Over on NRO’s The Home Front, I have a blog up about Elizabeth Wurtzel’s lack of understanding about the lives of real stay-at-home moms.
I find it frustrating when people try to calculate the value of stay-at-home moms, since they often use ludicrous assumptions (paying mom a share of the average CEOs salary for being CEO of the house, for example). And parents don’t think about parenting in such terms. I try to raise my kids well because I love them, not because I’m defraying the cost of paying others to do so.
But obviously if you have kids, taking care of them for your family (rather than hiring someone else) is of economic value. Moreover, raising kids is important to society (those like Wurtzel who seem to proudly forgo having children as a part of the cause seem to bizarrely overlook that their cause would end in just a few decades if everyone followed their cry to stop reproducing…).
If women’s equality really rested, as Wurtzel seems to believe, on all women giving up on the idea of raising their kids themselves, then women’s cause would be doomed. Fortunately, Wurtzel’s definition of equality isn’t the one that most of us have in mind.