Since my work keeps me away from home for months at a time, we’ve used both live-in nannies and daycare depending on what works best for my wife who is a homemaker. We currently have a young male au-pair from Bulgaria who’s been a great help in burning off excess energy from two middle boys, housekeeping, grocery shopping etc.

This gives my wife a few hours of relief each day, between taking care of our 15-month old son as well as enabling her to participate in daily after-school activities in ballet, theatre and music at our local charter school with our older kids.

God willing, I’ve got about another 8 months before I’m thru with the road-warrior routine.

But I have to say I am living your dream. And it is totally rich. With an awesome husband and six children to homeschool, life couldn’t get much better. And I’m even getting paid a little to write for a homeschool magazine. And that all got going because of my blog. Life is good.

My wife and I have a 17-month-old daughter whom we adopted from China in September 2004. Our original plan was for my wife (a cytotechnologist for a medical lab) to become a stay-at-home mom while I (a college professor — which isn’t as lucrative a job as you might think) work and bring home the money. It turns out that for health insurance reasons, we really needed my wife to stay on at her job part time. In order to do that, we put our daughter in day care — for four days out of the week, for four hours at a time.

Being in daycare for this moderate amount of time has done miracles for her social, language, motor, and intellectual skills. Being an adopted kid — who was found abandoned in front of a supermarket at age two weeks and spent her first eight months in a Chinese orphanage — she had a lot of issues with separation anxiety, socialization, language, and fine motor skills. Before daycare, she would cry if we so much as moved two feet away from her.

But now she loves to play with other kids, doesn’t mind not being held all the time, and has a generally happy disposition about life. Her daycare workers have been teaching her numbers and letters and songs; they are no substitute for parents but they know how to do certain things with kids that we don’t.

So I think that daycare (if that’s what you meant by “institutionalized ‘care’”) when used in moderation can be an immensely valuable thing for kids. We’ve certainly had nothing but positive experiences with it, and our girl has developed a lot faster and better because of it.

“Who could’ve realized that La Shawn Barber’s declaration of being a traditional woman would result in such conversation! Read her post here, then come back and check out”

http://marklaroi.blogspot.com/2005/06/stay-at-home-dads.html

We
made it home from the convention and I'm glad it's over! 
Unfortunately, the whole family came down w…

If it’s God’s design/plan that women raise children, while men go out and “hunt/gather” in the workplace, what about women who choose not to marry at all and throw themselves fully into their careers… are they rejecting God’s design for them?

~Possibly, but not necessarily. God gifts some individuals with the ability to remain celibate. These people are the exception to the main though, because it requires a real gift to stay celibate and not go crazy! These men and women should be seeking whatever God’s purpose for them is if it isn’t marrying and raising a family.

Others just haven’t married yet, and they are in no way rejecting God’s plan by not beginning a family without the benefit of marriage. In fact, they’re in obedience to His will by waiting.

People should consider carefully if they are capable of celibacy. If that isn’t God’s plan for them, and they refuse to marry for whatever reason, they make life harder than it ought to be, and they are apparently avoiding God’s plan for them because if He’d wanted them celibate He’d have gifted them for it. This is why it’s scripturally permissible for pastors to marry. Otherwise sexual temptation could lead them to sin, or at least distract them relentlessly.

By the way, I think I know what you meant but just to be clear where I’m coming from, it’s both parents job to raise the children, mom just has the primary time spent with them in her management of the home.

I will definitely have to explore this further. Thanks for the link!

For any one interested you may also want to take a look at Ezzo.info.

If it’s God’s design/plan that women raise children, while men go out and “hunt/gather” in the workplace, what about women who choose not to marry at all and throw themselves fully into their careers… are they rejecting God’s design for them?

I was just saying that The Rules comes across as manipulation, even if the book and its ideas are based on good etiquette and courtesy and politeness. And I was also thinking about the criteria from the book He’s Just Not That Into You, transposed into the Christian worldview (ie. minus the “if-he’s-not-sleeping-with-you,-he’s-just-not-into-you” sort of guidelines). The general principle of “man pursues, woman responds” is good. I believe in that. But what one man’s pursuit of me actually IS, may not be another man’s pursuit of me.

A male friend of mine said that there is no difference in his behavior when his intentions are friendship only from his behavior when his intentions are for dating/romance. The difference is in his desire.

So…I’m saying that some guys, for whatever reason, have trouble translating their intentions into behaviors that accurately communicate said intentions to the woman the guy wants. He may think, “She’ll know I want to date her”; but she may remain confused.

Now, if we gave every available man in America a copy of The Rules and said, “Go by this. I don’t care how contrived your actions will feel to you. You’ll at least get the right message across to the girl you’ve selected to receive your attentions.” We’d ALL have to agree to operate that way.

But…there will be folks who don’t want to.

I’m just saying that formulas are great for math and physics and such but not so great for real people.

And if you are making decisions based on what other people might think of you… then you are WEAK!!! Weak, Weak, Weak – pathetically weak. Get a grip. If you want to stay home with your kids, guess what – NO ONE CARES!!! Post-feminist America… Get out of here with that crap. Women were second-class citizens, and still are in many parts of the world. They fought to change that. Now, if you want to strive to be CEO, its cool. No one dawgs Martha Stewart, Oprah or Condi Rice for choosing careers over family and no one is going to give a hoot if a woman decides to leave the power lunches behind for afternoons in the park watch little Andy eat grasshoppers. It’s your life – DO AS YOU PLEASE – NO ONE CARES!!!

LaShawn Barber has posted an excellent, very personal post about her desire to become a traditional wife and mother. I applaud Lashawn's courage in…

God Bless