No, we've begun to socialize them to equally prioritize other things and not sacrifice their whole lives on the alter or motherhood because, truthfully, we've never valued mothers as a society. We've had the veneer of valuing mothers, but that's not the real thing. It's a lie.
And if our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers went through their lives not feeling valued by society, then it's not been anywhere near a convincing veneer.
A society invests in what it values.
We invest in war.
Not mothers. We've never invested in mothers. We just expect motherhood of women to prop up society.
We're not celebrating childlessness, were challenging the pathetic old maid narrative for not having them. We're celebrating the choice. We're also recognizing the importance of aunties for fucking once. One does not have to have children of one's own and build one's own nuclear family unit in order to center family. We also have a family of birth. And some aunties, like Oprah Winfrey and Dolly Parton become aunties to their whole communities. That's not nothing. Lot of kids in Severe County TN wouldn't have gotten to go to college or graduate high school if it weren't for Dolly Parton. Lot of girls wouldn't have gotten to go to school if it hadn't been for Oprah Winfrey. Lot of kids wouldn't have had books to read if it weren't for both of them.
They deserve to be honored and recognized as nurturers just like any mother, not shamed, ridiculed, and pitied because they have no children of their own. They're not old maids. They're wonderful, VALUABLE women. Aunties are community pillars. It's past time we recognized that and that the nuclear family is a failure without strong unions and strong democracy. We don't have that any more and so family fynamics must change or more and more familes will falter.
We're advising women to have a financial backup plan if they choose to be a stay at home parent, that's not an exit plan. The exit plan is completely different, in it's purpose, in what it is, and where and how it's built. You're conflating the two, they are not the same thing at all.
An exit plan is for if you marry a guy who says and does all the right things but then after you get married, you find out you fell in love with a mask and this guy turns abusive. Or maybe you've been married for years and then he takes up drinking or drugs or has a brain injury or something and becomes abusive. It is not unheard of to be married to someone for years and then their personality changes. Could be anything. It's important to note that an exit plan may be a divorce plan, but it doesn't have to be. The main goal is to have resources in place to get you and the kids out of harm's way immediately if things go sideways. It need not be permanent.
A financial backup plan is because you may find yourself alone and unsupported with kids to take care of after being out of the work force for years and no way to earn an income. That might be because he left you with 4 kids under the age of 5 to run off with his secretary or it might because he died, was injured, lost his job, got drafted, etc. Again, it need not be permanent or include divorce. It's about being able to take care of your family if your spousal financial support falls apart. For whatever reason.
And even with these shifts, women are still more socialized to prioritize family than men are. We're raised thinking about it from the time we are very little girls. Boys aren't. And you can tell because girls and young women don't get out of thinking about it; even if those thoughts are that they don't want to have children, they don't get out of thinking about it. Boys and young men, by and large, still act and speak as though fatherhood is something that just happened to them or was foisted upon them unfairly with no input from them. They speak as though they had absolutely nothing to do with it. Young men do not guard their reproductive potential, they take no responsibility to learn about reproduction and sex (you'd be surprised by how many young men think females pee out of their vagina and how many are unaware that women can orgasm). They have no idea how to care for an infant and many men who have children have no idea what is being spent to care for them. They know next to nothing about their children's lives.
Clearly, they are not being socialized to prioritize families.
What they are being socialized for is to earn societal value by being a Provider & Protector™ but those words are meaningless if you're clueless on how and what your children need in order to be provided for and protected. Men are being socialized to value and prioritize empty words over real people, their actual family.
