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There is a point in teaching children to read before they go into a school that teaches them the wrong way. After schools dropped phonics and switched to whole language approaches to reading, it became harder to correct a kid's bad habits. If a kid learns the right way to read is to look at pictures and guess, then a couple years down the line a struggling reader will be a nightmare to teach. Instead of sounding out words, which takes work and is hard, the kid will keep drifting to old bad habits.
I highly recommend teaching a kid to read phonetically at least up to The Cat in the Hat (so largely simple consonants, consonant blends, and consonant digraphs) before they go into kindergarten if you can. Some kids really can't because they lack the phonemic awareness necessary, like my daughter, but I wish I had held her back a year in the end because it was an expensive and time consuming mistake to fix.
When kids are in school, a homemakers primary job is to socialize. That's actually important! Volunteer, talk with people, find out special programs that other parents are sending their children to so that your kids get the advantages as well. Organize parties, picnics. Create a community. Organize a meal train when someone is sick. The social fabric is falling apart and no one thinks it has anything to do with the decline of people who went out to coffee every Monday after dropping off the kids and made strong and weak social ties across the local area?
Sure, I concede that if you live in whole language country you have to take things into your own hands. This is fairly time limited to the first few years of a kid's life though.
For me, it's simply that:
My own mother (a SAHM) did none of these things, so I'm not sure how common this was to begin with
Men's social fabric has also fallen apart (Bowling Alone) and I think it's difficult to blame this on women
So I find it difficult to feel strongly about the social contributions of SAHMs.
My SAHM mother did to the socializing legwork, which is why I recognize this as part of the job. Everyone knows someone in their job who doesn't seem to do anything and skates by, homemaking is no different. But judging a job by people who don't do it well isn't the best way to assess its usefulness.
Men's social fabric will fall apart when women's stop socializing. Who do you think gets to meet up at these parties and picnics the women organized?
Seems uncalled for to imply that my mother "didn't seem to do anything".
I do not take the view that men are entirely dependent on their wives and mothers to make and meet up with friends.
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