Thursday, 1 March 2012

Time to support the traditional family unit

Does David Cameron need any more incentive to make it easier for mothers to stay at home and look after their children.
The results of the Prime Minister's 'happiness survey' came out this week and they reveal that mothers who stay at home are as content and satisfied with their lives as those who choose to go to work.
In addition the survey, which Cameron employed as a means to measure well-being across the country, also shows the happiest people are traditional married families. Our Prime Minister made huge promises to support families when he took over running our country and so far little has been done to meet this promise.
Now, with the results of his survey back, surely he can have no excuse but start implementing some policies to make it easier for women to stay at home and look after their children if they wish.
It does not surprise me that mothers who stay at home and look after their children are as content and satisfied as those who go out to work. If anything I would have thought they would be more satisfied.
Any working woman who falls pregnant knows that in 18 months time they are going to be faced with one of the biggest dilemmas of their lives. Do they give up their career and stay at home and bring up their child or do they go back to work and miss out on being with their child full-time and also, in many cases these days, fork out huge amounts of cash on child care?
Either way a woman can never feel truly happy with the decision they make. If they stay at home there is the nagging doubt they should be at work, and if at work, they feel they should be at home with their children.
If however, there were tax breaks, more benefits or cash handouts to give vital support to families who find life tight on just a single income then this would ease mother's guilt about not going to work. There are some mothers who enjoy going out to work but I'm sure if you asked most working mothers whether, if they could, they would rather stay at home, they would answer yes.
Once you have had a child there is a real emotional pull towards being at home with your children full-time. We can spout all we like about feminism and equal rights but we can't go against nature. Women on the whole are nurturing, home-making creatures and of course they will feel their happiest in this environment.
I never thought I would see this issue in quite this way. Ideally, I always wanted to be a full-time mum because it seemed the correct thing to do but I didn't bank on how strongly I would feel the desire to do this once my baby was born.
I'm also not condemning women to a life chained to the kitchen sink. I think women's emancipation has come on too far for that. There is actually something empowering about giving up work. It is a bold decision to make and flies in the face of all that modern society dictates.
For almost two decades the government has been working under the assumption that mothers want to go out to work.
During that time we have seen increasing examples of youngsters running feral as their mums work two jobs to make ends meet. We have seen child care costs reach extortionate levels. Any money ploughed into sorting this issue out could be redirected straight into mothers' purses to allow them to give up work and look after their children themselves.
Families who are currently surviving on a single income and just making ends meet each month are still happier than many other sectors of society according to this latest survey.
We don't need any more equivocal evidence than that there needs to be far more support in this country for people to follow their traditional roles.
So I think David Cameron, it's time to step up to the plate on this one.

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