Categories: parenting-general, ranting
Date: 30 July 2009 07:51:53
Currently if asked to describe myself I would say student and mum, at some points it's teacher, student and mum. It's something that I have only recently started doing previously I would have just said teacher. However, up here I have got into the mindset of wanting to affirm that motherhood is a valid role. I don't know if this sudden urge to put being a mum on equal footing with my career and study has come from living in a building with a large number of women for whom motherhood is their full time occupation or whether it comes from somewhere else. The other possible options could be the desire for people to see that some of us are having to try and juggle other demands in additon to our study or it could be a reaction to the evangelical literature on family I have spent a fair amount of the last year reading. Alternatively it might be my attempt to illustrate to the young people around me that young women, when planning their careers will face challenges that their male counterparts don't. However helpful "new men" are "primary carer" is still a career for women in most families when the child is born.
Thus I whole heartedly endorse the point that Alice Thomson makes in this Times article that girls should be taught how to handle the juggling of roles.
Thomson suggests that "Careers advice shouldn’t be prescriptive or sexist but it does need to address the realities: four fifths of women still have children and most mothers won’t let fathers dominate the nurturing role. This doesn’t mean that schools should be teaching girls to cook and sew, but it does mean that Jessica might want to consider a different career path from Josh." This is a statement I think we have to be careful with. What it shouldn't lead to is women being encouraged to take lesser roles or train for lower ranking jobs, but it should involve girls doing lessons in PSHE where they have to think through the choices involved and the consequences of each choice for successful women who have their children once their careers are established. Girls should be taught that motherhood is a role that many of them will take on and how to balance that with a successful career.
At the moment there is still, as when I was at school, too much of a culture that learning anything about looking after children is something that we teach those who will end up looking after other people's children. Now, I have to admit I am as bad as the next person. Last year when at her old school Third Party said she wanted to take childcare I went off into one. Yet, perhaps it is a pity she didn't have that choice at her new school and wasn't able to follow that decision through. If we encouraged our academic, high flying girls to take child development or whatever it is called alongside their raft of academic subjects perhaps we would be doing them a huge favour, particularly if there were some extension unit within the course about combining a demanding career with a child.
As it is without this addition to the curriculum, which won't happen, positive role juggling is something we as mothers and teachers must somehow model to them. That's why for the moment when asked what I do I will continue to include being a mum in the job description.