Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeWaters
Clear as mud.
You are fine with BYU officially and overtly encouraging women to stay at home with children, yet you find the discouragement of "goals" to be reprehensible.
Sounds like someone is confused inside.
I'm betting AA no one has questioned your decision to go to law school, in terms of how it is you will have a family.
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You've not understood my distinction. I believe there is a difference between encouraging somebody to do something and discouraging them from doing anything else. It's the difference between, say, supporting your child's decision to go on a mission and threatening to cut them off if they don't.
My decision to go to law school makes for an insufficient example, but you brought it up, so I'll use it. For most of my college career, I very seriously considered going into academia. When I talked with friends and family about the decision, many if not most expressed concern over whether going into teaching would be the best decision in terms of raising a family, but every last one of them encouraged me to do what I thought was right. My grandfather, for example, is as big a proponent of this model of the family as anybody out there, and was only slightly less vocal in expressing his concern over whether this was right than in expressing his support of whatever I chose to do. One of the reasons I eventually decided to go into law (though, I note, not by any means the only one) is that I believe it will make for a better family life than academia. That was my choice alone; nobody ever tried to keep me from going into teaching.
In fact, I think my grandfather, a retired doctor, is more disappointed by me going into law than he would have been had I gone into teaching. He wanted me to be a doctor. Said as much on a number of occasions. But that's all parenthetical.
So yes, I've made career and educational decisions based on how I thought it would affect raising a family. But as I said, I think this is a big fat orange, and we're talking about apples at the present.