Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 9)
Chapter 9 is titled “Family”.
As someone who long ago decided, along with my wife, that only once of us would work outside the home so that the other could raise the children and homeschool, I find Obama’s talk about the hardship of raising kids in a two-working-parent household to be disingenuous and obnoxious. On one meager salary, my wife and I bought a small house and lived acceptably well. Now, it’s a crisis because people can’t send their kids to top schools and have ballet lessons unless both parents are working, and of course, the government needs to help.
Cry me a river.
It’s a manufactured crisis, because people want it all. They want big nice houses and choice communities, they want two nice cars, big TVs, etc etc etc. It’s hard to have all of this stuff on one income, so people choose to have both spouses work. Then they complain that they are stressed and sleep-deprived, and the kids suffer for it.
This is NOT a crisis, except among people with incomes well below the middle class range. This is a choice people make, a choice with consequences that people want to escape. Populist Obama, of course, is very happy to promise people assistance in escaping these consequences.
The solution, of course, is “high-quality affordable day care for every family that needs it.” Federal and state day care tax credits, subsidies to middle-class and low-income people, and improved licensing and training for day-care workers. And since we’ve already got the schools as a pseudo-day-care system, he proposes longer school days, summer school, and more after school programs. Cap it all off with paid parental leave laws, requiring employers to give people paid time off for parental duties.
What all of this amounts to is forcing someone like me, a father in a single income household, to pay taxes that end up subsidizing the lifestyle choices of others, in greater governmental support of day care and schools that I don’t use. Perhaps a large tax credit for homeschooling would be an appropriate offset, but fat chance you’ll see that anywhere in his agenda.
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If there’s one thing that social conservatives have been right about, it’s that our modern culture sometimes fails to fully appreciate the extraordinary emotional and financial contributions – the sacrifices and just plain hard work – of the stay-at-home mom. Where social conservatives have been wrong is in insisting that this traditional role is innate – the best or only model of motherhood. I want my daughters to have a choice as to what’s best for them and their families.
I can’t even begin to describe how irritating I find this passage.
When people make choices about how to run their families and their lives, they typically need information from others to weigh the pros and cons of their choices. It is usually somewhat difficult for people to experiment with family arrangements to determine what works best for them. Therefore, people rely on observation of others, as well as tradition and societal wisdom to figure out how to structure their lives.
I agree completely with Obama in wanting my daughters to have choices. However, unlike Obama, they will be taught early on that choices have consequences, and that not all choices are equal. Obama wants women to be able to do whatever they want, with the government filling in the gaps to raise their kids via schools and daycare. His message to women is that no matter how thin you spread yourself, no matter how many tasks you take on, the government will be behind you helping to take up your slack.
That is an awful message to send, one that hurts families and hurts children. Children need parents, not daycare workers. There is absolutely no question in my mind that a stay-at-home mom is the best situation for raising children, and in the interests of promoting guilt-free choice for women, Obama is content to blow away all evidence that this is the case and all value judgments about how women choose to live their lives.
I understand completely that compromises need to be made, that some women would prefer to work, that sometimes for financial reasons women have to work. That’s fine, I’m not going to throw stones at women with jobs. People make their choices, and they accept the consequences.
What I can’t stand is a culture that pretends that there are no consequences, or at least no consequences that can’t be effectively mitigated by a federal program. It’s a big feminist lie – one designed to give women the freedom, even the compulsion, to buck their instincts without guilt, to the detriment of themselves, their families, and society as a
whole.
Comments
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Wow, you hit the nail on the head. My wife and I have thought often about purchasing a bigger place with more land, but haven’t, mostly so she isn’t forced to work and can take care of the kid.
Public school already takes up a significant portion of a child’s life and doesn’t seem to educate him much at all. In fact it seems to instill in him a predisposition towards socialism.
Obama’s disdain for my right to educate my own child and his desire for me to subsidize his “State Sponsored Day Care” even more than I do now is quite disturbing. Who cares more about my son than his parents?
Thanks for holding your nose, reading the book, and sharing your thoughts about it.
harvester | 8/5/2008 12:51 PM CDT
