How Kids Are Suffering Home Alone

Zenit ^ | 2005-02-27

[elli1]

Good article.

[FormerNavyBrat]

Less time with Mom and Dad has contributed to more problems for more kids over the last few decades.

Shocking! /sarcasm

I took a graduate class with another teacher who didn't see anything wrong with "latchkey kids." He didn't deny that they existed, but didn't feel that grade-school kids being home alone for hours after school was a problem.

[Miss Behave]

VERY good article. Thanks for the post.

[k2blader]

It is very difficult for me to understand why all this isn't common sense to parents. If love and commitment for their children were truly in their minds, they'd have considered the consequences of all their actions before even having them.

[Jenya]

Good article. I grew up in the 60s and 70s. My parents decided early on that my mother would be a stay-at-home Mom. Fortunately, my father made a good living and they were able to pull it off with ease. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for all couples. Two paychecks are often needed.

I'm 47 now and my parents are deceased. As I got older I appreciated the fact that my mother was home when I came home from school. Hot dinners every night. I thanked my parents often for giving me such a wonderful childhood. I loved having a non-working mother. My parents were quite a team.

[imskylark]

"but didn't feel that grade-school kids being home alone for hours after school was a problem."

I remember when I would come home from school. I would keep looking at the time and when it was close to the time Mom would be home, I would position myself at the window waiting for her. I was so lonely and couldn't wait to talk to her. Unfortunately, she had to get dinner ready and then she was just too tired to talk.

[It's me]

What I think is sad is that this is so foreign to many children.

A friend of one of my daughters came over at around dinner time. My other daughter was setting the table. No big deal, really, just a fork and knife, plate and glass. This poor little 12 year old girl was amazed that we set the table and ate dinner together.

I was shocked that she was shocked!!

[Diana in Wisconsin]

"My parents were quite a team."

Mine were, too. Though that ended once we girls were grown and off to college and careers and families of our own. Then Mom hit the bricks, trying to "find herself" and recapture the youth she "sacrificed" for us. (She actually SAID that to me when I became a mother; "Don't sacrifice yourself to your kids the way I did for you.")

Granted, this was in the late 70's when the NOW hags were in full swing. She's really done a number on her Grandkids, though she has tried to make up for lost time in the past few years. Too little, too late, IMHO. You're either IN their lives, or you're OUT.

Sadly, my own Mom was one of the first to race from the gate the moment the Women's Movement made it OK to do so.

And now what do we have? A generation of kids with all of the problems described above! Way to go Libbers! Thanks for everything! /sarcasm

[Millicent_Hornswaggle]

Very good article. My husband and I decided I would be a stay at home mom and what a difference we see in our kids versus the kids from a two income family. The Lord has provided for us and our children are well grounded, secure kids. My father-in-law keeps telling us how proud of us he is because the boys are so good. My husbands parents were divorced and he was home alone alot. Faith in God, raise you kids as the good book directs, and a lot of prayer.

[Chiapet]

Frankly, I think the article's take on daycare is a load of crap. According to this article, the fact that I have my daughter in daycare while I work means that she will be more aggressive and sickly in the long term. I'm calling bull on that one. She's been in daycare since she was 8 months old, and is now almost 5. Not only is she MUCH healthier than her pampered stay-at-home cousins, but she gets along better with other children, and is infinitely more polite.

[Republicanprofessor]

Read later.

[redheadtoo]

My mother was a stay home mom who didn't work outside of the house. She was there almost everyday when my sister and I came home from school. But occasionally she was out when we got home. Mom said my sister and I reacted very differently to this.

If I found the house empty when I got home I would read a book or watch some TV until Mom got home. In other words I wasn't badly affected by her temporary absence. But it was different for my sister.

My sister would sit on the front porch waiting for Mom to get home. And, as she waited, she would work herself up into an emotional froth that would spill over when my mother finally arrived home. She would cry and dump a load of guilt on our mother. If Mom had worked outside of the house my sister would have probably become a basket case.

Not all kids with working mothers end up traumatized but there are enough sensitive kids out there to make working outside the house for a mother a questionable activity at best.

[It's me]

Yikes! 8 months old?

How do you do it? When do you see her?

Read post #7...

[anniegetyourgun]

Despite all that, it's something a working mother is never really able to reconcile. No matter the protests to the contrary.

[savedbygrace]

So you concluded that the article is saying the correlation is 1.0? Where exactly did you get that idea from?

[joesnuffy]

Great article

[Monterrosa-24]

One of the things Booker T. Washington tried to instill in his students at Tuskegee Institute was that such things as making supper a bit formal and ceremonial was important. He knew how middle class White families ate because he had worked for a very strict White woman in her home. He knew that typical Black small farm families and sharecroppers often handed out corn bread and so forth and the children ran around the yard eating it.

Today Booker T. would be disappointed to see that the ceremony of supper has largely been Hollywoodized/TVized/informalized in both the White and Black race.

[i_dont_chat]

I grew up in the 40s and 50s, in a highly industrialized city, with lots of oil refineries and such. The women were just starting to work in jobs which were usually for men -- as a result of the transition during WW2.

When my dad returned from WW2, he INSISTED that my Mom quit her "refinery job" and stay at home with we 3 kids. His words were something to the effect -- that in every family, where the wife took a job outside the home, the couple divorced. And he didn't want a divorce in his family. So, that was that. My mom didn't work. She had to find her fulfillment in other ways -- and she found art. She become an accomplished artist -- worked in the home.

I, too, am forever grateful for the wisdom of my folks.

[joesnuffy]

After all, another paycheck makes fathers' lives easier, too. Similarly, divorce is easier, and men are freer to walk away from their children when Mom is already working and won't be left entirely destitute as she might have been if she depended on her husband's paycheck.

Another way to look at it might be that mom is freer because of making a decent living and sympathetic femanized judges, social services, family courts, and DAs to simply replace dad with anyone mom feels might be 'better' in any number of ways..

Tdays dad's basically have velcro on their backs and like paper dolls are quite easily exchanged

As one femanist professor of wymon's studies put it...Men are like real estate...you get into what you can afford with an eye to trade up...

The effect on chidren and family and ultimately the nation is devastating...

But then that was the plan from the git go...and it's straight from the pit of hell...

imo