Do you really think that a childcare provider is a better option than their mother. – If it means our family has a roof over our heads and food on the table, sure. Also access to healthcare, quality education, and a safe environment, which all require a dual-income household if you’re living in a developing country.

… except… they are earning paycheques, they’re just doing it by telling other women not to.

I’m grateful that Nester and others like her don’t share that inferiority complex. It doesn’t make you unequal to your husband to not earn a paycheque if you are doing the very important work of raising up little humans. Do you really think that a childcare provider is a better option than their mother.

And that doesn’t necessarily mean that both parents have to work outside the home. In a true partnership, both roles are equally important. I think, if Laura is honest with herself, there may be a tiny bit of resentment toward moms who are afforded the luxury of raising their own children versus having a daycare do it. I’ve met many women who’ve said they wish they could have been home with there kids in those early formative years. I’ve NEVER met a mom who said she wished she’d worked more.

I definitely agree with you on that–my reaction was to the implication that she was wrong to envy the woman for the husband having stability, but I can see how the tone would be an issue. As Cloud pointed out above, it’s really annoying when women make money off of saying women shouldn’t make money, or when people judge your fitness for parenting based on whether or not you work.

Um, N&M, . . . no, you didn’t get it straight at all. But that’s probably my fault because I didn’t want to share too many specific details, and it’s not worth going into any further. With Sandberg, I was referring to a column by Maureen Dowd: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/dowd-pompom-girl-for-feminism.html?_r=0

I don’t always agree with Dowd, either, but I thought she had a point with this column. Not every story has a positive ending, and I don’t think there’s much to be gained by tacking on a false one, or by excluding people who don’t have one.

It’s funny, I was getting almost the opposite conclusion from these comments: I thought that most people seemed tired of and angry about “negativity” and wanted everyone to shut up who wasn’t brilliant or successful. Which probably means the comments are actually pretty well balanced, in the end. I think the blog is.

It may be that if successful people have at least a few flaws, and/or have struggled, it makes them easier to learn from. The most successful practitioners of a craft aren’t always the best teachers. Annie Murphy Paul had a blog that I can’t find right now suggesting that the best teachers and mentors are often solid “second tier” performers in a field rather than the most successful big names. Their success is more likely to be the result of hard work and creative problem solving than of luck or some kind of talent that can’t be replicated.

I think “struggles” and “hardships” are very different than “suffering” – the former imply a situation that is temporary, that someone has the ability to change, and can be encouraging and insightful to read about. The latter makes me think of people in internment camps or diagnosed with a debilitating illness, which isn’t quite the same genre that I think most people are referring to in this discussion, from what I can tell.