think it matters, in the way that Stephen is articulating, but broader.
I love seeing dad’s involved… but a dad that has put his responsibility onto his wife (without outside influence, like an illness making him unable to work as he once did) is someone I do not respect, and I believe many women would likewise not respect her husband.
But also, I believe the children will find it to be unrespectable too over time.
I remember reading a book years ago called “Gender Matters” by Dr Sax. It doesn’t speak to this exact issue, but more that girls and boys are not interchangeable, that this modern notion of making them interchangeable is nonsense, and harming us.
There are many podcasts on this subject, such as DOAC, louise perry at MMM or Rob Henderson, where the stats indicate a broken home and huge increase in marital dissatisfaction and adultery if women earn more. Women should not be the financial bread winners, as long ago we were not the primary hunters. This upside down world is the root cause of many of our troubles. As I like to say "just because you can, doesn't mean you should ".
I agree - just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I wonder how many women feel "trapped" by their level of education/skills. Once you've achieved in the educational realm, proven your intelligence and capabilities, and accrued the letters behind your name, there seems to be a lot of pressure (both externally and from within) to put your skills to use in the workforce.
What do we tell our daughters? Get educated, but not too much?
In my household I have more letters behind my name than my husband, so on paper I can get a job that makes more money than him more easily. But he happens to be smarter and more resourceful and has made us a lot of money online.
There's absolutely no way he could have replaced me these first 3 years. I've been breastfeeding on demand and for women who want to breastfeed on demand like for years, pumping so that they can work is actually even more work than breastfeeding. I know, I've tried it. And breastfeeding has so many advantages in all of the areas pointed to in this article, such as sleep, attachment/connection, physical health.
My husband can't do any of that.
I wonder if this conversation might be good for after the early years, maybe when the kids are five plus. They are either in school or being homeschooled by dad and maybe mom's working by then? But the way I see it then I'm taking a big gap of years in my career when my husband could have been advancing in his, and then he's going to take a gap when I go back to work after a 5-year Gap? Then it becomes just logical for me to remain at home.
And as it's been mentioned in this thrread somewhere, we live in this amazing day and age where we can make money online in about a billion different ways without leaving the home. This is not easy but it is an option that was not available for the generations before, and I see women everywhere taking advantage of that and I intend to as well! The best side of both worlds - I get to stay home and be the one with the babies especially when they're young, and I can still do a little something on the side during nap time ')
Many legitimate points made here. When I was pumping at work i had a “ lunch box” that was a slightly big. After weaning, somebody made the comment “ we wondered why you had such a big lunch box” . This was only with 1 baby. I was at home for 1st 2. Not easy, but necessary back in ‘91.
Thank you Suzanne. As an SAHM of 17 years, I've been following this MAHA initiative with much hope. One of my first reactions was that kids desperately need their moms at home to give them the best chance to develop in the healthiest ways possible. We provide irreplaceable, crucial value and it's time we are loud and proud about it. Thank you for your courage!
In that same vein, I worry about pushing for drastically changing American diets when so few Americans actually know how to prepare whole food in a simple and delicious way. I was a latchkey kid with quite a lot of time home in the afternoon, and I have very few memories of my mother cooking. I didn’t have any real idea of how to cook until I was in my 30s and had to feed my own kids. Granted, I figured it out, as most anyone can, but it took a lot of burnt food and expensive ingredients errors to get there.
Oh come on. There are millions of free YouTube videos showing how to cook anything under the sun. There are cookbooks from thrift stores...or even cheaper...go to the library and check one out. We live in a time where information is ubiquitous and the only barrier to someone not knowing how to do something like cooking is laziness. Not only that, but simple, basic meals with basic ingredients ARE NOT COMPLICATED. Do you expect anything in life worth doing does not come with a little bit of sacrifice? So, you burn some rice, or whatever...THAT'S LIFE. Geesh.
Europeans are not doing better than Americans in the realm of health. Quite the contrary, they are doing worse. Europeans are simply not having children. The divorce rate is high, but even more significant, the marriage rate is abysmal. People there have “partners” instead of spouses. Cohabitation of non-married couples is the norm. Small families or no children is the norm. Sure, they walk more…great. But they also do way less yard work (most have no yards), less access to nature nearby, and less participation in sports. They also pay exorbitant taxes. I don’t want “national healthcare”. I don’t want a pension. I don’t want to work less. Work provides purpose, fulfillment, and meaning to life. I don’t need the government to figure out how to be healthy, happy, or to figure out how to feed my family. I did it…I raised my children the old fashioned way with home cooked meals from scratch, playing outside, prioritizing traditional marriage and family relationships. I want the government OUT OF THE WAY so I can access real food from farmers that hasn’t been pasteurized, chemicalized, canned, and processed. I don’t need an alphabet agency to bless my food. If people are obese, unhealthy, and unhappy, it’s because they followed the government “recommendations”.
Some mothers are working because they have to to support their families. Not everyone wants to work I am sure some feel that their choice is made for them by high cost of living requiring dual income. Ideally a husband and wife can consider this before choosing housing and having a family.
This is all so true and well written. I have to say though, as a mother who is at home and does all the things you listed, my job would be MUCH easier (or at least less mentally exhausting) if the food in our stores was not full of questionable ingredients.
I spend extra time every week at the grocery store hunting for the one brand of butter that isn’t full of seed oils. While making my own bread from scratch, I fret about how the flour was processed. When I give a kid an apple for a snack, I wonder if I am poisoning him if I don’t take the time to peel it. I won’t even start on how many hours I wasted trying to come up with answers to the vaccine question. I have a background in microbiology, so I am better positioned than many to find and understand the answers, but the only answer I find is “nobody knows because nobody has run the studies properly”.
When my family’s health is on the line, I find that enormously stressful and maddening. Especially when there are ingredients that ARE known to be harmful that I feel like I should be checking for on every label (I don’t but I should be). Why is this my job? Why are these things still in our food?
If RFK will get the studies done, and get garbage ingredients out of our grocery stores, this mother would be massively grateful. Homemaking is hard enough without having to become an expert in food science.
You are a national treasure! Thank you for your candid writing about things no one wants to discuss ❤️
This is exactly what I’ve been saying for years, as someone who grew up as a latchkey kid. When I discovered the “slow food” movement along with the fact that I had no idea how to cook or even grocery shop for myself, I abandoned the feminist ideals I was raised with right then and there. Today, I’m raising my two boys with my husband on our little homestead, and they prefer my homemade food over storebought or restaurant food. They’re often alarmed to see how their peers eat, and it’s sad how adults and kids alike in our area tend to eat such a highly processed diet. It’s hard to deny the effects, but something that is really striking to me is what a financial burden that lifestyle is, even with two working parents. My husband’s co-workers used to be baffled that he wasn’t broke all the time, and he’d tell them “my wife makes most of our meals at home. You’re eating out almost every meal. I’m spending a fraction on food.”
I’m so so glad to see more people are making the important connection between a well-tended, working kitchen, and tangible health and financial outcomes.
You're lucky to have a husband willing to support that lifestyle. Many moms do not have that option, but would love it.
Well you’re right, I am very blessed and I married someone who I knew would support me as a homemaker. That said, we both worked when we got married and I also supported our family for three years when I had a lot of work as a freelancer. There are many ways in this day and age to accommodate home-oriented mothers and families, and a lot of men (and women for that matter) don’t realize how possible it is.
The best of all worlds is an at home mom working 12 hours a week for a break from the house- and some autonomous income- and women today who love to go to work for the camaraderie don’t realize if we all stayed home- we would have the sister hood camaraderie right in our neighborhood - just like moms did pre 1970. Keep fighting for this, Suzanne! As a mom, grand mom, and teacher- I see the rotten fruit of the working mom tree. (I worked PT while my kids were young -as did my daughter…. The reality is today many moms don’t even really like their children (they love them- but don’t like spending time with them because they are a ‘drag’…. Because they do not KNoW how to behave with their own children- they think their house must mimic a daycare center/preschool).
The ‘rotten fruit of the working mom tree’ is a very judgmental way of dismissing the majority of working moms who (like myself) work becuz I need to put a roof over our heads. My son turned out quite well. And he eats his vegetables.
Also those of us who work and still manage to feed our kids as well as any sahm.
Teach me. How should one behave with their children? My sahm mostly ignored me. I try to spend time with my kids but find them boring. Tell me how to do it right because I haven't figured it out.
You do not have to entertain your children 24/7. That is a huge misconception. You just have to physically be there. Provide healthy meals, a cozy, welcoming house, positivity and encouragement. You do not have to sit there day in and day out teaching some important skill, or learning this or that. Just be. As long as you are not sitting in front of a computer or staring at your phone…just live life with your children by your side. Give them their own room/space and let them be creative in it. Provide a reasonable amount of “tools”…watercolor sets, clay, building sets (legos, whatever), puzzles, books, non-electronic games, and tell them to “go play”. Invite a friend over. Swap babysitting days with other moms…one day they go to your house, then vice versa. That gives you a break. Go to the park, go on a walk, get a pet and show your child how to care for it. Come on, people, you can do this.
I follow a great Substack ‘Motherhood Until Yesterday’ and she mostly writes on how hunter gatherer tribes raised children. She highlighted in an article that a lot of the entertaining/engaging done with children was left to other kids, 6-13ish years old, because they were young enough to know how to play since they were just there developmentally themselves, and grown enough to know how to physically take care of kids.
I’m part way through the book “being there” by Erica Komisar which is specifically about how to be present at home- haven’t read it all the way through but so far I would recommend!
Amen, Suzanne. Thank God you have the courage to speak common sense to all of us! Let's hope it gets women to rethink their priorities.
And hopefully men will rethink their priorities too! I think a lot of men like to have their wives working.
Yes I think that’s quite common -it’s all about the lifestyle people feel they need to maintain.
It would be a great article had it put half the guilt and shame on dads. But hey, mothers create children's lives alone, don't they? lol
every article can't be about everything. this is about moms.
Dads are shamed far too much already, Franny.
Is this sarcasm?
We made the decision for me to stay home for 18 years to homeschool and cook for our boys. This decision is still hard almost every single day because I miss working. It's the plight of the millennial mother with a master's degree isn't it?! They promised us the world, you can have everything! Turns out no you can't, not at the same time. Or it might look like you are having everything but you're definitely slacking in some area.
I am prioritizing health so much that we are going to move somewhere where I can have a garden and chickens. I cook 98% of our meals, and the rare time we eat out I'm very picky about where it is.
I am so grateful to have had an army wife mom who stayed home with us all 18 years and cooked as well. I don't think I would have come around if she didn't do that! Here's hoping that we can turn this around a little bit for the next generation.
Thank you for the bit about “several hours a day” in the kitchen. I am a from-scratch cook and this is what is required. If we want broth, well we have to make it, which necessitates planning 24 hours in advance to get bones out of the freezer, roast them, and then simmer in a pot of water for a day. If we want bread, I need to feed my sourdough starter by mid-day, grind wheat, mix the ingredients, wait 12-15 hours, and then bake. Want beans? We’ll need to get some dried beans from the basement and they’ll need to soak overnight and then cook for several hours the next day. This is “slow food,” really the original food. And this is only scratching the surface if you decide to grow/raise your own food. I was a latchkey kid, with two working parents. Meals came in packages from the store that could be quickly thrown together. Luckily, we didn’t eat out much because it was expensive. But I had all the latchkey kid “symptoms” listed and I had to learn to cook for myself and my family in my twenties. I love cooking now. When my mom visits, I can feel her impatience/lack of understanding around how long the cooking takes because there is other, cooler, more fun “things to do.” But I’ve committed to real, nourishing food for my family, and me, in my kitchen, is what it takes.
Keep up the good work, Melissa, you are doing the right thing. It might not seem like it, but you will be repaid IN SPADES in the future, for what you are doing now. The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world, and rocking the cradle means more than what it sounds like. It means not only rocking, but cooking, baking, planning, encouraging, going the extra mile, being available, actually caring, and saying no and standing up to the anti-family propaganda every single day. You're doing it! You already broke the cycle. You don't have to be perfect. Look in the mirror every day and be proud.
Couldn't be more true. Both of my parents worked as doctors six days a week. I ate dinner at the nanny's house many nights. Hers were the only real meals I ate. My mom fed us sugary cereal, frozen meals, packaged snacks. I was always sick. And she was a doctor! I stay home and make almost all our family's food. You are right that it is a part time job and maybe even more than that! It's an inconvenient truth that kids' health suffered immensely when women went into the workforce, but a truth nonetheless. Keep sharing it, Suzanne.
This piece suggests a larger problem indicated in the title. A problem with MAHA (and MAGA too) is that they are indeed too obsessed with conspiracies. I do not mean this in the way that the leftist media does: We should not ignore complaints about the globalists and donors and arms manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies and agribusiness and election fraud and mainstream media themselves. They are evil, and they are probably indeed conspiring against us all. But that does not explain why they succeed, why we seem helpless against them, and why we succumb to their machinations. The MAGA movement refuses to acknowledge its own failings and blind spots, and you have identified a big one. I am sure that the pharmaceutical companies and the food processing interests are poisoning our children. But they succeed because we allow it by allowing what you describe here.
It is after all a Christian principle: defeat evildoers by first defeating the sin within yourself.
Uh. No. We've been publishing about these issues for 30 years, some for 130 years, if not longer. All we get is "There would be too may people involved"? "I don't want to see that information" "I'm blocking you" "I'm going to run away" "I'm calling homeland security" "Hahahaha"... A conspiracy?? You mean two people? Or a Presidential Directive which is just 1 person? Or the 2M stock holders in Saudi-Aramco/Chevron? They're not conspiring on anything are they? It must all be one big accident!
Thank you Suzanne for speaking the truth boldly and without apology. Can you speak to the situation of gender role-reversals - when mom works full time and dad stays home? This arrangement is becoming more common, as women are out-earning men. Is this situation equally healthy for the child, or is there something specifically advantageous about the mother being the one at home?
It will not work on a large scale because the women will not stand for it. Most women are not willing to support a stay-at-home man. They will despise and divorce him.
The working wife is not “supporting him”. They are supporting each other in their different roles. We have done it both ways - sometimes he stayed home and I worked, and vice versa. Or we both worked full or part time. It is a partnership that has to be flexible due to the fact that life crap happens. I loved the day i came home from work and found my husband hunting for good recipes for dinner- what a joy!
That’s a tired trope.
Really what I’m getting at is this - many men understand the value of having one full time stay at home parent. If the wife has greater earning potential, the husband may rationalize that it makes more sense for him to stay home. As you point out, this arrangement often doesn’t sit well with women, although they may struggle to articulate why, because it seems so “logical” - after all, at least one parent is home with the kids, she worked so hard for that advanced degree, etc. The husband may be reluctant to accept a lower family income based solely on his wife’s feelings/preferences that she be the stay at home parent. Is there any research that supports the idea that it’s better for the children to have the mother at home, or does the research show that the gender of the stay at home parent doesn’t matter? Thanks!
Truthfully, I can’t answer to the research…. and you weren’t asking ‘me’ anyway.
But I do think it matters, in the way that Stephen is articulating, but broader.
I love seeing dad’s involved… but a dad that has put his responsibility onto his wife (without outside influence, like an illness making him unable to work as he once did) is someone I do not respect, and I believe many women would likewise not respect her husband.
But also, I believe the children will find it to be unrespectable too over time.
I remember reading a book years ago called “Gender Matters” by Dr Sax. It doesn’t speak to this exact issue, but more that girls and boys are not interchangeable, that this modern notion of making them interchangeable is nonsense, and harming us.
Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable.
There are many podcasts on this subject, such as DOAC, louise perry at MMM or Rob Henderson, where the stats indicate a broken home and huge increase in marital dissatisfaction and adultery if women earn more. Women should not be the financial bread winners, as long ago we were not the primary hunters. This upside down world is the root cause of many of our troubles. As I like to say "just because you can, doesn't mean you should ".
I agree - just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I wonder how many women feel "trapped" by their level of education/skills. Once you've achieved in the educational realm, proven your intelligence and capabilities, and accrued the letters behind your name, there seems to be a lot of pressure (both externally and from within) to put your skills to use in the workforce.
What do we tell our daughters? Get educated, but not too much?
In my household I have more letters behind my name than my husband, so on paper I can get a job that makes more money than him more easily. But he happens to be smarter and more resourceful and has made us a lot of money online.
There's absolutely no way he could have replaced me these first 3 years. I've been breastfeeding on demand and for women who want to breastfeed on demand like for years, pumping so that they can work is actually even more work than breastfeeding. I know, I've tried it. And breastfeeding has so many advantages in all of the areas pointed to in this article, such as sleep, attachment/connection, physical health.
My husband can't do any of that.
I wonder if this conversation might be good for after the early years, maybe when the kids are five plus. They are either in school or being homeschooled by dad and maybe mom's working by then? But the way I see it then I'm taking a big gap of years in my career when my husband could have been advancing in his, and then he's going to take a gap when I go back to work after a 5-year Gap? Then it becomes just logical for me to remain at home.
And as it's been mentioned in this thrread somewhere, we live in this amazing day and age where we can make money online in about a billion different ways without leaving the home. This is not easy but it is an option that was not available for the generations before, and I see women everywhere taking advantage of that and I intend to as well! The best side of both worlds - I get to stay home and be the one with the babies especially when they're young, and I can still do a little something on the side during nap time ')
Many legitimate points made here. When I was pumping at work i had a “ lunch box” that was a slightly big. After weaning, somebody made the comment “ we wondered why you had such a big lunch box” . This was only with 1 baby. I was at home for 1st 2. Not easy, but necessary back in ‘91.
Thank you Suzanne. As an SAHM of 17 years, I've been following this MAHA initiative with much hope. One of my first reactions was that kids desperately need their moms at home to give them the best chance to develop in the healthiest ways possible. We provide irreplaceable, crucial value and it's time we are loud and proud about it. Thank you for your courage!
In that same vein, I worry about pushing for drastically changing American diets when so few Americans actually know how to prepare whole food in a simple and delicious way. I was a latchkey kid with quite a lot of time home in the afternoon, and I have very few memories of my mother cooking. I didn’t have any real idea of how to cook until I was in my 30s and had to feed my own kids. Granted, I figured it out, as most anyone can, but it took a lot of burnt food and expensive ingredients errors to get there.
Oh come on. There are millions of free YouTube videos showing how to cook anything under the sun. There are cookbooks from thrift stores...or even cheaper...go to the library and check one out. We live in a time where information is ubiquitous and the only barrier to someone not knowing how to do something like cooking is laziness. Not only that, but simple, basic meals with basic ingredients ARE NOT COMPLICATED. Do you expect anything in life worth doing does not come with a little bit of sacrifice? So, you burn some rice, or whatever...THAT'S LIFE. Geesh.
Dear Suzanne, thank you for saying it (the truth) loudly! ❤️❤️❤️
Europeans are not doing better than Americans in the realm of health. Quite the contrary, they are doing worse. Europeans are simply not having children. The divorce rate is high, but even more significant, the marriage rate is abysmal. People there have “partners” instead of spouses. Cohabitation of non-married couples is the norm. Small families or no children is the norm. Sure, they walk more…great. But they also do way less yard work (most have no yards), less access to nature nearby, and less participation in sports. They also pay exorbitant taxes. I don’t want “national healthcare”. I don’t want a pension. I don’t want to work less. Work provides purpose, fulfillment, and meaning to life. I don’t need the government to figure out how to be healthy, happy, or to figure out how to feed my family. I did it…I raised my children the old fashioned way with home cooked meals from scratch, playing outside, prioritizing traditional marriage and family relationships. I want the government OUT OF THE WAY so I can access real food from farmers that hasn’t been pasteurized, chemicalized, canned, and processed. I don’t need an alphabet agency to bless my food. If people are obese, unhealthy, and unhappy, it’s because they followed the government “recommendations”.
Some mothers are working because they have to to support their families. Not everyone wants to work I am sure some feel that their choice is made for them by high cost of living requiring dual income. Ideally a husband and wife can consider this before choosing housing and having a family.