Stay-at-home Mom?

Throughout human history, the prevailing family model has included a mother who does not work outside the home. Mothers for thousands of years have predominantly been concerned with taking of their households.

Yes, mothers have historically mostly been found inside the home. When they're not in the vegetable garden tending the vegetables. Or out feeding the rabbits or chickens. Or killing, plucking, or skinning the aforementioned animals. Or lending a hand in the field during harvest time. Or in the cellar churning butter. Or at the river, drawing water or washing their large family's clothes by hands in icy water. Yes, women are often found in the home. In the kitchen, in fact. Making everything their very large families need to eat. From scratch.

What's my point? I've been thinking about myself as a mother and my role in my family and outside of it. There are certain well-meaning Christians who would insist that moms should not work outside of the home. But, when they say this, they have in mind a paradigm that has really only existed for a couple of generations, and only in certain privileged parts of the world. A stay-at-home mom in rural France 2 generations ago, or a stay-at-home mom in many poorer parts of the world today, bear almost no resemblance to Mrs. Cleaver wiping her already-clean hands on her lacy apron and calling Wally and the Beav down for milk and cookies. Those women may not have worked outside the home, but the were sure busy!

So, while mom was washing, cleaning, sewing, and cooking, who was watching the kids? Often the grandparents (who, by the way, probably lived in the same house as their offspring), a spinster aunt, or an older brother or sister. Those Christians who say that a parent's duty to their children is such that care and education of the child can not be delegated to a third party seem to me to be entirely unaware of how the world has worked for milennia, and how it continues to work in many places.

Does this mean that we've given up the home schooling idea? Not at all. We still don't know what we're going to do, but this is part of my thought process. Thanks for listening.