Side Effects May Harm Some Family Members

In today's culture it seems to be a truth universally accepted that young women have to go to college, and afterwards get career jobs that will enable them to rise to positions of power in society, because women are just as capable of running a successful business as men are.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that women can't run a business just as well as men. I'm not saying that they can. And I'm not saying that women shouldn't go to college. I think the fact that women are able to go to college and get as much education as they want is a wonderful thing. All I want to talk about in this post is the repercussions a working mom's career has on her family.

Women are designed to have children, and to raise them. That is why we are more emotional, nurturing, and protective than men. We are better equipped to deal with day-to-day family life than men are. That is where our main skill set lies. Traditionally, men were the bread-winners of the family, and the women were the caretakers of the home and educators of the children. Up until the Industrial Revolution, that is (but the Industrial Revolution is a post for another day).

But in our "modern-thinking", feminist-idealogy-driven times, it is commendable for women to find work right out of college. Career jobs, at that. It is unthinkable to most of society that any woman would not want a career job, or would not consider marriage to be a career job (by the way, ask any married gal you know if they would consider marriage and/or raising a family to be a full-time job. I bet you I can tell you what their answer will be).

But in all this pressure to get high-paying, successful jobs, we tend to lose sight of something much more important. We as women have the unique gift of being able to  have children, and to raise and educate them much better than a man could. We are the ones who hold the family together.

I don't know how many times I have heard priests give homilies on the different roles of family members. I'm sure you've all heard some variation of this idea: the father is the "head" of the family, the one who makes the decisions and provides for the rest of the "body" that is the family. And the mother is the "heart" of the family, the caretaker and nurturer. The mother is the one who the kids go to when they are having trouble. She is the one who resolves sibling squabbles. She is the one the kids go to when they want something, and then the mom goes to the dad, because she is the one who can soften him up. She is the one who will sit and listen for the next forty-five minutes while the five-year-old retells his latest dream that doesn't even really make sense because he tells it in such a mixed-up, confusing way that makes you wonder if he even really understands what he's saying. She's the one who has the patience to explain that geometry problem to her highschooler over and over and over again, yea, even unto dinner time when the rest of the children are ravenously hungry so that they threaten to eat each other, and yet there is no food on the table. And she is the one who then takes all the children out to McDonalds, amid much cheering and vows of eternal love and gratitude from the backseat.

But we all know what happens if you take the heart out of the body. The body dies. The same principle applies to the family. If you take the mom out of the family life, away from the duties which should be hers, there is no one to fill the vacuum that is left and the family grows more and more distant from each other. In a sense, it dies.

This is what being a working mom means. And you may be thinking "but Grace, you're being paranoid. Now really, you're taking this too seriously."

Am I? Take a step back for a minute and look around. How many problems infect our society today? How many could be prevented if all homes had a good mother in them, taking care of them? People always talk about the ill-effects of not having a father around the house. But nobody ever mentions the harm that comes to a family without a mother.

I have been able to observe the children that come from a family where the mom is "stay-at-home", and I have been able to observe children that come from a family where the mom goes to work everyday. And the differences in the way the children interact not only with their siblings, but the way they view the world is very different, and not so much for the better.

I'm may not be a psychology expert, and I don't pretend to know each different family's situation when it comes to needing the extra income. And I'm not saying that a mom can't work from home, if that's what she wants to do. All I'm saying is my observations lead me to the conclusion that a family where the mom is present and accessible to her spouse and children at any and all times is a much happier and much more prosperous family.

If y'all have any thoughts on this subject, I'd love to hear 'em! :D

~Grace