First, pictures of the "Water Bug" are coming soon. Hopefully Tuesday.
Next, I'm struck by something very interesting. Let's look at the really big problems we have in our society, things like breakdown of families and neighborhoods, failure to learn morals and crime, failure to learn basic life skills, lack of aesthetic sensitivity, and general health travails like obesity linked to diet and a failure to exercise. If you look at statistics on crime, medical costs, and welfare costs, these are the big issues we have to face.
In my life, I've become aware that a certain kind of person does incredible work to mitigate these problems by cooking meals, hosting block parties, contributing to church potlucks, disciplining children and training them in the truth, educating children and ensuring they do their homework, and telling them to get away from the television and go outside to play. What does our society do with such a person?
It tells her that staying at home with her children and doing all this is demeaning, but it's admirable if she spends all day away from those she loves in a cubicle.
Podcast #1047: The Roman Caesars’ Guide to Ruling
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The Roman caesars were the rulers of the Roman Empire, beginning in 27 BC
with Julius Caesar’s heir Augustus, from whom subsequent caesars took their
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9 hours ago
5 comments:
Hmmm...interesting.
So my daughter was telling me about a new cross-country teammate, who is small for her age and also quite thin. The coach was giving his usual pre-meet spiel about how they needed to remember to eat a LOT before tomorrow's meet, and apparently this girl registered a surprised or otherwise negative reaction to that suggestion, which caused the coach to launch into a diatribe on the importance of nutrition and why eating is NOT a bad thing in the appropriate circumstances.
It occurs to me that even though I'm not the super-health conscious expert nutritionist mom, I'm there, cooking the meals, choosing decent snack foods, and otherwise monitoring the nutritional intake of my kids. It's not something I even think much about beyond the understanding that I need to provide my kids adequate good stuff, and not much junk.
Yet what if I was NOT around my kids most of their waking hours, not preparing their main meals and purchasing the ingredients for lighter meals they fix themselves, snacks, etc.? What if there were too many nights when I was too busy, too tired, or too-whatever to fix something decent, and either picked up convenience food or did takeout? What if I wasn't around noticing whether my kids had spent too much time hanging around inside on a nice day?
Some moms have a tough row to hoe and don't have a lot of better options than this. But it seems fairly obvious that among the benefits of having a person devoted to the health, order, and functioning of household might actually IMPROVE the health, order, and functioning of the household as opposed to a household where there was no dedicated person to do it, and the person or persons who did do it had to fit it into a lot of other, usually more "urgent," responsibilities.
So anyway, the way the cross-country anecdote relates is that it made me think that without dedicated around moms to simply provide good options, monitor stuff, teach good habits, and generally have an eye out for a kid's overall health, the kids are left with media messages scaring them about obesity, which for some of them isn't a danger at all and it would be nice if there were someone in their lives to tell them that. I don't know about this particular girl's situation with regard to that, but it seems like it would be a problem in many cases.
BTW, I know I don't have to issue this disclaimer for your sake, Bert, but I'd better say it anyway: I'm not saying that working moms don't provide good nutrition for their kids and all those other things. But the point is that they simply don't have as much time and energy to do it well as someone who makes it her "career," and it really doesn't strike me that it SHOULD strike anyone as demeaning if someone takes on this, and similar health, education, and training roles, full time.
Well said--hopefully I'll get that sort of comment, in which case I'll point out the fact that I am pointing a finger not at the mother, but at the society that views a mother's work as demeaning.
Your daughter's friend reminds me of myself. When my mom went back to work, I availed my time in day care to achieve a fine command of the Anglo-Saxon language, much to my parents' chagrin. And mine, when I realized what I was doing.
I'd better make one thing even clearer: when I referred to "dedicated moms," it wasn't to imply that all moms who aren't able to raise their kids full-time aren't "dedicated." I meant a mom who is "dedicated" to the mom-tasks in the same way that a server is "dedicated" to serving the network, rather than also handling other tasks.
Good post!
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