Glamor Magazine*
April 2007
pgs 269-270
The Story
The Summary:The article was adapted from a new book: The Feminine Mistake and looks into the dangers of choosing to be a stay-at-home mom.
Across the country, young women are jettisoning careers to stay home with their children. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an estimated 5.6 million mothers stayed home to care for their families in 2005, about 1.2 million more than a decade ago. The trend of opting out “has been broader than previously believed, with women at all income levels taking job breaks,” The Wall Street Journal reported recently.
Women originally entered the workplace in large numbers during WWII, and then not again until the late 70's/early 80's with the women's movement and the ERA. Since then staying at home or working have been major choices in motherhood. Some women feel that they have stretched themselves thin, others feel they had too much time on their hands. There's a story behind everyone's choice. But choices can have consequences.
Staying at home with your kids can be a fulfilling choice, but it’s also a risky one, and you should know beforehand what those risks are. Divorce, a spouse’s job loss, widowhood—all these leave far too many women broke and unable to support themselves and their children. I decided to write my new book, The Feminine Mistake, to warn a new generation about the hidden costs of financial dependency.
Divorce and a spouse's job loss are probably the hardest situations to deal with (people, especially in the midwest, often are more willing to help someone when their spouse has died, divorce and job loss are seen as bad, controlable things) Divorce is the one no couple wants to think about when they walk down the aisle or are the guest of honor at a baby shower, but statistically, half of all married couples end up going through it.
There's also the question of getting back into the workforce. If your husband just lost his job, do you really think it will be easy for you to jump into a job with just as much pay?
In fact, it’s not so easy to reenter the working world, and a time-out can inflict heavy penalties. More than a quarter of women who want to go back to work don’t manage to do so, according to a 2005 study by the Center for Work-Life Policy, and only 40 percent of those who resume work return to full-time employment. If they get a job after opting out, their paycheck takes a major hit: The same study found women lose a staggering 37 percent of their earning power when they spend three or more years out of the workplace.
Let's say you choose to stay home with your kids until your youngest is in kidnergarten, at 5 years old. You decide to have three children, each 2.5 years apart. That puts you out of the working world for 10 years! Look at the technological changes alone that have happened in the last 10 years. Imagine that in a specialized industry! At my part-time retail job, the product in my store has changed and evolved so much in the 2.5 years I've worked there. Leaving for a week and going back is stressful.
“It’s very nice to believe, ‘I don’t have to worry, I can have someone take care of me,’” says Lucy Peters,* a stay-at-home mother who was 33 years old when her husband left her and ceased to support her and their two children, even though he was earning more than half a million dollars a year. “But you never know when he’s going to stop wanting to take care of you, or lose his job, or drop dead. There are too many what-ifs to be lulled into a sense of complacency like that.”
I don't like the idea of someone "taking care of me" at least not financially. I've spent 7 years with varied degrees of financial indepedence, and it's nice to not have anyone to answer to about my spending. When I dropped $200 on Sex and the City, the Series I didn't have anyone making me feel guilty for spending money on something I knew I wanted, and would get plenty of use out of. Name one housewife who could do that. When someone else provides your money, you loose a part of yourself. You don't know how to take care of yourself.
As for the stress of working motherhood that Eames is dreading, it may be exaggerated. In one study, sociologists found that homemakers who went to work full-time reported a decrease in psychological distress. Many experts believe working women enjoy more power and more options in their lives, crucial components of happiness.
Moreover, their children turn out just fine. “The research on the impact of working mothers on kids shows that there isn’t any,” says Pamela Stone, Ph.D., a sociology professor at Hunter College in New York City. “Since the forties, this has been researched every which way.”
It's not bad to be a working mom. No one said you had to be working 80 hours a week, either. Part time is fine. The article in the magazine shared tips about the smart financial moves to make if you do choose to stay home with your children, like putting away money in your name, making sure the benefits of you husband's life insurance go to you and/or your children, and making sure your name is on all bank and investment accounts.
I can understand why one would want to stay home with their children, but I don't get why one would want to drop out of the workforce/world completely. Even if you voluneteer one day a week at a soup kitchen or animal shelter for a few hours, it looks good on a resume 10 years down the road. A voluneteer spot where work would have been looks better to an employer than "stayed home with kids" There are plenty of women who didn't, why wouldn't he hire one of them.
*I'm a big magazine reader, and I found this article very interesting, so even though it's not in the New York Times(NYT), I felt it deserved a spot on my blog. Also, the NTY was not available over spring break, which is why the two previous articles have no page numbers, only web addresses.
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