Introduction:

There are many reasons why this book began. The most important of those being the realization of the importance of my role as a mother in my own children’s lives. As I worked closely with many young children in my children’s entertainment business, I had observed the perplexing demeanor of children who had spent a majority of their time in daycares. Many had seemed to lack a sense of security and confidence. Some were overly aggressive, others extraordinarily clingy. I had begun to arrive at the point where I found myself being able to automatically pinpoint whether or not the children at each event had been in daycare or not. A curiosity was born, and a passion stirred.

This book is not intended to condemn, but rather to assist those who have a desire to dedicate their lives fully to the raising of their children by forcing their business lives to fit in around their children and not to fit their children in around their business lives.

I solidly believe that most mothers truly desire to be home with their children, but either just can’t see how this is a possibility given their current situation, feel emotionally overwhelmed by being with their children all day, or find their identity primarily in employment.

There is pressure from every angle in our time for women to have it all. I will set out to prove that having it all is a myth. When one has a whole pie, and has it all, there is no pie left over for anyone else. The family unit and your children will always be the losers in the game of having it all, as well as your health, sanity, and peace.

I hold some very strong opinions and convictions regarding mothers and the roles they should play in the lives of their children. This book is merely my voice, and one woman’s opinion. Take away from it what you need, and leave what you don’t need.

This book is not an easy solution, and will require effort on your part. I will attempt to provide support, information, and formulae for you to use in your life to help you quit or reduce your job hours and increase your family time with money-saving tips, brain-changing philosophies, and down-right straight talk.

Please join me in a journey of facing yourself, your wants vs. your needs, your priorities, your parenthood and your life. In the meantime, you may just realize all you have, and all you can really live without.

Chapter One

Now Why the Heck Would I Want to Do That?

We all face challenges and struggles that are unique to our own personality types, but each of us has a common goal in mind here—to spend more time with our families, and to spend less time being overscheduled and stressed to the gills. I’m so thankful you are allowing me a small chunk of your mind in which I can implant “stay-at-home mommy propaganda!” Let’s begin that process—together. Go “mommy power”—MOMMIES—UNITE!

Tackling The But

One small thing we must address before beginning our journey is a tiny, yet powerful three-letter word that you may find rearing its ugly head during this transition from work to home. The well-known ogre of a word is “but.” The power of this word has kept many from accomplishing their goals and living the life they’ve dreamed of living.

How can such a miniscule word prevent you from your goals? Let’s take a look at a typical conversation within a person’s mind—where the word “but” is invited:

The word “but” seems so slyly innocent, doesn’t it? Can you see its overpowering influence here? Observe how it carefully slips itself into the unsuspecting sentence to justify whatever it is you are doing. Notice how the “but” cancels out everything said before it: “I know I shouldn’t have said that mean comment to my husband—but he was being such a jerk!”, “I know I shouldn’t eat this double-chocolate-dipped whipped-cream éclair, but I’ve already eaten fourteen, so what’s the difference?” We say “but” in these sentences to justify doing what we know is wrong for us to do—and it makes us feel so much better—instantly! Isn’t “but” a great word? No, no, no, my estrogen-laden friends! “But” must be viewed as the enemy! Repeat this after me: “MY BUT IS MY ENEMY!” (Just make certain there isn’t anyone around when you say that—they may send you away in a straitjacket!) Pay close attention to your thought processes as you ponder the decision to alter the course of your family life. Notice when the “enemy word” jumps out from nowhere and attempts to devour every last bit of hope you have left for your dreams! Yes—there will be arising circumstances that make this all seem impossible—there will be obstacles and times of frustration along the way. You will hear the enemy word. Your husband may say it. Your friends may say it. Your mother may say it. You may even say it—but just by being aware of the word and its power—you‘re already two steps ahead. Don’t let a measly little three-letter word stand before you and time with your children. Only you can give the word its power—by surrendering yourself over to your doubts and giving up. Just by reading this today, it shows that you have a desire to change your current situation and your life, making more of your time available to your children and family. Although that change will sometimes prove to be uncomfortable and stressful, I urge you to “keep your eyes on the prize” in the same way that a racing greyhound keeps his eyes fixed on the rabbit dancing in front of him to provoke the race. Your children will know that they are an absolute priority in your life...this is your prize! Is this prize worth the pain? You have to make the commitment to see this prize come to pass no matter how tough it will temporarily be. If we never make the effort to achieve our dreams, and instead allow the “buts” of life to stand in our way—how will we ever know what might have been on the other side? Taking a risk is often necessary in order to find what lies on the opposite side of the fence. Are you ready to take a risk for your children? Are you prepared to peer over the fence to view your new life on the other side?

Self-Discovery:

Be keen to that pesky three-letter word as it’s bound to jump all up in yo’ stuff! Doubt is the enemy and fear fueled only by your willingness to harbor it in your spirit!

Put Your Breasts to the Test

For those of you who have nursed a baby in your lives—one thing is made very clear right away during the process: if you happen to skip a feeding or two while away from the baby...suddenly you find that your once drooping, flab-infested breasts have become the most enticing things your husband has laid his eyes on since Pamela Anderson left Baywatch. Dolly Parton ain’t got nothin’ on you, baby! (Please Parton the use of incorrect grammar, friends!) Yes, engorgement looks fantastic in a string bikini, but in reality, it’s a pain-filled ride in a parking lot full of speed bumps. The intensity of engorgement pain is on a level close to that of childbirth itself!

Let’s go back to that design stuff and that God guy. He has designed our bodies to perform amazing feats. It’s an awesome thing to think that a woman’s body can nourish her child on breast milk and nothing else for over a year, if need be. A baby will eat every two to four hours for the initial part of the first year and maybe every four to five hours in the second half. Even if you did not nurse, your body was still designed by God to carry out the same astounding duty.

When babies are designed to rely upon their mothers for nourishment every few hours, where does an eight-hour day plus commuting time fit in with this design? If God wanted us to be away from our babies for extended periods of time, why do those who nurse have breasts that swell up like pre-eruption melons of Mount St. Helens when away from their infants?

When our skin touches the intense heat of a flame, our body is equipped by God to feel pain as an indicator that something is wrong—and if we are wise, we will then turn away from the source of the pain. Our breasts feel pain because something is wrong—our babies are gone. God did not create breast pumps—humans did. He intended for us to be with our babies.

Self-Discovery:

We have been blessed with an amazingly constructed body. It functions beautifully and wonderfully all on its own—we never have to tell our hearts to beat—they just thump and bump around all by themselves. God designed our hearts to do this. God also designed a life for a woman. Are you living outside of God’s design for you? What kind of pain is rearing its ugly head in your life as an indicator that something is not quite right? Depression, anxiety, stress?

Is Five Years Too Much?

When we choose to fully dedicate ourselves to raising our children—leaving our careers behind in the interim—we need to remind ourselves that the state of childhood is a temporary situation. They will soon trek off to school at the ripe ol’ age of five, leaving you the freedom to once again pursue your career during their school hours.

The first five years of a child’s life, known by child experts as “the formative years,” are essential to a child’s emotional well being. It is a time when they are forming their opinions of the world around them. The sense of self-development during this time is critical, and it holds the key to children’s life-choices throughout their years on earth. It is during this time that they decide who they can trust and who they simply cannot, and just exactly how they fit into this giant planet.

In his book, Bringing Up Kids Without Tearing Them Down, Dr. Kevin Leman notes separate studies performed by two psychologists who take a closer look at the innate mothering patterns of birds. In one study, Konrad Lorenz discovered that the process of teaching the young to follow the mother duck was completed within the first twenty-three hour period of their lives. If the ducklings had been absent from the mother during those crucial first hours, the babies would have been unable to learn to follow the mother duck. Lorenz coins this phenomenon “imprinting.” Another study, carried out by psychologist Konishi, found that songbirds also learn their songs in very short periods of time. He found that once the song was learned, it was irreversible and could never be unlearned. These findings also showed that if the baby songbird missed out on the period in which the song was taught, the song would never be learned at all. (1)

It is also interesting to note the spectacle of “false imprinting,” which occurs when the animal’s mother either dies or has abandoned her young. The offspring is then raised by a surrogate mother—which can be an animal of the same species or of another kind entirely. I have personally seen photos of baby ducklings that were falsely imprinted by their stand-in mommy—a dog! It was the strangest thing to see a devoted line of meandering, yellow puffballs faithfully following a canine! Human children are also capable of being falsely imprinted by someone other than their mothers. This occurs when they are placed in daycare during the first year of life—one of the most crucial bonding and developing seasons for children.

It is plain to see how the plan of God intended baby birds to be imprinted by their mothers. If the mothers were somehow unavailable during the time of training, the babies were the ones who paid the price. The offspring were forced to go through life without the knowledge that was their inherited birthright—if they were fortunate enough to survive at all.

As the duck and songbird were designed by God to be imprinted by their mother, how much more is a human baby designed to have the same right. It is every child’s right to be lovingly raised by its mother. A decision made by a family to separate a baby from his or her mother is contradictory to God’s design for the life of a child and a woman. [See Titus 2:4-5] It is in the best interest of every child to be alongside its mother for the first five years of his or her life.

The average lifespan of a woman is seventy-nine years, with some living to under the average age and others surpassing the average into their late nineties. Let’s take the low average, and understand that five years of sacrificing employment totals 6.3 percent of the lifespan. If the person lives to be ninety, which many do, the total time of sacrificing employment would be a little less than that percentage—coming in at a whopping 5.5 percent. When you consider these facts, do these percentages still seem overwhelming? Is 6.3 percent of your life too much to ask of you?

The years we sacrifice to be home with our children can occasionally feel like a prison term in a smelly, whiney cell. When we choose our children over our careers and personal goals, it can be a time of emotional difficulty for us as mothers. We can constantly feel compelled by the world to accomplish more—to do something more “tangibly apparent” than only taking care of small children. These pressures can sometimes cause us to question the validity of the sacrifice. “Is it all really worthwhile? When I go back to work, will this gap in my résumé be frowned upon? Will others still see me as important after I leave my career behind? Will I see myself as important when my days consist of changing diapers and wiping noses?”

These questions and fears are certainly genuine, and it is true that we will lose some of the things we perceive as worthy in order to gain the new life we desire with our children. Some seemingly good things must always be sacrificed in order to gain the greater good. We cannot expect to be slim and trim while we hold the habit of food overindulgence. We cannot expect to have a large savings account if we maintain a practice of over-spending. We cannot expect to have a happy marriage if we continually speak disrespectfully to our spouses. We need to come to the realization that we will indeed experience the loss of some privileges and benefits as we choose to sacrifice our time and careers for our children. We as mothers need only to assess whether or not we think raising a portion of the next generation is more important than the benefits we will likely lose.

It is entirely impossible for we as women and mothers to have it all. This is a lie that has been passed on to us by the feminist movement. Some areas in our lives must be sacrificed in order to have it all and unfortunately, the first sphere that seems to be forfeited is the parenting arena.

Do you believe that your child is worth the measly five years of sacrifice? Is five years of surrendering your career really just a crazy notion not even worth discussion? Yes, it may cause you to step out of your comfort zone, and it may be somewhat difficult to accomplish your goal—but isn’t your child worth it? What do you believe your child deserves?

Self-Discovery:

If you think about it, selfishness is the one thing that causes a majority of the problems in our relationships. Becoming a parent can reveal selfishness like no other instance can! Admitting that we are selfish can be a difficult thing—but once we realize that we have put our own needs above what is best for our children and families—we are well on our way to change. Search yourself prayerfully—ask God to reveal your true motives for the choices you are making in your life. Although you may be able to list several benefits that your full-time job brings to the family, is your decision to remain in the work force honestly “all about you”?

The Daycare Dilemma

I don’t need to tell you that the financial cost of daycare is extremely high. If your child is in daycare now—you are already well aware of the considerable chunk this expense takes out of your budget. Daycare can come with a hefty price tag, but quite frankly—the providers certainly aren’t paid enough for all that they do. Their true job is to replace mothers, and the art of mothering cannot possibly be measured at an hourly rate of pay.

The monetary cost of daycare can be tremendous, but it is certainly small when compared to the emotional and physical costs that daycares cause the children who are in them. Let’s take a look at some of the evidence I’ve collected regarding the negative effects that daycare has been found to have on children:

1. In one study, seventeen percent of the children who were placed in childcare for more than thirty hours per week (during their first four and a half years) exhibited behavioral problems and aggression as reported by the teachers in their kindergarten classes. (2)

2. A small but significant link has been found between time spent in daycare and how positively a child interacts with his/her mother. (2)

3. The number of caregivers and the amount of time children spend away from their parents harms parent-child relationships, thus weakening cognitive and emotional development. (3)

4. Children in daycare have shown a fifty percent higher chance of repeated ear infections. (4)

5. In a nine-country study, children in daycares were more likely to have a history of poor hearing, tympanostomy tubes, tonsillectomy, or adenoidectomy. (5)

6. Children under two were more likely to be hospitalized for lower respiratory tract illnesses if they were in daycare centers with more than six children. (5)

7. Young children in daycares are slightly less likely to bond well with their mothers than stay-at-home children. (6)

8. A Finnish study of 2,568 children found that children in daycare centers accounted for 85 percent of the pneumonia cases in one-year-olds. (7)

9. A child who has not experienced strong attachment to a primary caretaker during his first two years of life —with the first year being of primary importance—is not likely to be able to establish and maintain stable intimate relationships, such as close friendships or even marriage. The earlier the disruption of the attachment process occurs, the more serious and long-lasting the damage will be. (8)

Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School and author of The Irreducible Needs of Children, states, “A warm, loving human relationship is very important for intellectual development. Children form their capacity to think and self-image based on these back-and-forth interactions. Fewer of these are happening, because families are so busy and more care is being done outside the home. Studies [show] that for all ages, 85 percent of day care is not high quality.” (8)

For working moms, the hours spent at home are harried and few, leaving many moms wishing they had more vitality and time to invest into their families. The family unit suffers the consequence of an absentee mother. Marriages do not receive the attention they require and deserve. The child is deprived of an early bond with his mother, natural maternal nurturing, and the emotional availability of the mother during her work hours. The human imprinting that should be carried out by the mother is then unnaturally performed by the caregiver—because the imprinting still takes place.

The bonding and imprinting process for the child becomes even more problematic when he is placed in a typical daycare center, where the average rate of employee turnover is over half of their staff each year due the combination of low wages and high stress. (9) The child first experiences the loss of the mother for attachment purposes, and then bonds with a caregiver, only to lose that caregiver, and the next, and the next, and so on. The result produces a child who has a difficult time forming meaningful connections to anyone due to excessive emotional loss, and who also has complications with trust and self-worth issues. Why trust anyone when they’ll just leave you?

Of course, there are other choices in childcare situations, such as the nanny, a smaller in-home daycare, or a grandparental caregiver. I would say that these are a small step up from the infant and toddler-farm daycare centers, giving children a bit more stability in their lives. Let’s not deceive ourselves though—these conditions are still only a mommy substitute, merely giving our children second best.

If a parent chooses not to stay home with their children, the instance of grandparental childcare is usually the next most beneficial circumstance for the child. Nonetheless, this arrangement is not completely positive. Not only does this situation deprive the grandparent of a proper grand-parenting relationship—causing the grandparent to act as the main disciplinarian—it also unfairly places the full responsibility of raising the child onto the grandparents’ shoulders. Mother abandonment and separation issues continue to be the core problem in any of these situations, and this cannot be remedied. When a child is separated from its mother, there will always be abandonment issues incurred—this is unavoidable.

Although not the most popular option, it is also possible for a mother to work full time outside of the home without the need for daycare or other parental substitutes. We can do this by deliberately choosing to work a shift opposite that of our spouse, so that our children will not be forced to spend time away from home with strangers. If we truly must work—this alternative is the closest thing to a win-win situation for everyone involved. The child is given the opportunity to bond with her parents, the relationship between a father and his children is strengthened, the guilt of child abandonment is lessened for the mother, and there is no added expense to the family for daycare costs. Of course, there are also disadvantages to this lifestyle. Some of the disadvantages include: the inability to spend an abundance of weekday time with our husbands, the sacrifice of having to work in a job other than what our specialized education implies (which could mean less self-satisfaction and the possibility of earning less money). We cannot have it all.

The concept of the institution of daycare was created to assist mothers who had suffered the tragic loss of a husband or who suddenly found themselves divorced. Having to earn an income in order to feed and clothe their families, these women were left with no other alternative but to place their children in daycares. Today, women of our society seem to view childcare as the first choice, while staying at home is viewed as living counter-culture—or only for the lucky. It is distressing to see that something which was once viewed as an unfortunate last resort has become known as the only ordinary, logical thing to do.

Sending our infants off to daycare does seem to be the norm these days, but the basic needs of babies and children still and always will remain the same. Simply because a society accepts a certain behavior as normal does not mean that this behavior is God’s will or design for us.

The changing priorities of a culture does not cause children to magically evolve into sub-human beings who miraculously no longer need mothers to rear them! Children not only need to be raised by their mothers, but they also want to be raised by their mothers. Ask any child you know! Ask your own children with whom they would rather spend their days. Hmmmmmmmmmmm...this is a hard one! Whom do you think they will choose? If you were a child, would you prefer to spend each day with a devoted mother who raises her own child solely because of her overwhelming love for him or her—or with a caregiver who only spends time with the child because she is paid to do it?

Self-Discovery:

Don’t leave this sub-chapter plagued with guilt and shame; those things are straight from the pit of H-E-double hockey sticks! God offers conviction from the Holy Spirit as a motivator to get our lives in line with His will for us. There is nothing that can be done to erase the things we’ve already done; only the power through Christ can transform and change the lives of His followers. God is a big enough God to cover your mistakes of the past—don’t worry about the dead issues of yesterday—but begin afresh today!