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    In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms
    In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms
    In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms
    Ebook178 pages3 hours

    In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms

    By Dr. Laura Schlessinger

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    About this ebook

    New York Times Bestseller

    The internationally syndicated radio host celebrates a group of critically important yet usually overlooked women—stay-at-home moms—and offers them words of inspiration and wisdom.

    “I’m scared out of my mind.”

    Dr. Laura hears this frequently from women who know that staying home to raise their children is the right thing for their family. Building on the principles developed during her long career as a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Dr. Laura provides a wealth of advice and support as well as compassion and inspiration to help them attain this goal. She pays special attention to the outrageous fact that stay-at-home moms are actually controversial! Dr. Laura offers a profound and unique understanding of how important it is for many mothers to raise their own children, and how stay-at-home moms benefit society.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 7, 2009
    ISBN9780061867668
    Author

    Dr. Laura Schlessinger

    One of the most popular hosts in radio history—with millions of listeners weekly—Dr. Laura Schlessinger has been offering no-nonsense advice infused with a strong sense of personal responsibility for more than 40 years. Her internationally syndicated radio program is now on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111, and is streamed on the Internet and podcast. She's a best-selling author of eighteen books, which range from the provocative (New York Times chart topper The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands) to the poignant (children's book Why Do You Love Me?).  She's on Instagram and Facebook (with over 1.7 million followers), and her Call of the Day podcast has exceeded one hundred million downloads. She has raised millions for veterans and their families with her boutique, DrLauraDesigns.com, which benefits the Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation. Dr. Laura holds a Ph.D. in physiology from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and received her post-doctoral certification in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling from the University of Southern California. She was in private practice for 12 years. She has been inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, received an award from the Office of the Secretary of Defense for her Exceptional Public Service, and was the first woman ever to win the National Association of Broadcasters' prestigious Marconi Award for Network/Syndicated Personality.

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    Reviews for In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms

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    • 3/5
      I thought I would like this book more, considering I chose to be a stay-at-home mom 18 years ago for all these same reasons. However, as I read, I found myself becoming increasingly annoyed at the notion that only the mothers can fill this role. Despite the fact that I made the choice to stay home to raise my children, I have always considered myself to be a proponent for feminism. I feel that a woman can do absolutely any job a man can do, and, likewise, that men can be proficient, nurturing parents and homemakers. I would have liked to have heard at least a few stories in here from some successful stay-at-home dads who are holding down the fort and caring for the kids while the mom provides for the family outside of the home. I have always felt that what was really important for children is that they have one of their parents stay home with them while they are young, but it doesn't necessarily have to be he mother. While I have never understood the notion of a couple making the decision to have children only to leave them in the care of strangers after they are born, I feel it is antiquated thinking to assume that the parent who has to stay home to raise them is the mother. If a couple is truly working as a team, then as long as one of them works outside the home, the other one should work inside the home. Perhaps they could even agree to switch places after a few years, so that they could each share in the benefits of the different "jobs".
    • 5/5
      As a stay-at-home mom myself, partly by choice and partly by default, I didn't realize how much I needed the lift this book provided until I finished it. While SAHMs are gaining in support, thanks to the wonders of the internet, the effects of the feminist movement are hard to undo, and I still find myself feeling bad for not "running the hamster wheel."
      This book is really about praising and uplifting SAHMs in every way, from giving advice on how to transition from working outside the home to becoming a SAHM, how to deal with naysayers, the impact of being a SAHM on the marriage, the children, and the woman herself, and the struggles that a SAHM goes through. Nearly every page features quotes from SAHMs who have contacted Dr. Laura with their opinions, experiences, questions, and wisdom, and these women all have unique living situations to fit any mother's lifestyle, even the ones who have been through a divorce because the husband does not support the idea of the woman becoming a SAHM. Dr. Laura dispels many notions and myths that run rampant about the type of woman that decides to be a SAHM, and what would make her choose such a lifestyle. Many of the women she quotes have college degrees or left great careers to become a SAHM. Others go on to degrees and careers once the children have grown and "fled the nest." Some of the best parts of the book were the stories that SAHMs related about the wonderful perks and unforgettable moments of being a SAHM, such as being able to cook healthy meals from scratch for their family and not missing all of those important milestones with their children.
      This book helped me to change my perspective on my role in my family's life, as the heart of the home, to focus on the good things of what I have committed to, and to appreciate my husband and children, not as sandbags on my own personal improvement, but as buoys to lift me up and save me from my own destructive self-involvement.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms - Dr. Laura Schlessinger

    Chapter One

    The Decision

    There was a time, long ago, when parents agonized over the sad necessity of finding some sort of child care due to deaths, financial disasters, and other catastrophes. Under these conditions families often struggled with feelings of failure, guilt, and loss at having to outsource the warmth of parenting to hired help.

    The greatest generation isn’t limited to those folks who served valiantly at war; it embraces the folks who worked on the farms and in the factories, toiling at difficult jobs to not only serve their country but provide for their families. Little mentioned are the women who birthed their babies, raised their kids, and managed the home and the budget so that there would be food in the family’s tummies and clothes on their backs, taught their children right from wrong, and made sure they washed behind their ears and got to school on time. In those days there was very little bellyaching about finding yourself, time for me, or what is my identity?; women were respected for their commitments and talents, and in spite of hardships, they felt important to their families and communities.

    Just in case you think this is all anachronistic, contemplate this recent letter from a listener:

    As I’ve been thinking and listening to your show, I’ve realized that our terminology surrounding women who choose to stay at home with their families has changed. We’ve become stay-at-home moms or, often negatively, housewives, rather than homemakers. My suspicion is that women have coined themselves SAHMs because they’re wanting to be competitive with their working mother counterparts (as if staying at home isn’t working!).

    Perhaps we’ve believed the lie that being a homemaker is old-fashioned and therefore irrelevant. However, I have come to realize that though my primary motivation for spending my days in my home is in fact taking care of my children, I do much more than that. I spend my days making a home, not just for my children, but for my husband and myself.

    Cleaning and organizing, playing with and teaching my children, shopping and running errands, taking care of finances, doing laundry, taking care of doctor appointments, communicating with teachers, organizing the family calendar, cooking meals, and making our home a comfortable, cozy, and welcoming place for us and our extended family and friends, among other things, is not just being a stay-at-home mom. I am making a house a home, and I couldn’t be happier with my job.

    I have always told women who call my radio show agonizing about their decision and how it might impact their self-worth that the woman is the soul, spirit, and center of a home.

    Then came the Alice Walker types; Walker, revered as a trail-blazing feminist and author who touched the lives of a generation of women, proclaimed motherhood as about the worst thing that could happen to a woman. She compared being a mother, raising children, and running a home to slavery—that’s right, slavery! Follow that up with Gloria Steinem’s declaration that stay-at-home moms were valueless, and what young woman in her right mind would choose to become a valueless slave?

    Since that time young women have barely given a thought to this sacrifice of personhood, and have sought independence whatever the cost to their children and marriages—assuming they’ve even bothered with marriages, when shack-up situations give you the freedom to hit the eject button whenever the mood strikes. Obviously, women’s independence requires children’s independence; hence the drive toward kids being separated from parents and home as early as possible, going into day care or preschool or the care of nannies or babysitters for up to twenty-four hours in a day, regardless of illness and ferocious tears. GPS cell-phone combos now enable busy moms to enjoy the fantasy of being wirelessly connected to kids who are who knows where, and fifty-fifty custody arrangements give moms that career and dating time.

    Let’s be serious: Who in her right mind would give up all that freedom and opportunity to cook, clean, fold clothes, and keep children busy all day, and then have to cater to the needs of a husband who saunters through that front door at night after having a fun day at work? Yipes! When you put it that way…

    Like Mother, Like Daughter

    People generally plan to have households and relationships that run about the same way as their original family. It therefore shouldn’t surprise anyone when the adult daughters of stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) choose to do the same; after all, it is what they are most familiar with, and therefore what they imagine and hope they will get the most family support for. For these women, a childhood with a SAHM gave them a sense of purpose and positive identity with respect to hands-on parenting. They also often describe a sense of obligation and duty as a mother to be their children’s primary caregiver, in spite of an all-too-common societal perspective that this amounts to servitude.

    Those women whose mothers worked generally also intend to work, because their own moms have given them the idea that being a SAHM is boring and unfulfilling—a curious thing to say to your children about taking care of them, don’t you think?

    Some women had mothers who offered day care in their own homes so they could stay at home. These women, having seen with their own eyes how their moms spent more time with those children than their own parents did, may have decided that they wanted to be the ones raising their own children.

    One woman wrote to me of her very own family experiment. It seems her mother was a SAHM while she was growing up, but then went to school and started to work more and more, so that the writer’s younger sisters got less and less of their mom. She described their lives as being punctuated with shacking up, eating disorders, an abusive husband, divorce, poverty and a child born out of wedlock. I got the best of our mom. Recognizing the difference between our lives, it made me want the best for my future children: a SAHM.

    Now, of course I realize that this is an anecdotal situation that cannot be generalized to all family situations, but it does seem logical that hands on, face-to-face interactions during the length of a day between a child and his mother ought to have some kind of profoundly benevolent impact that lasts a lifetime. Or do we really want to believe that human children are no more complex than a goldfish, whose emotional, psychological, and even physical needs might be satisfied with any bowl in any environment as long as there is food to consume? Or is logic not a part of the discussion? Perhaps not.

    Unless their mothers ran cathouses or often lay prone on the couch in a drunken stupor, women who had SAHMs describe always feeling safe and cared for, and they want their children to have that same sense of security. I remember feeling the same way; even though my stay-at-home mom lacked the warmth I yearned for, nonetheless having her home made a big emotional difference to me.

    Some women hear their own moms’ regrets that they didn’t stay home, whether for reasons of ego or finances. They hear their moms’ lament at not being there for all the important moments that seem so small but are huge when infused with regret and loss: the first cookie, the first boo-boo, the first…anything. And it isn’t only the firsts that make such an emotional impact, especially over the years. It is the ongoing epic of ups and downs, surprises, problems, dramas, curious moments, confused or fearful instances, and so forth, which were handled by someone else who influenced these mothers’ children with other than their own heart, soul, psyche, spirit, and knowledge. When the moms express that regret and longing, their adult daughters are understandably impressed with what is indeed a higher purpose, not a cop-out from the feminista movement. Their adult daughters also think about how much they missed having a mommy at home to dote on them, support them, teach them, have fun with them, and just be there. They don’t want their kids to miss out on that special feeling.

    Following are some of the commentaries I’ve received that express deep feelings of needing, wanting, or missing a SAHM:

    Dr. Laura, my mother died when I was twelve. I walked to an empty house every day during those precious years. I vowed to myself that I would always be there for my children as long as [God] allowed me to.

    My mom was the mom that would work long hours and missed out on everything I did in school. I realized that I was turning into her, and I remember how I felt when she didn’t show up to things I was in and I couldn’t do it to my kids anymore.

    My mother died when I was twelve, and because my father was often out of town at work I was sent to a series of boarding schools. I was lonely and miserable; all I wanted was to have a normal family life, and I missed my mother terribly. I was exposed to alcohol, drugs, and girls having sex, as they were all searching for the same thing I was: love and security. I knew that when I had children I would always be there for

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