Stay-at-home parenting, Part 2

Many people wonder: what do "stay-at-home" parents DO all day? (Some people also like to refer to the practice as "work-at-home" parents, which is excessively vague and confusing, methinks.) For one, I'm rarely home! About 3 or 4 mornings a week, Jackson visits the gym's Kid's Club while I get my exercise or physical therapy time. In the early days when I started taking him to the gym, I would just relax in the hot tub and try to melt away the pain and stress of never having down time. I progressed over time to where I was regularly attending Zumba class and then added in more weight-bearing exercise. Jackson, unawares, merely enjoys time with children in a variety of age groups.

We go to parks a great deal and explore the variety of playgrounds and parks available here in Gainesville, FL. We visit other families with young children and have playdates. On days when we'd rather not be outside, we go to the play area at the local shopping mall or the natural history museum, which has free admission and is well-geared toward children. We have picnics together for our lunches after the gym, sometimes joined by friends. He has also just started a new gymnastics class and has regularly attended a weekly open-play event at a local play-place for kids. (http://www.suncountrygymnastics.com/) We have regularly attended as a fun activity for a Friday morning that gets us around other parents and young children as well as exercise in an environment where Jackson can fairly safely play however he likes.

Jackson is also learning the basics of household management. He likes to pretend to vacuum and has learned most of the ins and outs of vacuum usage, though so far he's too scared to operate it himself. He loves to sweep with brooms and dustpans. He loves to pretend to cook at his kitchenette, custom-built by my step-dad. (Ric is available to build and ship custom-made all-wood kitchenettes and toys: reraddas (at) gmail (dot) com; the man is an awesomely talented journeyman carpenter!)

Jackson knows a good bit of geography, too, so he can often tell me how to get where he wants around town on the days when it's not too pressing that I go where I intend. He likes to walk around the mall, feed the ducks at the pond by the hospital, play with the display toys at Toys R us and Target, and will point out (and demand to visit) when we are passing the home of a good friend of his. Because so much of his life is decided for him, I try to allow him a certain amount of autonomous decision-making. But of course, there are boundaries in all things: we do not go to the playground if it is time for lunch or too close to naptime. We do not watch a movie while after he has his bath and is calming down for bedtime.

At this point, our day is well-regimented. We wake each weekday morning, eat breakfast, and go somewhere by 9 or 9:30. Typically around 10:45 or 11 we're starting our lunch. Afterward, we have some low-key play, brush teeth together, read a story, and Jackson naps at around noon. When the world isn't conspiring against us, 2.5 to 3 hours later Jackson comes out of his room with a big smile and tackles me with a hug and a kiss and tells me he loves me. We spend a little time playing or cuddling while he adjusts to being awake again, then we have a snack. Afterward we typically either go outside to play or run errands or both, if time allows. Andrew gets off work around 5:30pm or 6:pm most days, so we do dinner then as a family. Jackson usually finishes eating first, excuses himself from the table with an "All done!" and plays independently while Andrew tells me in a burst of excitement all about his day. The two of them then go do bath time while I clean up the dishes. Shortly after I finish, Jackson comes tearing out of the bathroom, naked but for his lion towel (which makes him feel like a king). We try to wrangle him into a diaper and some pajamas before he gives us reason to use our Bissell Spot Bot. He gets a little more quiet play time, then we brush teeth and floss as a family. Andrew reads him what seems an interminable number of books while I listen through the baby monitor, then Jackson goes to bed. There's very little different on the weekends, especially since Andrew is still finishing up some college courses to prepare for graduate school.

I'm planning some more posts in the future that will talk about some of the toys and games that we highly recommend, so stay tuned!

Stay-at-home parenting, Part 1

One of the great opportunities afforded me in this life is the chance to spend time in my child's earliest and formative years focused on helping develop his potential as a human being. Many people refer to this as being a stay-at-home parent. Some very wrongly assume that it's only women who fill this role (and are just flat out wrong; women merely dominant the group is all).

In ancient times, before we had running water and electricity and other things that we believe simplify our daily lives, tasks needed to be divided in order to keep our social groups alive and well. Because men are sadly not endowed with the capacity to provide nourishment to babies, women naturally filled the role as caregivers of babies and children. Men went off and did the other fiddling bits such as chasing down food and trying to sort out what makes good plants for eating grow. Somewhere along the line, women got stuck doing the cooking and the cleaning, since clearly they had so much time on their hands, sitting around trying to keep the children from maiming themselves. Then the Industrial Revolution changed things, as people became more interested and more capable of finding ways to make a job simpler and more automated. Suddenly clothes did not all need to be hand-washed. Electric sewing machines replaced the vast amount of time women spent with needle and thread in hand. And over time, more appliances came into being that were designed to lessen the work a woman had to do at home. Even baby formula was created, allowing many women complete freedom from their prior role as a housebound person.

Suddenly even women who previously would not have been financially well-off enough to avoid doing their own chores had time to follow many of their aspirations and indulge in the frolicking larks that many men enjoyed. They demonstrated that they were equally capable (or in some capacities, superior) to men in the workforce. And many of them liked it so much, they stayed there and encouraged other women to follow their lead.

One day, however, things had gone beyond the point of no return. Women were no longer really in a position to choose whether or not they wanted to work outside the home. To afford the rising cost of living (induced in part by the doubling of the workforce), women now formed a staple portion of the workforce market. Instead of being locked in a cage at home, they became locked in a cage at work. (To read more about this, I highly suggest this excellent work by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi: The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Parents are Going Broke.)

So, it's no great surprise that I grew up under the impression that women and men who "stayed at home" were lazy or insufficient contributors to their families. My own mother had a great deal to do with me developing this impression. She's a hardcore work-a-holic, checking in on work email regularly throughout the day even when on paid vacations. My father was also working, but for many years he ran his business out of the house. Being that his income varied seasonally, mom was the primary breadwinner for our household. She was a great role model, and my sister has followed in her tracks as much as possible--even to the point where she works at the same company which has claimed my mother for over 30 years.

Didn't he know that children are best raised in herds of their peers by total strangers?

My brother-out-of-law stayed home with the kids for several years. They were not a rich family by any means, so mentally I judged him negatively for not working full time and putting the kids in preschool to give them more "social interaction." Didn't he know that children are best raised in herds of their peers by total strangers? While he could have done more to help them socially in the early years, I've come to realize that he was taking on a far more challenging task than I could have possibly imagined at the time.

Our society is not set up for families to have daytime custody of their own children. As bizarre as this sounds, it's demonstrably true.

When I finally gave up the dream that I could work from home 20 hours a week and still watch my newborn, I felt like a failure. But I was nursing 12 hours a day, sleeping about 4 or 5, and the other time I spent trying not to be a complete and disgusting slob. Living in a college town, I have found many other parents like Andrew and myself who have no family or social support system in place to help us care for our child. Having been physically "disabled" from a car accident a few months before my surprise pregnancy, working for any duration is very painful, so a full time job is out of the question until I can find a way to stop hurting all the time. Working part time doesn't cover enough to make up the costs of outsourced childcare. So, all things considered, it's been the most ideal option for us for me to stay home with Jackson and drag him to nearly all my medical appointments. (Thankfully my physical therapy sessions are at my gym, so I can pawn him off on the gym's lovely day care girls while I get abused back into feeling human again.)

Many moms I know would have loved to spend more time at home with their children, but by the time they were considering getting pregnant with a second child, they needed to go back to work to make more money for the family in order to pay the bills. Jackson's first playgroup, formed in his first months of life, has been decimated by this effect. All but one of his friends from the original dozen members is now in the care of someone other than Mom or Dad during the day while both parents work. These children who enjoyed special time throughout the day with their mothers (as we all were) have been shunted into a classroom directed by a stranger whose attention is divided among many children with the same abilities and disabilities. Luckily, society has managed to convince these parents that this is the normal order of things, that it's somehow more natural for a child to be kept away from her family all day while surrounded by those who know almost nothing more about the world than herself.

Don't get me wrong: childcare availability outside the home is a great feature of modern society. My son regularly spends time playing in the daycare at my gym while I exercise. There are many single parents in this world who do not have the luxury of staying with their children all day. There are very good benefits to a preschool, such as the ability to teach children a foreign language or let them play with toys and materials that are not likely to be found in a traditional home setting. But I do not believe for a moment that foisting my child off into the world before he can fully communicate is really the natural modus operandi.

I believe in equality. I believe that men should be allowed to stay home with children just as well as women should. I believe that women should be allowed to work just as well as men should. But I will not suggest that a parent is doing a disservice to a child by spending quality time focused on the child himself. The emotional well-being of a family should not be sacrificed because of the selfishness or pig-headed ideology of any one of its members.

I stay at home for my health. I stay at home to focus on my child. I stay at home because my husband is overwhelmed with work and school and has very little free time--that I'd prefer was spent with us as a family, not doing chores. I stay at home because I enjoy the physical and emotional freedom. We don't spend much time at home, but I'm happy and proud to be a Stay at Home Parent.