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The problem is that in the 21st century, a housewife and mother of three is not going to be relaxed; she's going to be perpetually stressed and exhausted. Servants are the missing variable in these arguments. The old system presupposed that anyone middle-class or above would have at least part-time servants to do the cleaning and look after the very young (and even for the poor, to a certain extent it presumed big family clans where retired members could be put to "work" for household and childrearing stuff, though it also largely presumed that it was okay if poor women's mental health was a horror show).
Women are relaxed around children. Female school teachers for young grades are like the most relaxed women in the world, and those aren’t even her kids and she isn’t at home. There is a biological reason for why a woman would be stressed after being severed from her child but no reason why she would be stressed being in a homemaking environment. When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs). There’s also a study showing Amish women are significantly less stressed than normal Americans, and they have eight kids. There are a lot of different compelling reasons to believe that a mother with her child is the least stressed version of woman, provided she isn’t also laboring for eight hours a day away from her kid.
You don't actually have a wife and kids, do you?
Notably, these games can be paused when you get tired of them.
Can a woman pause her work when she gets tired of it? Do you think SAHMs play “excel simulator” to relax? Preferences are revealed.
Okay, no wife, no kids. That explains a lot.
What does this have to do with anything? Did anyone make the ludicrous claim that work is relaxing?
Pal, I don't know if you want to go down the revealed preferences route given the revealed preferences women apparently have around marriage and number of children. Your whole argument revolves around how women would be happier if they did something other than they do - i.e. a denial of the validity of the revealed preferences.
I don’t think your n=1 wife who likely works has any relevance here. But maybe you married a Mennonite chick, I don’t know. Sorry about your stressed out wife. Here is n=288 showing that sahm culture produces 1/4th the amount of “feeling overloaded” as girlboss culture and 1/10th the depressive on a symptoms scale.
My wife hasn't worked the entire time we've had children, and I've talked to other women who have had children and worked or didn't work at different times of their kids' lives. My wife is also not a stressed woman, which is not to say that she finds kids "relaxing".
My point is that if you've literally never raised a child and get your view on what it's like, and what women think of it, from discord and other Internet forums, you basically have no idea what you're talking about. It is, quite simply, one of those human experiences that you have no access to without going through it yourself.
I am curious - have you actually discussed whether or not children are relaxing IRL with a flesh and blood woman? Even your mother?
That's really not what this is comparing.
The groups are Amish women vs non-Amish women, so there's already a lot of differences between the groups besides "works" or "sahm".
Only a minority of both samples (19% Amish, 28% genpop) are mothers. So most of the comparison here is between women without children, rather than SAHMs vs working mothers.
28% of the Amish women work, and 75% of the non-Amish women work - so this isn't even comparing "Amish SAHM" vs "non-Amish working mothers".
Given that this is mostly a comparison of unemployed childless women vs employed childless women, I'm hardly surprised the first group is less overloaded than the second. Especially since the Amish are generally okay with using washing machines - the work of running the household without any kids is just not that much.
In the Amish sample, 19% have no children and the rest have children. 33% have between 6 and 21 children. In the general pop, 28% have no children. (That’s going by “number of pregnancies” as a proxy for children). It’s important to learn how to read a simple data table if, in the same reply, you tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Now if you go down to the Psychosocial Hassles Scale, married with children Amish are happier than never married general population women.
We have to look at data because we do not exist in a SAHM culture. So in regards to the n=1, she might be stressed around her children because she never learned the skills of motherhood during her formative years of adolescent cognition. Almost no American adolescents learn this. Or maybe she was taught and internalized antinatal values, that a woman’s worth is in her job or something. This is grilled into minds at a young age. Or maybe she is more easily stressed because her own mother-child was severed early. It really can be anything. Because the important question is whether women would be happier being a at home with kids in a culture which prepares them for this role, versus our current culture which promotes almost the exact opposite values and skills (sedentary studying, avaricious competition, &tc).
Likely those who are finished with motherhood plus the ones who haven’t started.
Apologies, I misstated this.
Sure, but that's a weird comparison. In both populations never married women score higher on psychosocial hassles than the other groups. The difference between married with children and married without is very small in terms of SDs in both populations.
None of this helps us answer the original question - do women find children relaxing or not?
I again repeat that my wife is not a stressed woman.
She, and several of the other mothers I've talked to who have children, also have younger siblings and participated in raising them.
There's a lot of nuance here that you're missing, likely due to your inexperience with family life.
Women generally enjoy raising children, no doubt about it. That's why they have them, and often have more after having one.
Women would be happier at home with young kids assuming that the income they give up makes little marginal difference in the household's consumption habits. That's why high income husbands have wives most likely to stay home. If staying home is too much of a lifestyle downgrade, women prefer to work to maintain their lifestyle.
Once the youngest children are in school, a SAHM's life changes significantly and they have a tremendous amount of free time open up. They often go into part time or volunteering work because sitting alone at home for 7 hours a day with nothing to do is not very fun. Among the rich, this often manifests in nonprofit board membership. There's little appetite for being a SAHM for when the youngest is 13 and mostly wants to hang out with their friends.
None of this indicates anything about whether women find raising children relaxing. There's a lot of things in life that are meaningful and worthwhile that are not relaxing, and are actually in fact quite exhausting. If you've ever had a job you've found meaningful, you should already understand this. If you ever raise (especially young) children, you will understand this infinitely more.
Your arguments about this inevitably end up in a gish gallop of unfalsifiable no true Scotsmen (the women find children exhausting because they've been brainwashed! Or because they weren't raised right! Or it was generational trauma from their mothers!). This is fundamentally rooted in lack of experience with real family dynamics. Internet forums cannot replace this. It's bizarre to be one of the biggest tradposters on the forum when you don't lead a trad life and seem to mostly know the trad life based on looking at Amish people and discord.
I encourage you to remedy this.
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