That is the question all mothers and mothers-to be will eventually face. It is not very easy to decide in the world where comfortable lifestyle requires increasingly higher incomes and employers in turn demand ever higher commitment to professional life.
Can women reconcile career with a full time job of raising the family?
Parenting means much more than just meeting children’s physical needs. We have come to understand how important the quality of education and their emotional development is to their future and ours.
Negative consequences of inadequate parental care have in their ranks crime and substance abuse among youth and has truly become a real plague in modern society.
This concerns not only young people from poor and dysfunctional families but more often from affluent homes, which forces us to consider what in the world went wrong.
As mothers we would like to be all in all “superwomen” in order to prevent such a grim scenario from coming to pass but for many of us it is impossible.
Unfortunately too many women do not even have the choice when raising children on their own being their only provider but if you are in secure relationship in which father of your children brings a worthy income for the household, you are in position to make choice.
There is an obstacle however in such a situation, cultural stigma of a so called”house wife” that brings to imagination of overage person the picture of not so good looking, poorly educated woman in rollers perpetually on her head who stays home because she is not capable of anything else in opposition to always successful and slim business woman in suit who lives in a huge house and goes to gym every morning.
Before I started writing career, I had to face it many times over, almost at every social interaction when the dreaded questions would inevitably come : “where do you work?” or” What are you doing for living?”. Every time I answered “I stay at home with my children”, I would get this long look that was supposed to make me feel like a refuse of the earth or dying species at least, but it didn’t matter to me.
I knew why I was doing it and it was my personal choice, anyway what I do doesn’t make me who I am and frankly my children are more important to me than some strangers opinion. Two happy, healthy constantly adoring their Mommy daughters bring more satisfaction than anyone could imagine…
There are indeed great benefits of staying at home with your kids both for you and of course them, if I would try to mention all of them here, I would have to write a book instead of an article.
What is best for you depends on your individual family make up as well as your personality. If you are energetic, multitask person who can never sit still in one place for a minute, you might successfully be that “superwoman” and provide quality parenting for your children while maintaining professional life outside home, nevertheless if you are one of these frustrated women who have to put up with feelings of guilt every time they drop their little crying darlings into the care of strangers, you could be better off staying at home.
There is also more and more popular option of working from home or on a part-time basis if living on one income is particularly unbearable.
Whatever decision you will make, may it be truly yours based on what you really want and not on social bias or opinions of others, ultimately they are not responsible for your children and they do not live your life, so take it in your own hands!
