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My wife went stay-at-home shortly after our second was born.

It’s been fine so far but now she wants to send both to private school. . . and who can blame her (we live in Kalifornia.)

Sad thing is: ‘tain’t gonna happen on my salary.

/sigh

I’ve been staying home since my eldest was 6 months old. It has its ups and downs, but we are committed to it unless my husband takes early retirement, in which case I will go back to work while he stays home. (The kids would be in high school at that point.)

I think it strengthened our marriage, because we had to join forces more, trust him with the money, trust me to manage the home.

I was a lawyer, and very cerebral. It still drives me nuts not to have sufficient intellectual outlets, but I do have some, and I am willing to say “not now”. And on a lovely day when I’m doing something outside with the kids instead of being in an office, I am the most grateful mom in town.

I sort of assumed that if I stayed home, my kids would be above average. They are really not prodigies of any sort. And one of them has ADD. Some of the working moms I know seem to have well-mannered, smart, talented kids. They must be doing something right. On the other hand, because I stayed home and made raising my children my vocation, I know my children very well, and I have time to learn about child development, parenting, etc. My ADD kid does not take prescription meds for it because we are managing or ameliorating it in other ways. I would not be up to speed on this if I were practicing law full-time.

As to foregoing private school, well I believe parents are the primary educators of children. Our public school is very strong academically, and follows the Josephson Character Counts system of teaching values, but where they miss something, we fill in the gaps. And where the kids get a biased presentation of history, we are there to present the real story. Our views do really matter to our kids, thus far. The private schools near us can be expected to present much the same biases, even the Catholic schools, and they are not free of gossips, snobs and bullies, either. So we are in a California public school, and staying there until further notice.

I know how you feel. We put the oldest through a fairly cheap (as far as private schools go) school for two years and had our second child in private kindergarten at a different school. Neither was expensive, but it took a big chunk out of our savings to do it.

We so need vouchers in this country, but that won't happen in our lifetimes with these communist bastards running the show. The only thing you could do is home school and the restrictions in California are probably not friendly in that respect. The next suggestion would be to move and I know that's easier said than done too.

Good luck--I know it's not easy for parents like us that don't want to go along with the flow and indoctrination.