Brains fully engaged, every day

Paul Brewster writes for Olive Press Online that mothering is not a threat to civilization, but its preservation:

Rearing children and managing a household are first-order jobs. They require the best efforts parents can put forth. Yet [economist Sylvia Ann] Hewlett is alarmed that women who have children sometimes delay their re-entry into the “workforce” for two or more years. She was so concerned with this finding that in 2004 she formed the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force to “try to find solutions everyone could live with.” Everyone, that is, except the children.

So, according to the feminists, mothering is a brain-drain and a threat to civilization. They could not be more wrong. Stay-at-home moms are the hope of civilization and represent the finest and most noble use of human intellect known to humanity. My wife is a summa cum laude college graduate. And she uses her brain fully every day. I believe deeply that her contributions to society are every bit as vital as that of the most strategically positioned female executive. Her brain is not wasted by staying home. Instead, she has chosen to invest her life in our children and in their future.

The truth is that when we married more than 17 years ago, we did not envision her staying at home. But the further we progressed in rearing our family, the more we realized what my mom already knew: parenting and homemaking are not short-term propositions. They require the very best that parents have to offer of both time and energy, and they require it over very long periods of time—like a lifetime.

http://www.sebts.edu/olivepressonline/index.cfm?PgType=2&ArticleID=422