And not just for that. In the comments on olderwoman’s post here and elsewhere, she is also demonized for having the gall to have had negative feelings about her situation, and worse! to have expressed them in writing. “Bitter” seems to be the pejorative term of choice. Because, as we all know, a single post about her life is adequate to sum up all of her feelings and actions. Or at least adequate enough for all of us to judge her by.

The criticism is the same whether the author is male or female.

Olderwoman’s post was brilliant. I’ve also been squeezed between the impossibly and insanely overlapping demands of jobs, family and relationships, so her words evoke those memories with painful clarity. Her situation and choices aren’t identical with mine, but her experience of being condemned all around for trying to be a “good” scholar as well as a “good” mother and “good” partner? That’s sadly universal.

These seem like odd thoughts: human caregiving has always been “privatized” i.e., done first and foremost by kin of the one being cared for as opposed to strangers. Thus, it makes no sense to say “the more we privatize” it.

And, the phrase “structural constraints” is one of those massive generalities that just sweeps so much under the rug. Laments about ” no universal preschool” etc are irrelevant to the original post, most of which deals with events that occurred once the kids starting going to school. It is a structural constraint that one can’t have one’s cake and eat it too. One person’s “structural constraint” is another’s “real world.

Given that dual-income couples and families are more common today among professionals than say, 30 years ago, the tensions olderwoman describes are widespread. This is not a personal choice as much as a social one. “Keeping up with the Jonses” is a result of this. For example, buying a house in a neighborhood also favored by DINKs and DIWKs is harder for single-income families. It is not a personal choice to have other professionals pursue dual careers and drive up your cost of living.

Consider the irony—Scatterplot’s poster had her husband follow her to two places for her career. Then her career gets nose-dived w/ the 2nd child and his travel-centered job (she never said it paid more; only that it was something he had always wanted to do and was “exciting, fun, and interesting.” For all we know, it paid less than his prior job). She does not regret this choice; it is after 10 years on the mommy track, and her attempt to re-engage her academic career that she gets hit with her children’s resentment. In the end, her academic career is not revived. So, her husband’s prior sacrifice is for naught; her career as she had imagined it is aborted. She didn’t choose this; it happened. She never blames the kids or he husband. That doesn’t mean she should blame herself.

So instead of the children watching TV for 10 hours a day they will be in state-provided childcare for 10 hours a day in utopia?

From my reading of her post, I don’t know if that would have helped OlderWoman and her husband. She said at the time that they didn’t want to hire full-time childcare, so presumably they wouldn’t want full-time government-provided childcare. She already had tenure by the time of their second child, so stopping the tenure clock wouldn’t have helped her in particular.

It sounds like a large chunk of their dilmmia was that neither her nor her husband wanted to give up their interesting jobs. The author turned down a lot of work possibilites to take care of her kids, so presumably she also had work flexibility. Her husband consciously choose a very demanding job with a lot of travel.

I don’t think government can do much to solve those sorts of problems.

And, incidentally, I was dispatched on a number of occasions in my childhood to after-school and holiday programmes. I preferred it when we had privitised childcare – either with people my parents had hired or us being dispatched around amongst our aunts as part of some complicated childsharing system my mum and her sisters had running. In a programme you are always being organised and entertained and educated, and there’s no allowance for curling up in a corner with a book or splashing around in the stream. If you splash around in the stream there is a workbook to fill out telling you to do things like “see if you can find these aquatic creatures!”. Aaarrrgh. Give me privatised childcare any day.

Do some of her friends have that deal? Why yes they do (some don’t even work part time though their kids are well past school age). Would I sign up for it? Hell no—it’s a lousy, unfair deal, why on earth would I do that?

way to stick it to the man your wife, dude.

24/7 nanny coverage means hiring three full-time (8 hour shift) nannies, down to two when your kid is able to sleep through night regularly. Having a nanny on shift does not mean you never interact with the kid. It can mean that while your playing outside he or she is doing the kid’s laundry. It means that when a colleague returns your calls while your playing or feeding your child, you can take the call without yelling for your spouse to stop what she’s doing to watch your child. I’ve seen the stress-levels that dual professional couples with dual-nannies display around the house. It’s a lot less than the stress-levels at mine, where there are no nannies.

Why assume that nannies still have kids at home? Some have adult children or have not yet had children.

I think her post also shows how these dilemmas are often particularly difficult for women. We get more education now, are expected to have careers,… then once having children are confronted with an intensive mothering ideology (see Sharon Hays’ The Cultural Contradictions of Mothering) that extorts us to lavish time & attention (& money) on our kids. It seems men suffer in particular ways too—from all kinds of institutional constraints that prevent the majority from reducing work hours for childrearing. These phenomena exist in North America—other CT posters can speak more to other countries.

So, while many of her parenting decisions might seem questionable, let’s remind ourselves of the structural conditions under which she lives—and that these similarly affect other employed mothers in North America. (And that those without partners or other folks to help out and those with low incomes are clearly the most disadvantaged in our privatized system of caregiving.)

5. attend to how I am doing this. Well, clearly this is a simplification. It does not discuss the details of each hour spent, or the possibility of multi-tasking, or the impact on our mutual finances, or the time-dilation effect of time spent in motion as per relatively theory. Nor does it discuss involvement from extended family. It’s a way of schematizing that reduces matters to a mathematical formula, and it’s based on a daily rather than weekly, yearly or hourly level.

Okay, I’ve attended specifically to the ways in which I’ve gone about simplifying and schematizing my understanding of it.

Now what? This is a genuine question. What does olderwoman think I should do now?

Or does simplifying and schematizing our understanding have a meaning in sociology that’s like the meaning in maths of the phrase “differentiate y with respect to x”?

Okay, I’m puzzled. I’m thinking of having kids myself, and would like a way of thinking about the trade-offs. But how are we meant to do this? And how will it be useful as a way for making better choices for ourselves?
I’m trying to think through the steps.
1. Complex interdependency of our system is a starting point.
Okay. Taken.
2. Attend specifically to the ways that we go about simplifying or schematizing our understanding of it.
3. Look up schematizing in a dictionary.
“To express in or reduce to a scheme”

4. Where now? Well, I learnt in university a number of ways of simplying, or schematizing a system. Pictures of blackboards and whiteboards come to mind. I can write an equation for daily time available from me and my husband:
No of hours spent working + no of hours of housework + no of hours spent in childcare + no of hours in personal care

#26 “If someone else is paying for 24/7 nanny coverage, sure.” Then they’re not your children anymore. Let the servants take them home. They have kids too: that they can’t take care of while they’re taking care of yours.

#25 “We do not speak honestly of class, but we like to sometimes use gender as a substitute.”
I have no sympathy for anyone, male or female, who can afford to hire servants. I have no sympathy for people with “careers,” only for people with jobs.“We do not speak honestly of class”
No, you don’t.

This isn’t the life “of the mind” it reads like the life of the over-worked and self-absorbed bureaucrat. There’s not an ounce of emotional sympathy for another human being in the language of the post or in most of the responses. It’s not about you it’s about the kids. All your store-bought expertise and you end up where you started: adolescent/academic narcissism.

“He was owed”
No…
“I owed him” But even if she’d had the guts to write it straight she’d be incapable of attaching any irony.