Musings on the concept of SAHMS

SAHMS (Stay at home mom)
I find it quite interesting to see some kind of blogging world develop, where, lets say, the young creative moms get more and more out into the blogosphere sharing their experiences on how to make nice stuff, how to live on little money, frugality, DIY and all these things.

While I really enjoy at lot of DIY stuff and am all up for living simple and frugal, some tendencies rather worry me: (besides: why does your DIY stuff for girls always has to be "cute" and in candy-colours?)

At some of the (christian) blogs I have noted the tendency to be so proud on being a so called SAHM, and on promoting the model of "my husband works 6 days a week, 10 hours a day so we can live on one income, because it´s my God given place and role to be a mother at home" and "if you work you show disrespect towards your husband cos it´s his role to provide for his family", if you are a working mother it is bad for your children und ungodly and so forth...

Besides the fact that I always wonder why some people seem to know so well what "all husbands" want and "all children" need , I recognise that this idea is culturally foreign to me.

1. Speaking with some of my male friends the idea was: "It´s pretty unfair to put all the income/working pressure on the male side of the family, especially in a time where the education level is not so much more connected to gender."

2. How do we get the idea that kids wouldn´t need their dad as much as their moms? Shared time with your kids seems much more fair to me.

3. Most of these kinds of blogs are written by western, protestant, white, middle class moms. That doesnt´t mean that people usually have more money but it seems like people somehow can arrange to live on one income while others simply have to go working to make a living. As far as I know in most countries of the world moms can´t afford to stay at home and not go working for a salary. So maybe it´s a pretty western idea?

4. What do you do all day long at home? I´m not speaking about the ones with little kids cos there it´s pretty obvious that they mostly keep you busy all day long. But "I want to stay at home until they all fly out?" In former times when people didn´t have washing machines and so on it was obvious that running a household, rasinig kids and maybe also running a garden and all this stuff would take up a lot of time. But nowadays? In Germany we now change more and more to the model of having your kids in all-day-schools. I don´t say that this is always good, but what do you do when your kids then are at school and come home late?

5. Who says that kids are always happy having their mom at home? Honestly, I imagine it sometimes quite annoying to always have a mom at home who wants to do something with you because this is what she´s determined to do. I remember I was pretty early happy to do my own stuff, meeting with friends, doing sports and whatever without my parents interfering into my life and always trying to "raise" me.

Maybe it´s just another way of "childhood in the year 2009 is live in a surveillance socity, in a dictatorship of the "good"?"
We can´t totaly manage and we can´t totally control and maybe that´s healthy?