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I’ve been wondering about this one. With my daughter’s very traditional orientation toward the Church, I’m pretty sure she is going to grow up believing she will marry an RM, get married, and start having children quickly, staying at home as a Mom. She is not formed in any direction just yet, but she identifies VERY strongly with the Church culture and way of doing things. However, there are great risks if I don’t help her make some impressions of what her life paths could take, and how to prepare for adulthood. For example, my wife was raised on the get married, have kids, stay at home, with education as a secondary thing — the total Mormon culture line.
She found upon marriage that she was unable to have children in the normal way, and that I refused alternative methods until our problems were resolved. She was in Church hell for about 5 years — every time someone announced they were pregnant, she sufferred, cried, and just felt lost as a working woman with no real education or career plans. I saw how woefully unprepared she was for what hit her as an adult, as she assimilated only the textbook pattern for young women and young adults we hear at Church. When that pattern did not materialize, she was so despondent and lost, and felt terrible at Church around women with babies.
What are your thoughts on this — what do you teach your daughters about the pattern for their life, if you do at all? Or do you simply let the Church line of thinking prevail through passivity (sorry for that word) and non-proactivity in your parenting?
SilentDawning wrote:What are your thoughts on this — what do you teach your daughters about the pattern for their life, if you do at all? Or do you simply let the Church line of thinking prevail through passivity (sorry for that word) and non-proactivity in your parenting?
At this point, I am emphasizing to my 5 year old girl that being different is OK, that God made each of us to be different in obvious and less than obvious ways, and that people who would make fun of those differences are in the wrong. I am attempting to build up her self esteem on things not related to looks, I try to praise sharing and good sportsmanship etc.
As far as adult roles. DW and I are fortunate in that regard in that we both served missions and both received 4 year college degrees before our marriage. It is my hope that this will enable us to model our expectations without getting too overbearing.
DW was in the finance program at BYU. In discussing some of the very competitive and traditionally male dominated BYU programs, she told me that she was only aware of 2 women in the engineering program and 5 in finance. There were warnings at the beginning of each semester against hazing these women or suggesting that they were displacing male applicants.
Of the 2 women in the engineering program, they are both currently stay at home moms. We didn’t keep in contact with the other women in the finance program but we know that at least one of them (DW) is also a stay at home mom.
Was this education wasted? In my conversation with my wife a scripture came to my mind: “If ye are prepared, Ye shall not fear.” Is it ever a waste to be prepared? As a couple, we value DW’s education and what that brings to the marriage table – even if that doesn’t ever extend to the job market. We plan to communicate that value to our children through both directly and indirectly.
On a side note, one of my personal faith crisis elements is the relationship between generally assumed causes and effects. It is possible that a young woman may marry young, have special talents towards being a stay at home mom, and live an entirely fulfilling, enriched, rewarding, and HAPPY life by following the “textbook pattern for young women and young adults we hear at Church.” This varies depending on the predilections, dispositions, and talents of the individual daughter as well as a good degree of luck.
I can’t know exactly what kind of role my daughter would be happiest in. I can’t change myself (very much) and my imperfect parenting styles even if I knew what would be optimal for her. I hope to encourage missionary and college experiences to help her to make some pivitol life decisions. I also hope to support her in those decisions, even while knowing that those decisions are based upon her own best guesses.
I guess to put it another way, I hope to give her some “wisdom” based upon my limited and specific life experience. I then expect her to filter what I am able to impart through the lens of her own limited and specific life experiences. I then hope to trust her decisions (even though there are no guarantees) because – while she has fewer life experiences than I do, she has the advantage of knowing herself in ways that I never can.
I just have my girls read posts by Hawkgrrrl, :angel: and tell them they need to be strong and independent like that.No matter what the risks, there are no straight answers for everyone. Some love to be stay home moms and are depressed they have to work. Some get married in the temple and have problems of one kind or another.
More importantly, my girls need to know they are important, and never let anyone else tell them what to do or limit their choices (that one came back to bite me when my daughter told me she’s 18 and doesn’t need to listen to me anymore. Yikes! I didn’t know if I should be proud of her, or put her over my knee and spank her!
😯 ). They need confidence to tackle whatever trials will come their way and whatever adult decisions they must make. Why does it seem there are such heavy and major adult decisions that our kids must make at such a young and inexperienced age???My oldest is off to BYU-Idaho this week. I can’t believe I’ve become so old my daughter is leaving the house.
😥 SilentDawning wrote:I’ve been wondering about this one. With my daughter’s very traditional orientation toward the Church,
I’m pretty sure she is going to grow up believing she will marry an RM, get married, and start having children quickly, staying at home as a Mom. She is not formed in any direction just yet, but she identifies VERY strongly with the Church culture and way of doing things…However, there are great risks if I don’t help her make some impressions of what her life paths could take, and how to prepare for adulthood.What are your thoughts on this… It seems like the Church is giving too many young women the impression that the main thing they need to worry about is simply getting married in the temple to a “worthy” returned missionary and then they will supposedly live happily ever after. The problem with this idea is that even if your daughter marries a seemingly perfect RM in the temple he could still easily be one google search away from becoming a bitter ex-Mormon atheist and/or “porn addict.”
There aren’t any guarantees no matter what you do but personally I doubt that very many people would ever regret finishing whatever education they plan on pursuing and/or working for a few years to explore some career options before having children. Personally, I think more Church leaders need to realize that it’s not the 1950s anymore. Putting all of your eggs in one basket mostly based on what the Church says is a bad idea in my opinion because it leaves too much to chance and there are too many things that can go wrong with the Church’s formula for success that they haven’t seriously considered so they don’t plan for all the realistic possibilities very well.
I have four daughters. I think I know them well enough to believe they probably will have four very different lives, in unique ways. I try to prepare them to make their own decisions. Period. I hope it is within the framework of the Church, but my focus is on preparing them to be agents unto themselves.
I think everyone will agree that daughters should be given license to choose their own path. However, the voices at Church will lead them to think the Find RM-Marriage-Babies-Stay-At-Home formula is the only way to go, and I think that should be qualified. I think I’m going to prepare her for several eventualities. She already says she wants to go to University, and I think we should let her know that she needs to prepare her life for many possibilities that can materialize in her twenties and beyond — from the textbook pattern above, to the scenario where children might not be forthcoming, and she is a career woman, to a situation where she works and has a family at the same time, and where she has a husband who gets sick and can’t work. Let her know these are all viable alternatives. Also, neutralize the judgmentalism that many women in the Church have to women who work — help her learn to be accepting of these people.
I also plan to encourage her to believe that if she is able to stay at home, she should tackle the situation quite a bit differently than the women on her in-law side of the family.
I hope the women here don’t beat up on me about this, but frankly, I think my in-laws see homemaking as a huge vacation. My sister-in-law, and others on that side of the family tend to sleep in regularly, watch movies all day and nap all afternoon even when their only child is sleeping through the night, leave many things within their power undone in the household, refuse to get meals (when the young kids say at lunchtime “what is for lunch??”, they say “I don’t know, what are you making???”), and then leave all these things for their husband to do when they get home. Dishes pile up for days on end, and when the husband asks if the two of them could clear them off, he gets no cooperation. My sister-in-law recently said she “never sees [her] two girls all day” because they play in the play room upstairs.
I guess I’m being critical here, but I’ve seen the hardship this causes on the husbands and how these attitudes get passed on to the next generation. The marriage counselor who saved my marriage through his books 10 years ago, Willard Harley Junior, commented that each person brings certain emotional needs into a marriage. Love is triggered when the other person meets those emotional needs. Common needs women have are conversation, affection, family commitment, financial support etcetera. Men tend to value sexual fulfilment, domestic support, recreational compansionship, and others (there are 10 common needs).
My hope is that my daughter will understand these needs in her intended spouse, as well as her own needs, so she can marry someone whose emotional needs she meets without having to alter who she is significantly, and vice versa.
Heber13 wrote:I just have my girls read posts by Hawkgrrrl,
:angel: and tell them they need to be strong and independent like that.Hehehehe. Best advice EVER! Seriously. I really admire how Hawk seems to slip effortlessly between the roles she chooses to live, which on the surface might seem very different.
My own approach:
I have three daughters and three sons. The question is about the daughters, so i’m just focusing on that part. My girls are 18, 14 and 11. My 18 year old is away at college, and she is a bright, highly focused and driven young woman. She is an adult now. Sure, that doesn’t mean my love, responsibility as a parent, and involvement in her life are over; but she can make decisions and choose what she wants to do with her life. I think it is really important to let go over time. I can’t control her. I shouldn’t. I don’t really want to. I do the best I can as a parent to give her whatever I can to help her be successful. She has to do the best she can too.
I think I got lousy advice when I was her age. I got advice that really left me unprepared for the realities I would have to face. Consequently, my wife and I are very determined to give our daughters practical and realistic advice. We expect our girls (just like our boys) to pursue some form of further education or training so they can support themselves as an adult. My girls can CHOOSE to be stay at home moms if they want. But I refuse to let that be understood as the one-and-only option. I think it’s terribly naive and a case of poor planning to just assume these days that a family can always live on a single income. Even in Mormon temple marriages, 50% or so end in divorce. So right there it’s a coin toss, and it’s WAY harder to go get career training AFTER you have a bunch of kids to support. I know. I was left in that position because of the choices I made (based on the view I was taught).
We just wrapped up the single most affluent streak of stability and positive economic growth in human history. That gig is over. I think it’s extremely poor of parents to allow any of the children, girls especially, to become adults with the notion of having no income-generating skills. I’ve had periods of unemployment where my income was really all over the place and unpredictable (I can usually hustle and find side work even while looking for a new permanent job). My wife has always been a stay at home mom, so she can’t jump back out into the market when that happens to supplement our income. It has caused really difficult times for us at points in our family.
Flexibility is the key to survival now and in the future. It has always been that way.
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