Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (95820)	2/10/2005 1:07:22 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Well, I didn't say that the mom had to stay home exclusively. When I went back to work my baby was four years old, and my husband and I were on different schedules so she was still almost always with us. She also went to a really high quality community nursery school three afternoons a week to encourage good socialization skills. I think daycare is a vast social experiment foisted on us by the feminist movement. I realize I sound like Rush Limbaugh about this--I guess it is an issue I am just really conservative about. I think the fact that young mothers right now are staying home with small children in larger numbers than their mothers did says something significant. These young mothers were more likely to have experienced how daycare feels for themselves, and don't want it for their children. If you can't somehow figure out how to nurture young children, perhaps you shouldn't have any is my opinion. I practiced immersion parenting, where the baby under one year is almost always touching a parent. It is the way the third world naturally parents. I also nursed my baby until she was four, which again is the worldwide normal age to wean children. I think the American way of parenting--bringing home a baby and locking it up in a cage in another room and then listening for its cries by speaker system, and dumping it off for about ten hours a day so distracted strangers who are unattached to the baby can take care of it--is an extremely weird kind of child rearing. Of course, I don't think that material wealth is as important as rearing a healthy child. Unhealthy, unattached children who do not develop to the best of their potential and are messed up emotionally will bite you in the butt for the rest of your life, I think. I was trying to avoid that, and feel really good and unconflicted about the way I took care of my child. It's true that those post-war moms played bridge and had coffee together and enjoyed generally very convenient lives. Still, it was nice from a child's point of view to know that your mom was home when you needed her, that someone was going to be there after school. It is a really cold feeling for children to come home to an empty house, and statistics show that time and place is when they start experimenting with drugs and sex, way too young. In the fifties, dinner was always served promptly, and families ate together, which I think is very important. Houses were immaculate, sheets were clean, and there wasn't the high level of pressure and chaos that I don't think is really very good for anyone. My grandmother had a maid when her children were young. Perhaps I am wrong, but I was told that most middle class women did as well. Labor was really cheap prior to World War II. So she did actually spend an enormous amount of time playing with them, reading to them, etc. To respond to something you said in your post, I don't think the difference between children who are cared for at home and those who go to daycare is usually night and day, but my own guess is that it is significant. Is that worth the cost? I guess every parent has to make that decision for themselves. What I object to most is the feminist brainwashing that daycare is good for children, not the individual decisions that parents have to make in the real world.