by Maria C Collins

Created on: December 10, 2009   Last Updated: March 14, 2012

Working mothers cannot win. Regularly, a politician, newspaper report, or research study says that stay at home mothers raise children better. This carries the unspoken criticism that working mothers neglect their children. Trouble is that modern life dictates that two incomes are needed these days to raise a family. Working mothers already feel torn between work and home responsibilities. The British government encourages mothers to work. Also, in Britain, it is impossible to pay a mortgage on a typical single income.

The myth that all working mothers neglect their children because they are too busy to oversee their children’s development is patently untrue. Since most children of working mothers grow up to be useful, contributing members of society. The myth also implies that the children of stay at home mothers never have any problems, which is also clearly untrue.

 Dysfunctional families occur whether the mother works or not and because of many different factors. To blame all society’s ills on working mothers is lazy thinking, after all children have two parents and society, itself, is much to blame for the problems that youngsters have, both in childhood and when they become adult.

The truth about working mothers is that they have to work, not for pin money but to make an essential contribution to family incomes. Working mothers juggle children, relationships, jobs, housework, running a home and doing all the things that women accomplish. Women still bear the bulk of the responsibility for family life and the home, and working mothers do all that as well as holding down a job.

 A working mother can be a very positive role model for children. Teaching them about the importance of hard work and also the traditional skills of motherhood and caring. A stay at home mother is not better, or worse, than a working mother.

There is a parallel myth about stay at home mothers that they are cabbages and have somehow become less worthy or brainy than working mothers, because they are not in the work place. Perhaps it is time that everyone realized that most mothers do their utmost, whether they work outside the home or not, to do the most important job in the World, the job of raising the next generation.  

Society should look instead to itself and wonder what has gone wrong, instead of blaming women, who are just doing their best. Everyone could help by teaching boys how to do domestic chores and child care and showing them that it is natural, and right, for men and fathers to do these things. Perhaps then society would not look down on certain jobs as women’s work and less worthy than any other work.

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