Raising kids at home: a lifestyle choice?

Raising kids at home. A lifestyle choice?

I agree with Rowen Pelling in this article in the Telegraph in which she questions whether stay at home mothers make a ‘lifestyle choice’ as argued by George Osbourne this week in support of the new childcare voucher scheme.

My stay-at-home days were tough, bleak and poverty stricken – and quite frankly, largely thankless. I didn’t have a big enough salary to make full time childcare financially viable, voucher or no voucher (I was 24 and at the beginning of my career, though at my biological peak for pregnancy and childbirth,  a fact often overlooked by policy makers and campaigners against young mothers….) and was bamboozled by a new born and his subsequent developmental issues into a nappy stained wilderness of dribble, shit and cleaning crayon off my walls for the next three years until I found the wherewithal, and enough sleep, to set about re-entering the work of writing.

It’s a rare breed of women who make chichi coffee stops and home making their priority when they are raising their children, and there is so much evidence to say that young children benefit from mums at home, that it seems counterproductive to force us all back to work before our milk ducts have resumed normal duty. So why should the government make women feel any less appreciated for their necessary work shaping the next generation (of consumers and tax payers, I might add) than other frontline workers? It beats me.