Your Child, Your Choice, Your Responsibility

The mommy wars never end. Michael Medved, as I type, has Erica Komisar on his show, who has a book out about the importance of mothers being with their children from birth to age three. Of course there are women calling up complaining about the fact that children benefit from actually being with their mother. They'd rather not hear the truth, apparently. And others are complaining that their employer doesn't facilitate this.

There are thee issues here.

1) It is YOUR responsibility to plan things so that if you have children, they will have their mother* with them. Your choice, remember? With choice comes responsibility. Daycare is almost always voluntary and a bad choice. If you're not cut out to be a mother, don't become one. If you don't have a marriage that allows for you to mother your own children, don't have them.

2) It is not a legitimate role of government to compel employers to provide daycare or maternity leave or any other of these accommodations parents want.

3) Employers should be free to run their businesses as they want. If they want to give mothers paid time off to raise their children, fine, but expecting all employers to offer it is an attitude of entitlement.


I'm a father by my choice. My wife and I PLANNED how we were going to handle things so she could stay home to raise our kids.



Being a parent is A CHOICE.

What we do as a job is A CHOICE. We can create our own business, we choose employers.

I know this might come as a shock to some of you, but businesses don't offer you a job just so that they can issue you paychecks and provide you benefits and run a daycare. They offer you a job because they need people to help them provide goods and services to customers. You can't do that if you're not actually working. When you're not there, your co-workers have more work to do, or your employer has to hire a temp, which costs them extra.

Most workplaces used to be overwhelmingly male, and women who were part of those workplaces were often child-free or their children were in school or grown. AND THIS IS WHY. Employers used to ask young women what they were using for birth control. Then women demanded "equality" and questions like that could no longer be asked. And women got that equality. Now they are in just about every workplace that doesn't involve heavy, dangerous physical labor. But now they are demanding that employers accommodate their CHOICE to become mothers?

How about... NO!

It's a choice to become a parent.

And employers should be free to CHOOSE to offer such accommodations, but they should not be compelled to.

It's interesting how in many ways, women have demanded that workplaces adjust to be friendly to their gender's sensitivities and wishes. So they really didn't want access to workplaces as they were. They wanted everyone to change everything for them, rather than learning to adapt themselves.

If your employer offers all the accommodations you want, good for you. But don't whine about the fact that working full time is usually not compatible with being a mother of a young child. It's life. Life is full of choices.


*****

*Of course fathers can stay at home instead, but as the book explains, there are biological reasons why it is best for the first three years that the mother does it.