Young men need to understand the value of this role as well. They need to be shown that a homemaker -- male or female -- provides an essential contribution to society. They, too, need to be given the option to become the primary caretaker. We need to ensure that we lift up the value and recognition of this role to the point where it is just as viable an ambition as any other career prospect.
We need to stop acting as though when we provide women with these traditional skills, we are taking away their power. Teaching women to care for children and a home empowers them. It prepares them for a path that may lie ahead. What really takes away their power, is telling them that doing so is worthless. Feminism, it's time to catch up. Our women deserve better. Let's tell them they can be anything they want -- including a Mum, and let's start telling them just how important that is.
We are functioning in a society that pretends women don't grow up to become mothers. We are so driven by the focus that women can do the same and be the same as men, that we completely fail to provide them with education or understanding of what may be ahead for them, as future homemakers and those who raise children. How can we ensure equality for all women, when we place so little value on the role of the mother?
The men of our society, when not performing the role of stay-at-home parent themselves (as so often is the case) need to be taught to see the worth of the parent who stays home. There needs to be a change within our society in how we speak to and about homemakers. If our only marker of success is what you do in the workplace, how can we ever achieve that degree of equality?
In the fight to ensure equality, as we preach to girls that they can -- and should -- do anything a boy can do, we are failing to prepare women for one of the greatest challenges so many of them will face; motherhood. We are teaching our young people that there is no value in motherhood and that homemaking is an outdated, misogynistic concept. We do this through the promotion of professional progression as a marker of success, while completely devaluing the contribution of parents in the home.
We need to view and offer this as just as an important career option as any other; because for many women, the ones who, for whatever reason, do not return to the workforce and instead stay home to raise their children, this does become their career.