It is one of the reasons I spend so much time on Hacker News. Most men are less aggravating for me to deal with.

It is also part of why I do not self identify as a feminist.

My wife who is also a homemaker and stay-at home mom. She has heard remarks from family, acquaintances and even random parents playing with kids at the park how she was throwing her university degree down the drain and how somehow she doesn't "need to stay home" and can do whatever she wants. They don't seem to understand that what she wants to do currently is to raise kids.

Women who work outside the home get rude comments, women who stay at home get rude comments and you can't even avoid it by opting out of childbearing entirely, those women get rude comments too.

I fail to understand what that has to do with feminism or much anything else.

BTW, staying at home is the more socially acceptable choice.[1]

[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-d...

In this day and age? Does that still happen? Asking because honestly that’s so far from my personal experience.

Which is to say, I have the highest respect for SAHM moms because it's a damned difficult job.

Any feminism that cannot honor, respect and support the importance of full time parenting is an ideology I want no part of. To my mind, the only good feminism is one that insists that full time parenting should be an equally legitimate choice for either parent, not just the mother.

I love this quote.

There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong in a child's life that can potentially lead to a need for enormous resources at state expense from medical to mental health to behavioral, which can go very differently if there is a sufficiently knowledgeable full time parent to handle it before it goes so very wrong.

You are in error. More education is not wasted on raising kids. Your opinion sounds incredibly ignorant to me.

What baffles me is the amount of people in the US, usually in parochial cultural settings, who lack significant formal education or pedagogical background and are nevertheless deemed fit to home-school their kids. How is this legally possible? Now can a high school drop-out single mom (absent some extraordinary characteristics) possibly provide a well-rounded and adequate curriculum in a variety of general education subjects, ranging from math to literature, to world history, to biology?

If anything, the problem is that there aren’t nearly enough PhDs teaching kids.

Freedom.

Absent abuse, in the US we allow a very large degree of freedom in ways people are allowed to raise their children, no matter how unconventional and ill advised.

You're legally allowed to mess your kids up in many ways, such as by not teaching them life skills, encouraging teen marriage and pregnancy, teaching them bad manners, withholding critical information from them, giving them misinformation, disallowing them to be around unapproved peers, having tons of kids, raising them to be hateful (Westboro Baptist Church, KKK,...) etc, etc, etc.

BTW, I actually know of a high school dropout single mom who homeschools her kids. Of course, since she's unemployed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a stay at home mom so shes entirely dependant on her own mom for every single thing, there's no father in the picture. She's a 35 year old child. Her kids are going to be so screwed up and entirely ill prepared for adult life, but it's legal, her "homeschool" is registered with the state.

For better or worse in the US individual liberty is valued over almost everything else.

All this "freedom" has much to recommend it, one can hardly deny, but it has it limits.

If anything I think parents are best suited to teach their own children until high school given the parents have a reasonable IQ.

Doubtless, some parents who home-school their parents have an adequate foundation for this. However, some of the greatest proponents of home-schooling I've met most definitely do not, and it boggles my mind.

But that's part of the point, as I see it. Lots of modern institutions are a bit unnatural and require some contortion for humans to squeeze themselves into. Public school is valuable in teaching that, or at least it was to me and many other people I know, as we reflect upon it years later.

I am not comfortable with the suggestion here that a parent needs advanced education to successfully homeschool. There are support systems for homeschoolers. I was involved with that at one time.

If you homeschool gifted kids, even if you have a lot of formal education, you can find yourself really challenged. You can find yourself dealing with a child who knows more about a subject than you do, even though you have had college classes in the subject.

One way to handle that is to become a resource person for the child. Instead of instructing them, you participate on email lists and what not, learn what books and other materials have a good reputation and make sure the child has access to such materials. There is no reason a high school drop-out cannot take a similar approach.

A bigger problem in my mind is that when women go to college and have difficulty with a subject, they are often actively steered towards early childhood education. One outcome of this fact is that a high percentage of elementary school teachers are not only bad at math, they are math phobic. They pass this math phobia on to impressionable young children and may not be really qualified to teach math.

My oldest son likely has dyscalculia. By the time I pulled him out of school, he feared and loathed math. When he asked questions in school, his teachers often read him the explanation in the book. He read well above grade level. If the book explanation were going to help, he didn't need the teacher for that. It never helped him.

Fortunately, I had more college level math by the time I graduated high school than most people with non STEM bachelor's degrees have. I also have a background tutoring it and I can find novel ways to explain it. I was eventually able to get my son over his fear of math and give him a solid grounding in the subject.

When men struggle with subjects like math in college, they are not encouraged to give up and "go do something easier, like teach small kids." My ex is not good at math. I tutored him when he took college math classes. No one suggested he give up. They expected him to man up and do what it took to meet the standard to complete his goals.

This is very much a gendered difference in student outcomes and it has all kinds of negative consequences for not only both genders -- because men don't get support for making other choices if they genuinely can't do something -- but for the entire fabric of society.

One thought:

I am not comfortable with the suggestion here that a parent needs advanced education to successfully homeschool.

I did not mean to make that suggestion, either. I deliberately chose the language of my comment to leave open the possibility of pedagogical experience or aptitude without the corresponding formal education. Perhaps it is my mistake that this did not come across as emphatically as I had meant it.

However, I still harbour a great deal of scepticism about the capacity of many parents I've seen take up home-schooling, simply on the basis that they don't seem particularly knowledgeable, curious, or educated themselves — whether formally or informally.

There are no easy solutions for that situation. But I think it starts with having a high degree of respect for individuals and their right to choose, even under circumstances where it is challenging to feel real respect for them. Or, perhaps, especially at such times.

But despite what I'd like to believe is a generously well-rounded upbringing in a university family, I have serious doubts about my ability to home-school my son to anywhere near the same effect as an average public school—and that's bearing in mind the variation in quality among them. I wouldn't dare try.

Then there's the sheer effort and energy involved in juggling multiple subjects. My knowledge on certain subjects doubtless exceeds that of most public school teachers, but certainly not all the core subjects! And knowledge alone doesn't translate into effective teaching ability or experience with presenting information in effective and compelling ways to kids.

One parent went and surveyed what their child did all day in school. They concluded that most of the school day was spent changing classes, queing up, calling roll, etc. They estimated that only one to two hours a day was spent actually learning.

California laws allow for tutors as a valid education option. They specify 3 hours a day, not 8. One-on-one teaching is much more intense, relevant and information dense than a one-to-many teaching situation. Most teaching in school relies heavily on the kids reading the material provided. A homeschool parent can similarly provide good materials.

Learning comes more naturally than teaching. ;)

Anyway, it isn't intended to try to convince you to homeschool. It is only intended to say that lots of parents have felt the same way and then found it was more do-able than they expected.

I tried to enroll my son in college when he was 13 to get him out of my hair. His knowledge of some subjects has long been over my head. That did not work out and I had to woman up and figure out how to keep being a resource for him. So I am no stranger to feeling like "This is something I am not qualified for." But a parent with a sincere interest in supporting their child's education can be an excellent resource, even when they can offer no further instruction.

Seriously?

Your experience of self proclaimed feminists and full time motherhood is very different to mine, and it's not just a generation gap because my mother was a full time parent and a feminist (still feminist, but spends less time parenting these days) and my sister is both as well.

I am also pretty skeptical of the interpersonal understanding and self awareness of women who explain that they just never get on with other women because of the issues those other women have, and men are just so much nicer - it's usually as much about their issues as anyone else's.

Plus it’s always in continuous change. Example: currently in the U.K. there’s a hot debate between (some) feminists and trans women [1] but who knows in the future, it would be 100% feminist to accept all self-identifying females as valid females.

Slightly off topic: Feminisim is a bit of a messy subject (imo), I wonder if one can have a clearer picture if it’s expressed in logical terms :o

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/26/transgender-...

Feminism is all about empowering women to make choices that are right for them, especially with regards to reproduction and childrearing.

If your wife wasn't a stay at home mom she'd get rude comments about working outside the home - it's called the "Mommy Wars"- ever single childrearing choice gets criticized by someone.

I get a massive amount of criticism and nasty comments, from everyone including strangers, for my reproductive choices as well, even though they are firmly "progressive" - I'm a married woman whose voluntarily opted out of childbearing. I also get nasty comments about not taking my husband's name.

It's become fashionable, in the Trump era, to use feminism and liberalism for some sort of scapegoat, or reason for bad things, no matter how absurd. I was at a BBQ and one kid hit another kid and, very seriously, the mom blamed feminism. Yep, feminism caused a minor dispute between siblings.

I'm hoping that we'll be able to work towards a world have a world where stay-at home dads, stay-at home mums, surrogate pregnancies, same-sex parents, dual parental leave, etc, are all valid choices for bringing up children.