Family Life Choices

It is the rare young family today where one parent has opted to remain at home with the children, rather than have both parents absent throughout the working day, attending to paid jobs, and ensuring that some one is looking after their children.  Mostly through day care, though in some few instances another family member - grandmother, for example - has undertaken that important function. 

It is not just that since feminism a new kind of social contract has overtaken the old which has freed women to think of themselves as vital members of the paid working community. That too, of course. 

For some peculiar reason women who remain at home responsible for the care of their young pre-school-age children are made to feel by prevailing standards of society that they are not contributing in an important way if they do stay at home.  They feel defensive when they're asked what they "do" and they respond with the answer that they are stay-at-home mothers. 

Performing a vital, difficult and responsible task.  And one they and they alone should recognize is their responsibility. A woman - or a man - as a parent has assigned to themselves a responsibility for the well-being and needful raising of a young child if they have decided to have children.

 Hiving the day-to-day care of young children off to paid minders whose most important task is to return those children intact at the end of the working day to their parents has become the societal norm, but it does not express a situation that is optimal for responsibly raising children.

Most two-parent families of the middle-class are not prepared to make financial sacrifices for the children they aspire to.  They want children but neither parent wants to forgo the paid workforce, nor the salary that comes with it, and the approval of society that now views this as normal. 

Without a double salary much of what modern society takes for granted representing lifestyle and its accoutrements would be denied a family with a parent at home. Childcare costs are expensive, but this is a requirement in families where the mother is preparing to return to the labour force after giving birth. 

That cost accelerates enormously when more than one child requires child care.  The quality of life for parents and children is not optimum; any day has finite hours and if a working life is combined with a home life, the working hours take precedence.  With less time to spend with children the solution seems to be lavishing possessions on those children.

The choice has been made then, to become an acquisitive consumer to rationalize too few quality hours 'left over' for children.  People live a lifestyle that is inclusive of meal shortcuts through pre-packaged food choices, eating out, expensive vacations. 

Add to that household upkeep that includes charges for Television reception/channel choices, cellphone and computer/Internet, and the latest gadgets and toys for children who have too little time at home to make full use of them. The choice to live in this way is mandated by what has become the norm within society. 

In Canada, where medical/hospitalization costs are provided through government programs, and education is paid through taxation as well, the true necessities of life; shelter, food have been hugely supplemented by luxuries that are also now considered necessities.  It is the add-ons that bring costs up, and which are dispensable.

A home without a television set can be one where books are more appreciated and where conversations are conducted continually, and board games indulged in, each of these alternates providing exposure to more value in a child's life through meaningful interpersonal interactions than  the mindless slumping before a television set with its detached and meaningless programs lacking true social value.