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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.
When you say that she isn’t stressed, you mean that she isn’t stressed generally speaking. But that generality is in the fulfillment of the tasks of life that she spent 35,000 hours mastering since preschool (school time + homework + ECs). School made her extremely adept and comfortable in the skills of dealing with occupational burdens in corporate America. She may be extremely good at spreadsheeting. This leads to comfortability because humans are comfortable doing what they are trained and reinforced to do. (The Chinese boy manning the cash register at the restaurant will be completely fluent in the stresses of restaurant-running by the age of 12, whereas it would take a 25yo years to develop the same fluency).
But school did not teach her anything that would lead to comfort in the domain of motherhood. That is a totally distinct set of skills that have more to do social habits and stress resilience. School did not have her carry around a doll 24/7 for a few years, or teach her how to sleep with the child so that it doesn’t cry at night. It didn’t teach proper breastfeeding or weening. It didn’t teach her how to speak to a child or how to tell fairytales that makes children behave. She wasn’t taught stress resilience as a caregiver. She wasn’t given any sort of role model relevant to the domain of motherhood, the chief domain of her existence.
I’m assuming that you understand that people are comfortable doing tasks which have been reinforced and tasks which they have been trained to do. I’m assuming that you know that traditional cultures imbue women with this training implicitly or explicitly in adolescence. I’m assuming that you can understand how the study would debunk the claim that motherhood is stressful (the population with tons of children is much less stressed than the one with very few). These are reasonable assumptions. If you want ancecdota you can go to an Amish locale and ask around, I guess.
Why, no, that's not what I mean.
It may surprise you that it is in fact the case that you're mistaken about several of your "no true Scotsmen" assertions about the conditions necessary for a mother to find children relaxing in the context of my wife. It's not your fault, since you don't know her - but one wonders what possesses a man to invent stories about another man's wife.
Comfort isn't the question here. I'm perfectly comfortable doing my job for which I have extensive training. Nevertheless, it is exhausting.
I hope I don't have to explain why you can't compare Amish vs genpop stress and conclude that motherhood isn't stressful. Instead, I'll pretend you reiterated my point about the small gap in stress between married women and married women with children in both groups. I'll go ahead and reiterate what I already said in response to that point, which is that you can find something meaningful, fulfilling, and also utterly exhausting. I also couldn't immediately tell what goes into the hassle assessment, so it's unclear to what extent it even measures what you think it measures.
I'm genuinely puzzled that you don't understand this point. I'm my last post, I assumed that you had worked a job that you doing fulfilling at some point. Am I mistaken on this? Have you never done that? Generally speaking, have you ever done something hard, taxing, exhausting, yet absolutely worth doing?
Has a mother ever told you that raising (especially small) children is relaxing?
I can't help but feel as if your knowledge of childrearing, but also of women's attitudes towards it are entirely symbolic, in the sense that you derive this knowledge entirely from reading words on a screen. Am I correct in this assessment or does the rubber meet the road somewhere?
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