Originally Posted by
rockmom
Well, I suppose fathers could have picked up the slack a bit more. From discussions among my fellow moms, a lot of men are still seriously slacking in terms of housework and child care whether the mom works nor not. It's pretty damn common for men to maintain their hobbies after kids, while mom's new hobby is getting to go the grocery store on her own.
Idk, I don't compare myself with other parents, fathers or mothers. I try to do the right thing. I question norms instead of accepting them blindly or refusing to question them because they are so engrained. It's not always possible or easy to act independently of culture, but the more you try, the further you get.
A suburban neighborhood full of at home moms also means that the kids were being supervised because there was always a responsible adult near by. Middle class neighborhoods are pretty empty during the day now. I think that the idea that kids walked and biked everywhere is also pretty overblown. While both my husband and I walked to elementary school, we bused or were driven to junior and senior high school because they were not close to home. And we were driven to extracurricular activities that didn't take place at the school.
There was a time before cars, and there was a time before many families had more than one car. Kids most certainly walked to get places, and often biked. It's sad that many people can't (or don't want to) seem to remember that people and kids in particular used to be more independent of motor-vehicles for transportation. Many people in the world still are. There are cultural blinders that prevent auto-centric driving-dependent people from being aware of that. I'm not exactly sure how the psychology of these blinders work, but it would be interesting to understand it. In a way it seems natural, but in another way it seems eerily artificial, like some kind of mind-control paradigm being enforced in some covert way, disturbing as that might sound.