upset at nanny -- vent

Michelle S. Spina wrote:

You might feel that way, in theory, but if you've never been in any
other situation than SAHM, you don't understand what happens in
reality when you have a nanny or other childcare arrangements. What
you say here is just plain silly. Might be what you *feel* in theory,
but that doesn't at all make it true.

*shrug* Well, I've never been a working mother, but I was always the *child*
of a working mother. I'm coming from the perspective of being the child who
spent significant amounts of time at daycares, with babysitters, etc., often
unhappy, often isolated.

Maybe I'm just plain silly - after all, I only *lived* it as a child - but I
don't think of what my parents did as parenting. It didn't feel that way.
And that's reason number one why I don't work, and won't do so until Gabe's
school-age. I'm not saying that all children of WOH moms feel the way I did
(I suspect that, on the contrary, there are a lot of mothers who manage to
really be *involved* in their kids' lives), but that's how I felt growing up
and that's why I'm a SAHM.

--
tristyn
www.tristyn.net
"i have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
i do not think that they will sing to me."

"Dawn Lawson" wrote in message
newsnvWb.474200$X%5.129714@pd7tw2no...


PattyMomVA wrote:
"Dawn Lawson" wrote in message
news:FQrWb.462164$JQ1.333434@pd7tw1no... AND I snipped!

She was ASKED what NAmericans do that she finds unusual
and shocking.


Yes, that was me who asked. I was curious. It's been an interesting
thread
to read. Thanks, Tine, for answering honestly.

Seconded. I think Tine does extremely well in a second language
(English) to make her points clearly and honestly, and she's
refreshingly straight-forward.

:-)

Dawn

blush

Tine, Denmark

"Dawn Lawson" wrote in message
news:EQvWb.463442$JQ1.205616@pd7tw1no...


Tine Andersen wrote:

"Nina" skrev i en meddelelse
...



Where was i insensitive? I was disucssing in depth with her her
perceptions
and asking her further questions to get a better idea of her
perspective.
I cant see how thats insensitive.
Dialogue.


It's OK with me - I love these exchanges of ideas and ways of living.
And I
accept that not everyone recognize my descriptions as mere descriptions
and
not statements of a better way of living.

Again, Tine, you've been more clear in your second (?) language then I
have in my first.....your last sentence is EXACTLY what I was trying to
say. ;-)

Dawn

more blush

Tine, Denmark

Michelle S. Spina wrote:

Nina wrote:

"Michelle Spina" wrote in message
m...
"iphigenia" wrote in message
...


So if you want to raise your children yourself, are you looked
down on?

Heck, SAHM's with that opinion are looked down on here by many, as
well. ;-)

Sorry, pet-peeve of mine. Both DH and I are raising our children.
Our
employment status has no bearing on this fact. I don't *think* you
meant it in the tone that I read it, but I still couldn't just let
it
go...

My personal belief is that children are raised by their primary
caregivers
so if my kid is at daycare 10 hours/day and with me maybe 3 waking
hours/day
I would feel as if someone else were raising my child, based on MY
definition of
"raise".

You might feel that way, in theory, but if you've never been in any
other situation than SAHM, you don't understand what happens in reality
when you have a nanny or other childcare arrangements. What you say here
is just plain silly. Might be what you *feel* in theory, but that
doesn't at all make it true.

m.



Too true. I'm currently a SAHM - decided to stay at home after DS was
born and I didn't have a job. But I worked full-time when DD was an
infant. Both times, I and DH were and are the parents. No one else
"raised" our children, although we did have support from our daycare
provider with DD.

I'm finding that I always have a lot of admiration for the *other* side.
I mean when I worked, I thought SAHMs were incredible - lots of energy
and organization. But now that I'm a SAHM, I think working moms have it
rough and *they* are something akin to superwomen.

At times, I wish I am working - to be honest, it's not as draining (I
get coffee breaks). OTOH, the house is slightly cleaner, I get to play
a lot with my son, and we find the household is doing better with me
staying at home. About the only one who is kind of disgruntled is DD -
she wants to be in after-school care.

I hear about how working moms "sneer" at SAHMs, but I haven't met one
yet.

Jeanne

"Dawn Lawson" wrote in message
news:X9EWb.477660$X%5.454466@pd7tw2no...

Nevermind wrote:

Dawn Lawson wrote in message
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Tine Andersen wrote:

"PattyMomVA" skrev i en meddelelse
...

This is the same reason I cringe when I hear someone refer to "the
blond."
(And, I can't get DH to stop doing it.)

But 'blonde' is a noun, isn't it?

Yes, or an adjective.
The blonde woman/the blond man (adj)
or she was blonde (noun)

I'm sure I'll be only one of dozens to point this out, but in your
last example, the word "blonde" is still an adjective, describing the
(pro)noun "she". Only if you say (for example) "She is a blonde" do
you make "blonde" a noun.

yes, sorry, typo. And apparently the OP cringes because it focuses on
the person's coloration. Mind you, if you are trying to point someone
out, that can be a distinguishing factor of some use, imo. (ie, the
blond standing by the tree as opposed to the brunette beside him, both
wearing similar clothing, etc)

I find it interesting how many people don't realise that blond/blonde
refers to masculine/feminine. IOW, it's incorrect to say the blonde man.

Yes, blond/blonde can be used as an adjective or a noun, according to my
dictionary, as can black and white. I agree they can be useful as a noun
when pointing someone out. What bothers me a bit is when they are used in a
context in which the person's hair or skin color has no reasonable
importance to the discussion. For example, "This blonde I met at work also
comes from Colorado." Can anyone else understand why this bugs me?

-Patty, mom to Corinne (5.75y) and Nathan (3.5y)
and stepmom to Victoria (13.5y)

"Katie Jaques" wrote in message
m...
"Circe" wrote in message
news:sZsWb.39183$QJ3.10241@fed1read04...
Clisby wrote:
Circe wrote:
Nina wrote:
"Tine Andersen" wrote in message
k...

"Nina" skrev i en meddelelse
...

It's not 'negro' in Danish - it's 'neger'. But it's the same
word.

The english translation of "neger' would be "black" not "negro"
as "negro" is basically
a euphemism for black. So calling black people "neger" is the
equivalent of calling them "black" here,
not "negro". Neger probably sounds like ******, which is a Bad
Word.

You are right - I checked my vocabulary - it's 'black'. Was negro
a bad word 35 years ago?

No, negro was then standard usage. It changes.

Er, 35 years ago, I was 4 years old. I'm reasonably sure that
Negro was in disfavor by then. I believe "colored" was actually
the favored term by that time.

I think you have it backward - at least, for where I grew up, in
S.C. and Mississippi. "Colored" had been around for a long time -
that's the term my parents (now in their 70s) had used all their
lives.
The NAACP is almost 100 years old, after all. I'm pretty sure "Negro"
was more a '40s and '50s successor to "colored" - when I was growing
up, the word "Negro" came with the implication the person saying it
wasn't Southern.

That's interesting. I'd have guessed that in California (where I grew
up),
the term in favor by the late '60s or early '70s would have been neither
colored nor Negro, but black. Certainly, when I was 8 (1972 or
thereabouts),
I had a neighbor friend who was black and we said she was "black", not
Negro, not colored. (Of course, there were some kids in the neighborhood
who
called me a deregatory term I'll leave to your imagination as well.)

I was thinking, however, that colored was considered a less offensive
term
than Negro first, since blacks themselves used the term (as in the
NAACP).
I'll admit, my regionalism may be showing!

That said, Negro was *always* a word with negative implications
because it was coined and used at a time when black people were
considered so inferior in the US that it was okay to enslave them.
For obvious reasons, most people in the US now want to dissociate
themselves from that term and all its baggage.

I'm not sure I'd say "Negro" was coined - it just means black.

I disagree for the simple reason that Negro is *never* used to define
the
color of objects in English. It just isn't. The *only* use of the word
is to
describe people. That makes it a word with implications that the word
"white"--and by extension "black"--don't have.

Certainly, in slave-holding times, the term for blacks was Negro (or a
much
ruder variation thereof). IMO, that means it was, by definition, not a
value-neutral word.

And
I disagree that it always had negative connotations - at least not
in the way I think you mean. When I was a child, my parents would
consider a person calling himself/herself a "Negro" to be an outsider,
almost a radical - like someone leading a voting rights drive, for
example.
To them, it was a negative term - I doubt that it was to the people
who
used it to refer to themselves. (I'm sure Malcolm X considered it a
negative term, but that's another story.)

That's very interesting. I really had no idea. Perhaps this was a bit
like
the gay movement appropriating the word "queer", however?

See, Tine, we've got cultural differences even *within* the US!



I was a college student in the late 1950's, and a sociology major.
The term "Negro" was, at that time, the polite, scholarly term,
intended to be value-neutral. For example, my "Racial and Cultural
Minorities" sociology text, written by two Oberlin professors and
published in 1953, uses the term Negro. Gunnar Myrdal's landmark
study of American racism, "An American Dilemma," published in 1944,
also used the word Negro. "Colored," however, was considered a polite
term as well, as in NAACP, and was perhaps in more common
conversational usage in Missouri, where I grew up, and in Ohio, where
I went to college. "Negro" was more highfalutin; "colored" was more
the common vernacular; but neither was intended to be derogatory, at
least not in the same way that other terms were used.

I worked with African-American women in the steno pool of the social
service agency where my mother was employed as a medical social worker
in the mid-1950's. My co-workers at that time referred to themselves
and their families as colored, at least in polite conversation in a
racially mixed group. However, I do remember that by the late 1950's
there was some discomfort with either "colored" or "Negro" among white
liberals, if not among African-Americans themselves. I remember
hearing a story about how a colleague of my mother's, describing an
African-American man whom she wanted another colleague to recognize
and meet at some function, described him as "dark-skinned." Alas, the
intended meeting failed to take place because the second colleague was
thinking in terms of maybe an Italian!

In the 1960's the civil rights movement and the "Black Power"
advocates changed the linguistic landscape, and "black" became the
preferred, polite term. I think that had pretty much taken place by
1964, when Barbara was born, and it certainly was true by 1970. Of
course, in recent years, "black" has been replaced in polite usage by
the cumbersome "African-American."

The Yahoo! online dictionary has the following Usage Note:

"The Oxford English Dictionary contains evidence of the use of black with
reference to African peoples as early as 1400, and certainly the word has
been in wide use in racial and ethnic contexts ever since. However, it was
not until the late 1960s that black (or Black) gained its present status as
a self-chosen ethnonym with strong connotations of racial pride, replacing
the then-current Negro among Blacks and non-Blacks alike with remarkable
speed. Equally significant is the degree to which Negro became discredited
in the process, reflecting the profound changes taking place in the Black
community during the tumultuous years of the civil rights and Black Power
movements. The recent success of African American offers an interesting
contrast in this regard. Though by no means a modern coinage, African
American achieved sudden prominence at the end of the 1980s when several
Black leaders, including Jesse Jackson, championed it as an alternative
ethnonym for Americans of African descent. The appeal of this term is
obvious, alluding as it does not to skin color but to an ethnicity
constructed of geography, history, and culture, and it won rapid acceptance
in the media alongside similar forms such as Asian American, Hispanic
American, and Italian American. But unlike what happened a generation
earlier, African American has shown little sign of displacing or
discrediting black, which remains both popular and positive. The difference
may well lie in the fact that the campaign for African American came at a
time of relative social and political stability, when Americans in general
and Black Americans in particular were less caught up in issues involving
radical change than they were in the 1960s. .Black is sometimes capitalized
in its racial sense, especially in the African-American press, though the
lowercase form is still widely used by authors of all races. The
capitalization of Black does raise ancillary problems for the treatment of
the term white. Orthographic evenhandedness would seem to require the use of
uppercase White, but this form might be taken to imply that whites
constitute a single ethnic group, an issue that is certainly debatable.
Uppercase White is also sometimes associated with the writings of white
supremacist groups, a sufficient reason of itself for many to dismiss it. On
the other hand, the use of lowercase white in the same context as uppercase
Black will obviously raise questions as to how and why the writer has
distinguished between the two groups. There is no entirely happy solution to
this problem. In all likelihood, uncertainty as to the mode of styling of
white has dissuaded many publications from adopting the capitalized form
Black."


It's not clear-cut, is it?



-Patty, mom to Corinne (5.75y) and Nathan (3.5y)

and stepmom to Victoria (13.5y)

"PattyMomVA" wrote

.. Orthographic evenhandedness would seem to require the use of
uppercase White, but this form might be taken to imply that whites
constitute a single ethnic group, an issue that is certainly
debatable.

And then lets remember, Black doesnt encompass a single ethnic group
either
as Black can often mean Puerto Rican, Cuban, Brazilian if it is used
to refer to
race and not ethnicity.

PattyMomVA wrote:



Yes, blond/blonde can be used as an adjective or a noun, according to my
dictionary, as can black and white. I agree they can be useful as a noun
when pointing someone out. What bothers me a bit is when they are used in a
context in which the person's hair or skin color has no reasonable
importance to the discussion. For example, "This blonde I met at work also
comes from Colorado." Can anyone else understand why this bugs me?

*g* you're blonde?
She's actually from Oregon?

:-)))

Dawn, just kidding.

"Michelle S. Spina" wrote in message
...
Nina wrote:

"Michelle Spina" wrote in message
m...
"iphigenia" wrote in message
...


So if you want to raise your children yourself, are you looked
down on?

Heck, SAHM's with that opinion are looked down on here by many,
as
well. ;-)

Sorry, pet-peeve of mine. Both DH and I are raising our
children.
Our
employment status has no bearing on this fact. I don't *think*
you
meant it in the tone that I read it, but I still couldn't just
let
it
go...

My personal belief is that children are raised by their primary
caregivers
so if my kid is at daycare 10 hours/day and with me maybe 3 waking
hours/day
I would feel as if someone else were raising my child, based on MY
definition of
"raise".

You might feel that way, in theory, but if you've never been in any
other situation than SAHM, you don't understand what happens in
reality
when you have a nanny or other childcare arrangements. What you say
here
is just plain silly. Might be what you *feel* in theory, but that
doesn't at all make it true.

m.
I havent always been an SAHM. I would hesitate to call anothers
opinion
silly, because Im sure I can find ways to attempt to descredit your
view and call it
"silly". I did say MY definition, allowing that others have their own
definitions.

As someone said, they are raising their kids because the nany or
whomever does it
according to their beliefs, wishes, values. To me, thats like saying
that I cooked the food
because my cook did it with my recipe using food I puirchased. In MY
view, thats not the same thing.
For me, hands on time with the kids is a crucial part of it.
If other people dont feel the same, I have no problem with it, I dont
judge them, I dont call their
views silly because they arent the same as mine.

Dawn Lawson wrote in message news:WkEWb.466772$JQ1.155936@pd7tw1no...

Okay, I'll buy that. Certainly I would say that those qualities seem to
be at least some of the difference between me and other people who find
what I manage to get done rather amazing. Frankly, I have to wonder
what they would think if they saw me in "full production" (I'm not used
to city life, and find it rather less of a challenge than I prefer)

But still, these families are basically one community, and I wonder how
they manage to so consistantly show the traits. Perhaps it has to do
with how they *value* the work ethic and therefore how they keep going
better through the mud-bog times. I get a general sense that the
average member of the "opposite" group I described tends to value a lot
more disconnected time (TV, etc) and a greater willingness to "leave
that til later" than what I see in the first group.

Is there also any kind of difference between whether the
getting-things-done group and the other group about whether
time spent with kids should be spent on 'kid' activities or
spent doing work together and making it fun?

I have to confess, I'm one of the group that has a single
child and a job and has trouble keeping the house clean and
home-cooked meals on the table, which just seems ridiculous.
I re-read the _Little House on the Prairie_ books when my
son was an infant, and it was blindingly clear to me that
Ma Ingalls was *definitely* not doing the kind of child-
raising I was, not and making all the clothes from scratch
and washing them by hand and cooking all the food from raw
components, many of which she grew, and milking the cow and
so on. I don't know if it's a greater willingness to 'ignore'
the kids in a benign way, or a greater ability to involve
them in adult household activities, or maybe those activities
are intrinsically more involving if they're obviously
part of the pattern of life rather than just 'tasks', or
what.

Dawn, if you ever figure it out, please post it. I would
love to know!

Beth