The Haversian Canal

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July 9, 2006

Watching the kids is like standing watch

Is there are journal for the stay-at-home-parent profession? Staying at home with the kids this summer has been an illuminating experience. It's not that it's particularly harder than a day job, although it is more physically demanding. I find it to be most like standing watch on a ship.

Similarities:
1) You're responsible for what happens.
2) It can be mind-numbingly boring
3) You can easily slip behind the schedule if you let the boredom lull you into a sense of 'just passing time'.
4) There is a real chance of people getting hurt, even if you're careful.
5) There may be a greater chance of people getting hurt if you're too careful.
6) Your legal authority is tremendous, but your actual influence is a matter of personal rapport.
7) Decisions have to be made in real time.

Differences:
1) A stay-at-home parent is responsible for fewer people.
2) A stay-at-home parent gets remarkably less respect. I think this may be associated sociologically with the number of people the parent is in charge of. Isn't a parent of 12 held in higher esteem that a parent of 2? There aren't many stay-at-home parents of 100.
3) The equipment is much more mundane: the dryer just isn't as exciting as a missile launcher or turbine engine, although the proper functioning of the dryer is surely a more significant day-to-day concern.
4) I'm not aware of many professional journals of stay-at-home parenting or advanced degrees in stay-at-home parenting.
5) The stay-at-home parent's shift is longer (16-18 hours a day vs 4 to 7 hours for a deck watch), but the sleep schedule is more regular.
6) The typical American stay-at-home parent isn't part of a day-to-day institutional organization, like a ship or a hospital, that brings many practitioners into close contact and facilitates the exchange of ideas. Pockets do exist, notably military base housing, where parents are able to share lessons and stories on the playgrounds, in social contexts, etc, as a part of their daily routine. In retrospect, this a phenomenal advantage of base housing, and community planners should look to it as a model.

Decisions have to be made in real time, but there aren't any professional journals and there aren't a large number of practitioners within a local, physical institution with whom to share stories and lessons. Researchers seem to make a rather nihilistic assumption that people raise their children as they were raised. Well, that's probably true, but it's not the whole story. Stay-at-home parenting, parenting in general, seems to be lacking a lot of the standardized indoctrination that virtually all other fields provide their neophytes.

Posted by Niels Olson at July 9, 2006 10:47 AM

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