Dina sent me this stunning article from the UK Daily Mail.
It says:
Mothers are now as likely to go out to work as women without children, figures showed yesterday.
The historic landmark reached last year means just one mother in four stays at home to raise children.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed 74.1 per cent of mothers with children under 16, or between 16 and 18 if they are still at school, are regarded as ‘participating in the labour market’.
By comparison, 75 per cent of women without dependent children were either in work or looking for a job last year.
[…]The new estimates are based on the large-scale Labour Force Survey covering women who either have jobs or are unemployed and looking for work. The ONS report said benefit changes that have pressed single parents into looking for work may have influenced the change.
It added: ‘Other government policies, for example to fund 570 hours of free early education childcare a year in England for all three to four-year-olds, will have provided additional incentives to engage with the labour market.’
The biggest change has been among mothers of children under five. In 1996, 1.6 million of them were in the labour market, compared with 2.1 million last year. This represents a rise from 54.5 per cent of mothers of under-fives in work in 1996 to 65 per cent now.
There are three things I want to say about this.
First, it’s undeniable that daycare is not optimal for a child when compared with having a stay-at-home mom for the early years of childhood. That’s not my opinion, it’s a fact. Part of preparing to get married and have kids is understanding what marriage requires and what children need. Don’t rely on the government to provide for your kids, they are only interested in putting you to work so they can get your income taxes. That’s especially true for big-government leftist parties that want to weaken marriage and the traditional family in any case.
Second, it’s undeniable that government programs can make the choice to stay home or not more or less financially feasible. Make sure when you vote that you vote for smaller government and lower taxes. The bigger the government, the less money you have to run your own family game plan. Social programs exist so that the government can buy votes from people by transferring wealth from those who work to those who don’t. If you work and want to have a family, then vote for your family, not for big government.
Third, single men and women need to factor in the costs of a stay-at-home mom into their marriage plan early. Your 20s are not the time for you to waste money on alcohol, parties, contraceptives, and recreational sex with hawt atheists. Your pre-marriage years should be the time when you to get used to hard work and save a nest egg. If the needs of your future children are important to you, then you study STEM subjects or a trade in school, you get a real job after college, you pay off your student loans, and you start saving money for your marriage as soon as possible. Again, you can’t “feel” your way to a good marriage. Recklessness is not going to work.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
It’s sad, isn’t it? So many things have conspired and come together to get moms away from their kids, the economy, the government, the decline in marriage, and relentless mockery of stay at home moms. It’s not so easy anymore.
Money and planning of course are wise, but you can learn to live with less. People have been raising kids with very little for centuries. What is extremely difficult to deal with is the social stigma. It whittles away at women’s self esteem as mothers, it begins to create stress within marriage, men are relentlessly told their wives should be working, and kids themselves start to look at their moms as if there is something wrong with them for not being like other moms. So, a huge amount of spiritual warfare going on there.
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“Your 20s are not the time for you to waste money on alcohol, parties, contraceptives, and recreational sex with hawt atheists.”
Straight into the WK Hall of Quotes with that one! For the record, my wife and I did not waste money on any of those things, but, according to her, I WAS a hawt a-theist. :-) Now I am neither. It was a wonderful trade, by the Grace of God.
I sure hope that you have a TON of young, and listening, Christian readers – for the sake of our morally regressive nation.
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I really don’t like that awful woman who demanded that we all pay for her contraceptives. Sandra Fluke.
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But, Wintery, her UMC pastor Dad is so very proud of her. :-) It’s actually stunning to me that people cannot put two and two together when it comes to contraceptives (some of which have abortifacient modes) and abortion. But, I doubt that Fluke’s Dad even understands what an atrocity abortion is, if he is proud of his slutty daughter.
You left that out too, WK: this push to get women into the marketplace has a significant upward pressure on abortions. (We need to quantify that, if possible.) Nothing can get in the way of a woman and her career – not even an innocent defenseless baby in the womb. For a few hundred dollars, the “problem” can be made to go away. It is an easy economic calculation, a final solution of sorts.
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“it’s a fact” link is broken, 404 error.
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Thank you! It was my fault, and I fixed it.
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All this push still boils back to policies that keep women out of the home. At-home work like freelance writing, blogging, eBay shops, private tutoring, the arts or daycares are not viewed as “socially acceptable” in most female circles. But these are the forms of employment that could bridge the gap between needing a second income and needing to care for your children.
On a social level, they’re still pushing the old feminist mantra “If a woman is given the choice between family and work, she can still make the wrong choice.”
They don’t care that quality of life is dropping, wages are dropping, happiness is dropping. They don’t care that there are better options for women who want to have children. They just want other women to embrace THEIR decision and thus validate THEIR career.
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