As a stay-at-home mother I have unfortunately grown accustomed to disrespect from both society and government. I am reminded by feminist groups and the media on a regular basis that I have degraded myself by choosing to be a unpaid, full time care giver to my family. I live with the discrimination of the tax system which places a heavier burden on my husband and I because we have chosen a traditional lifestyle rather than reap the financial rewards of living common-law, earning two wages and giving our children over to institutional day care. Yet despite this I am incredibly secure in my decision to raise our children and endure the financial disciplines that living on one wage require us to exercise.
But a new study conducted by StatsCan and released in mid-October is reported to conclude that stay at home parents could actually be doing damage to those they love the most. It seems that my babies will not be able to compete with the institutionally trained wonder babies they will be meeting in kindergarten. It is claimed that children who must live with the rigors of day care routines are often able to construct simple sentences at the age of five and have a more concrete awareness of time and seasons. (Children who live with the constant embrace and nurture of their mothers are no doubt blissfully unaware that they are expected to compete in the academic world at such a tender age.) While little tykes in wooden chairs are kept busy doing educational work in assembly-line fashion, the children of stay at home moms may be helping to cut out sugar cookies to surprise Daddy with when he comes home from work. As tired babies and overstimulated toddlers in institutional care are forced to sing or go for walks on command, babies who stay at home with their mothers have more freedom to choose their level of activity. While little ones in daycare centres must wait in line while dozens of other children cry out for attention, toddlers who stay at home with Mommy lift up their favourite book a dozen times a day and a dozen times a day they settle down on a wonderfully familiar knee for a story told just right.
When the lives of these two sets of children are compared fairly the babies who slip from their mothers womb into her arms and then spend the next five years exploring the world with her are clearly advantaged as human beings.
Many studies have been released in the past few years that warn of the incredible damage being done to children who have the bond with their mother severed at an early age. The babies who are left with day care providers go through recognizable stages of trauma and grief and then lapse into cold resignation when they find that no matter how hard they cry, mommy will not come back to hold them. In turn this often leads to a lack of bonding and emotional attachment that can affect their relationships with others for their entire lives. But the media will not report these studies. The journalists fold themselves over the facts to protect their agenda of government raised citizens. And now it seems they have another study to comfort parents who have children in day care. Another study to sway the minds of mothers struggling to find the balance between feminism and maternal instinct.
I know a woman who has a baby the same age as my twin sons. She chose to go back to work when her son was five months old because she believed the feminist rhetoric about her own need to express herself in her chosen career. She believed that she would be happier if she could get her own life back. So she began by weaning him from her breast. Soon after this she decided that if she was going to have to get up and go to work every morning she could no longer afford to get up in the night with her baby. So she let him cry and cry until one night he was silent. Not because he had stopped missing the warm nourishment of her breasts and the comfort of her arms in his dark nursery but because he had given up in despair. I wish that she had spared me the details of his first two weeks of daycare..how he screamed every morning, how he stopped eating, how he seemed aloof even when she had time to hold him after her busy day. I will never forget the morning I saw him in the church nursery following this decision to abandon him with strangers at a day care. He looked like a baby whose spirit had been broken. Instinctively I bent down and held him and as I sat there rocking him in my arms I found myself unexpectedly crying. Crying for him and the thousands of babies just like him who are all victims of feminism and the left-wing agenda.
