Choices....

[Lynne]

One of the saddest things to me in the world today is that people don't seem to make the connections that they used to make with the people around them. I think that most of this is a direct result of women going to work and the size of the families shrinking. Women are the home makers and I am NOT talking about cooking and cleaning the house. I was raised on a one-block-long dead-end street. Every house had a passel of kids and a Mama ruling the roost. The women worked together and it was as if you were NEVER out from under your Mom's watchful eye. They took turns hauling kids to school and it was a lot like having a dozen Moms watching you all the time.

It was a lot like having this HUGE family that all sort of lived together. You had a lot of brothers and sisters that you actually liked. The men were slower to make friends but back then people didn't move very often and eventually, the men became close too. Part of it was that the heat in the houses drove people outside and into contact. That along with the influance of the women made for a very special lifestyle.

I agree. I don’t mean to ruffle the feminist feathers. I too had to work. I believe women and men both can accomplish great things but the fact that no one is home raising the children is costing our society greatly. I won’t list losses , we all know the results we are living with in this generation. It’s a sad situation when a family has no choice but to leave their kids to go to a job. This is when the innocence of our culture was lost.

 

[TexDanm]

When my daughter was born my wife stopped working outside of the home. What we came to understand was that in the past most families had a stay-at-home Mom. Everyone told us that it wasn't going to work because we were used to having two incomes and cutting that income almost in half was going to cause problems. What we did was quite simple. We lived just like our parents did. We didn't eat out very often. We did a lot of our shopping at flea markets and often just did without things that we didn't need. We stayed out of debt and for entertainment we did the old things like playing cards, freezing homemade ice cream, camping, fishing, and spending a lot of time with family.

When my kiddo went to kindergarten my wife went to college and I took over a lot of the chores that she had taken care of in the past. When summer came my daughter usually worked with/for me. I paid her pretty well and she bought her own school clothes and learned how to handle money. LOL, that first year when she bought her own school clothes she went top-line expensive. By Christmas, she was sick of wearing that same getup two or three times a week. That was the first year that she wanted clothes for Christmas instead of toys or things that were fun. After that, she became a pretty good shopper and handled her money responsibly, and never had that problem again. It must have worked she is an accountant supervisor and works for the state now.