A recent conversation that I read on my Facebook really made me sad. It's the fact that some women can't stand to be around their children. They put their children in daycare just so they can get out of the house!? They would rather work for nothing (working just to cover the cost of daycare) than stay at home and raise their children, take care of their home, and fully meet the needs of their husbands.
Women have been indoctrinated with the feminist worldview, that says being a stay at home mother really isn't good enough. That somehow you must be unhappy, uneducated, and missing out on something. No offence to anyone out there, but I've been in the world; I know what it has to offer me as a woman and I want no part of it.
So many forces aim to take women away from their primary roles of being mothers and helpmeets to their husbands. This is even happening in the church. The church will tell mothers that they 'need' to be involved in this ministry or that ministry that will only serve to pull mothers away from their children. They will tell mothers to put their children in the nursery or children's church while the adults have their time of worship. But the church seems to have forgotten that the family unit is part of God's design. It is the result of a man and woman coming together in marriage (which is ordained by God), and being "one flesh". The church has forgotten that mothering is a ministry and is a very important one. Yes, we are called to reach the world for Christ, but the Great Commission starts at home.
Today’s Plans
3 weeks ago
I also feel saddened by women who, as you put it, "can't stand to be around their children." I think that part of this is caused by declining birth rates and the distance between extended family. Most women no longer spend very much time around children at all until they actually have one, and motherhood is definitely one job that should have more than on-the-job training! I'm often amused (but not really) by comments about how people who take on the most important job - parenting - do so without any training. It wasn't always this way, and I think it shows.
ReplyDeleteI think another reason for this is the way that the women in my generation have been raised. Most of us had working mothers, and many of us had single mothers. After a long day working outside the home, most of our mothers were so tired that they didn't relate to us very much, and I remember many of the girls relating that their parents often "shoo-ed" them away. We were taught that we are a burden, and thus we were trained to see children as a burden.
This is an issue that I struggle with as well. Heavily entrenched in feminism, I put my first daughter in daycare at 8 weeks old (a bit later than most of the other babies there started out). After having her gone for so long, it has been a struggle over the past several years since I came home to really learn how to relate to her.
When my daughter is getting on my nerves while I'm on the phone with my own mom, she often says, "Are you really sure you want to homeschool her? Wouldn't you rather send her off to school and get some peace and quiet?" This bothered me very much, especially the second time she said it (and I discovered that it wasn't a slip-up). Now I view it as a challenge to show the joy that I find in my children, but that I don't express often enough.
Being raised in a culture that devalues children by parents who were too tired to value us with no real training as mothers really seems to have had an impact on the way we view our own children. Hopefully it was just a bad day, and the woman in question was simply trying to vent without letting it escalate with her children, or maybe she's looking for encouragement. Motherhood is by far the most challenging job I've ever had!