Family structures and annoying comments

[peanutter]

Wysiwyg: I've been thinking more about your comment:-

"I see her as actually asking if you are with someone and you get to the point of deciding whether to have kids or not if your partner wasn't prepared to take on the primary caregiver role (who knows what career they might have) and you were a lawyer - could it actually be managed? Would it actually be likely to lead to a joint decision not to have kids."

And I guess I never had to think about that - but yeah, if I had met my future partner later, in my 20s or 30s I guess the conversation could have been quite different.

Maybe she was more interested in the process of the discussion that lead to our outcome? Or what our decision would have been if DH and I had both wanted to work ...

[onthefly]

Just generally speaking, I think it's indicative of the underlying misogyny in our culture, which devalues 'women's work'. Ie, why would a man want to do that? it's why people get in a twist about lactation breaks, breastfeeding in public (do it in private, unless you're flashing your titties for someone's enjoyment!), the (non)rights of women in childbirth, and why men are often disadvantaged in the workplace if they try to take on a greater fathering role, or are even derided for it.

It's good to have potentially opened someone's eyes about alternate options. This is the way forward.

[Sagres]

While the general tone of the questions have obviously been biased by the idea of gender roles etc. underneath it I can see a pretty valid question. If two people meet and both have the same career focus (I assume pretty common with couples meeting at uni doing the same or similar study, or meeting at work, sharing similar values because that is part of what they are attracted to) and both have the concept of having children but not being the full time carer, how do you negotiate that? How does a couple navigate that decision and specifically how did YOU decide? I think curiosity about that process is not necessarily a bad thing for a student to show.

But as for you being lucky in regards to your partner being a SAHD, I think you are lucky or blessed, just as your partner is blessed to have a partner willing to be away from the kids and shoulder the money earning responsibility, just as I am blessed to have a husband that will do the money earning and missing out on some good kid stuff, and he is blessed to have a wife who is willing to run a business from home and also do most of the parenting and my friends are blessed that they both have partners willing to work part time and share kid/domestic duties. As long as a couple has an arrangement that they are happy with and works for them they are very lucky, because there are plenty of people (mostly women) who are forced into roles they don't want due to money or cultural norms or inflexible partners etc. who would love the freedom to negotiate and choose something that fulfills them.