Men stay at home?

jeez. mine did. it was fucking awful.

 

Did you want to kill yourself?

 

no, though i did have the occaisional homicidal impulse. why kill MYSELF when THEY'RE the ones being stupid?

 

The good thing about big familys among others is the kids can find somebody to talk to, and then they wont want to kill themselves.

 

unless the other kids merely see them as a convenient outlet for anger and aggression.

 

That would suck.

 

This is just an issue of how men are usually brought up, Men = providers woman= moms/ stay at home. It's just an issue that we were brought up with thats all, it's totally up to the people involved obviously if my wife has a masters degree and can get a much better paying job than myself and she wants to work she can, compared to me who only gets a minimal salary. I would work if she wanted me too and would rather work but I would never force her to if she didnt want to no matter how much either of us made!

 

Interesting... will you hold the same notion if you were a woman and your wife was a man?

 

I feel like you do what you have to do to make your family work and bring home money to get bye and if it works for you great!

 

Four big problems that men face when working at home are...

1) The lack of a suport network for male caretakers. Housewives have these, and they are usually unofficialy closed to men. Women don't really trust that house husband who's probably a shiftless looser anyway. And they certainly don't feel comfortable gossiping about their sex lives with him.

2) The external preasures designed to force men back into our gender roles. When people start noticing what's going on, gossip will fly and eyes will roll and relatives will ask when you're going to get a job.

3) The internalised shame of failing at your gender roll. A lot of house husbands are in their possition not out of a desire to do housework, but because their wives make better money.

4) The lack of skills. Girls are raised from the start to know how to keep a home for someone. Boys are not. Those skills don't come easily.

All in all, men have about as much trouble deviating from our prescribed gender rolls as women do.

 

i reject point #4. i have no idea how to run a household and was never taught to cook or what household cleansers are for or how to use them. i only learned to do laundry when i was a teenager. mom didn't want me in the home. also, i've never had a female support network.

 

oh, and my husband does the cooking. not that i can't if i have a cookbook, but that entire area of household management seems to require creativity, in which i'm lacking.

 

Well, that sucks for you KC. Why didn't your mother want you in the home? It sounds like you were raised to take on the male gender role. So you have as much trouble with the female gender roll skill set as we do.

 

Support networks are unofficial. Whenever you come into contact with another mother and talk with her you've become a support network.

 

i really do. i have a relly hard time relating and connecting with women and what it is that the female culture embraces.

and as for a female support network being every time i talk to another woman, that's just totaly crap. that means that every time you talk to another woman you have a female support network, too.

 

I'm with KC here, I didn't learn anything about keeping a home either. Not because my mom didn't want me in the home (? sounds like a rude way of saying it to me, but whatever) but because she simply never had those skills - her mother was very sick for almost all of the time my mom was around and passed away right before my mother found out she was pregant

 

I'm very sorry to hear that, Murria. But that should make you even more sympathetic to my point. People don't just have those skills. They have to be learned. And despite your personal experience, most women have learned from their mothers. Most men have not, and so this is a huge problem for men working in the home. I don't see why you disagree, KC. Just because you have the same problem doesn't meen that men don't have it.

Maybe there should be courses in homemaking skills for men at local community centers. That would also help to create a suport network for house husbands.

 

i disagree because "housewife support networks" are a myth. most of us stay at home mom's are left floundering in the dark, trying to make connections with others in the same situation we are. there may be happy little crews of women who get together and do crafting and discuss household cleansers or whatever, but most of us stay at home alone with the kids until our husbands get home. or we show up here.

you're also getting into the generations of women rasied by mothers who didn't stay home. they didn't ahve the time after work to teach their kids anything about household management.

 

my mother is a rude woman. she didn't want me in the home.

 

I don't have much of a support network. I have LLL, but it's focus isn't on home care ect. And we only meet once a month. And I'm 20 years older than many of the new moms in our group. The "Coffe Klatche" is dead, gentlemen.

My sister's dh was out of work for almost a year. Her dh was, I guess, a SAHD, but SHE still had to do all the housework and most of the cooking when she got home from work. And he spent all day playing and smoking and visiting buddies while the kid was dumped on HER dad. It was NOT a good situation.

I know one SAHD, he seems to be doing a good job. But, he refused all invitations from any of the other moms at preschool to get together for even a play date. I really don't know what the issue was, but he didn't seem to want a "support network." He's really good with his kids, though, and seems to be doing a great job.

One of the problems is that most SAHDs are doing it because of lack of employment. My dh makes TONS more money than I ever could (despite the fact that I have more education) so it is much more advantageous for him to work, plus, he admits he'd be a terrible SAHD, he doesn't have much patience and wants all his "free time" for whatever he wants it for. I'd rather be home than have him do it, in any case. But, that is just us, we aren't a microcosm of the entire country, not to my knowlege.