How much education does a SAHM need?
 

SAHM = stay at home Mom.

I think being a SAHM is a noble thing. I don't look down at any woman that chooses this.

But a SAHM can mean different things to different people. If you have 2 kids, 2 years apart, and you go back to work when the youngest is 5, then you have invested 7 years.

On the other hand, SAHM might mean to other women "I will never work, ever."

If you are sure you are going to be one of the latter kind of SAHMs, do you need a professional or graduate degree?

There is a young woman in my ward who was considering going to a specialized engineering university. But in her recent talk, she said she wants to be a SAHM. Do those two things really fit together? Maybe, I don't know.

I certainly believe an educated mother is a more effective parent.

How well received would a talk from a YM be, who says she intends to be a working mother? I wonder.

I see no on took this bait. What does that last sentence mean, btw? I can't make sense of it.

I'm not convinced that more education makes a better parent. Good parenting involves a unique skill set that is probably not enhanced by most traditional education. Very smart, very educated people could be poor parents, and vice versa.

As to the question about what we teach our LDS YW, that's a quite separate. IMO, much of this question turns on ambition. I would define that as a desire to pursue a more worldly set of goals: professional goals, monetary goals, status goals, maybe service in a larger, more organized sense. I don't think ambition is necessarily bad (it can be, but that's another topic), and LDS to some extent expect YM to have it because we expect that their role will be to provide for families. That's harder to do when you are not pursuing goals with ambition. I imagine that natural ambition varies quite a bit from person to person anyway, but I bet we try to cultivate it among YM who don't seem to have much.

For YW, however, we sort of set them up to have goals: education and family. Worthy goals, yes. But we seem to seek either to gut their ambition or not to instill it. Yes, go ahead and get that electical engineering degree, but that's okay if you never use it and stay home with your kids--that's your best roll anyway. And maybe it is. But it puts some women in a tough position. Some actually have to work for various reasons, and I think some have ambition that can't be gutted.

Who would argue that we should seek to instill more ambition in our YW? It will come as no surprise that I would, I'm sure. I taught YW several years ago, and these were my main themes at that time. First, I wanted them to understand that it was time to make up their minds for themselves as to the gospel because they were about to be on their own. Second, I wanted them to understand that regardless of family-oriented goals, their main role in life was to be an agent for themselves, to make their own choices and to take care of themselves. To be self-reliant. To me, that requires some ambition because even if you are a SAHM, you have to know that you can provide for yourself.

seriously, why dignify his transparent (and rather pathetic) attempt at trolling with a response?

It's no secret that our society has lost sight of the inherent value of education. There is wealth and beauty that comes only from extending the depths and breadths of one's understanding - but so few of us can see that anymore. Mike's commentary is reflective of our increasingly shallow, vocationally-motivated mindset.

there's nothing trolling about this--we have an entire cadre of LDS girls with no intention of becoming educated, or if educated, only moderately so, and if "very" educated, then not using that education in a vocation.

This girl's mother is a lawyer who never practiced law (to my knowledge) while her husband delivered pizzas and newspapers to support the family (they have some unique circumstances, which would explain some of this, which I won't bother with).

If you send your daughter to BYU, expect her to get much negative reinforcement if she is not on the SAHM-track.

More--

In my work, obviously, many of my colleagues are highly educated professional women. Some are my equals. Some are my superiors, etc. Just like you would expect.

But then contrast this with my ward--many professional men. Zero professional women (that I am aware of). Zero. Even the professional men are not married to professional women.

Obviously, it is the choice of women in this cultural group (Mormons) not to pursue professional careers (for the most part).

This is what I worry about: do we, as a church, lose the women who choose to become professionals? i.e. are they now inactive, gone? And if so, is that a good thing? Is their a way to keep them?

My brother-in-law works in DC. He is single. He says he is not attracted to most of the LDS women there. Why? Basically because they are aggressive professionals.

If LDS men won't marry LDS professional women, then what is to become of these women, in terms of staying in the church?

If you do a survey of the professionals here, you will likely see they are married to non-professionals (including myself). This isn't any kind of value judgment against them--I don't wish my wife was a professional. But I have to ask myself, did I avoid such women?

How many women marry in college and IMMEDIATELY give up their aspirations so their husband can finsih college faster or some-such?

BG, I think your take on this is different from what he's getting at. What you mention here: the value of education for its own sake is actually embraced in the LDS culture, at least ostensibly. In fact, it's the perfect plan for many a future SAHM who enters BYU. Or the SAHM who goes back for the master's degree in something, once the kids are in school, but still with no real career plans.

Whether he's trolling or not, I still think its an interesting topic. Many would shy away either because they don't see what he describes or because they don't see it as a problem. Sadly.

I generally ignore non-LDS lecturing me on how I am wrong about LDS culture.

I may be wrong, but at least I have a basis to be right.

Who doesn't want a SAHM back at the home? I wish I had one.

My ward does have a few professional women, some single and some married. More fit into the category of women who either didn't even finish school (stopped to leave to the husband's professional school) or who didn't really work.

I took some time a couple of years back to try to help a woman who was a new BYU law grad. She had finished her degree and elected to take the next 9 months off to go on her husband's rotation (he's military med school). She never took a bar and didn't seem too worried about it. I told her how important it was to look for work NOW because the longer she waited, the harder it would be to get on the ladder. She never did get a job, and now she has a baby, and I wonder if she'll ever practice law. Not that she has to, but what's the point of going to law school if you don't want to use the degree. Strikes me as a poor investment.

Which reminds me that I have several times been asked whether I went to law school "for fun" (as in, for education's sake, I suppose). Again, that's a very odd comment to me.

But you really can't openly pursue a career as a woman in the LDS church. You just can't. It doesn't fit the doctrinal message. It's not your role. No, it's not forbidden, but it's not the way it's "supposed" to be.

you seem to think that a SAHM doesn't need a law degree.

There are some kinds of technical training that would seem to be a waste if you never used it as a SAHM--like going to truck driving school. Or learning the ins and outs of the engineering of heating and cooling in skyscrapers.

There's a line somewhere--and I'm not sure where it is--where you have to wonder about the investment of time and money (and that's a two-sided thing--schools benefit when their alums do well, so the school is investing in the student, esp. when spots are limited like BYU law).

Are you open to a recent BYU grad lecturing you on how you're wrong about BYU culture? Because I don't see what you're seeing, and I still have the stench of Provo emanating from my cap and gown.