Brainwash be gone. A podcast for women who've left a high control, high demand religion. In every episode, we deconstruct one specific rule you were taught so you can let go of the harmful conditioning and live an amazing life on your own terms. Today we'll be talking about.

All women should be stay-at-home mothers.

For me, growing up, this rule was so ingrained that it literally never even occurred to me that in my lifetime I could possibly be anything other than a stay-at-home mom. But life had other plans in store for me. That's not to say that being a stay-at-home mom is a bad choice, but the key is understanding that we have a choice about our lives and there are pros and cons to staying home with kids or working outside the home, or any combination of choices that you make about your work and family life.

It is not such a black and white option. Really. This episode covers some of these details of our options and takes a closer look at why high control religions actually push stay at home motherhood.

In many high demand religions, the idea that women should stay home is framed as divinely ordained. Leaders will often say that God designed women specifically for nurturing, homemaking, child raising, while the men were designed to provide and lead.

There can be a lot of pressure to stay with your kids because this option is presented as the only loving choice that a woman can make for her kids. Plus you wouldn't want them to be out there in the world. bebecause who knows what they might learn. My goodness.

And of course, motherhood. Presented as the ultimate spiritual calling. So for many women, this becomes the only acceptable path to meaning or to spirituality.

Growing up in a high demand religion, my own mom stayed home with us and so did nearly all of the moms I was in contact with and I totally bought the explanation that it's much, much better for kids to have their moms stay at home with them. Growing up at the time, I never would've dreamed that there could be any other reason other than the wellbeing of children involved in this part of our religions practices and teachings.

But as I grew up, got a job myself, and eventually left the religion, I started to realize that the issue is much more complicated than it appears on the surface. And there are actually several unstated motives that seem to be playing a big part in why there's such heavy promotion or even enforcement of stay at home motherhood in high control religions, specifically because if women stay home.

They're financially dependent on their working spouse, and that plays right into the traditional gendered power dynamics that form the basic social structure of these groups. The man makes the money, he decides what to do with it because he's the head of the household and the woman stays in a quasi childlike role where she's ignorant of adult activities and functioning like how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to manage your finances.

And how to make strategic decisions for the household.

She'll often follow a budget that her husband sets or defer to him on financial planning or receive a small personal allowance for herself. Literally, like she's one of the teenagers and the man is the only adult in the family, which is wild when you think about it.

The more childlike and naive women remain in adulthood, the easier they are to control and the harder it is for them to have the capability and resources to challenge authority, protect themselves from bad situations, and ultimately have the option to leave the religion if they choose. Staying home in an insular community also reduces access to information and ideas that could shake the foundation.

It keeps the women from having access to the information, ideas and the children as well, because heaven forbid they meet a non-member who's perfectly lovely as a person and yet practices a different religion, or is openly gay or just enjoying life like they're not supposed to be able to do according to church leadership, because you know.

As an outsider, they're supposed to be suffering in the world and evil.

But when we have those outside experiences, it shakes a lot of those foundational teachings. Realistically, having members who are good at critical thinking and knowledgeable about the world and who love and care for themselves and will advocate for themselves and their families is anathema to what high control groups need their members to be in order to propagate their control, both over current members and the next generation.

It's kind of funny to me being on the other side, seeing how could they claim to have ultimate truth and yet be so incredibly threatened by any challenge or any information that contradicts their ideas.

Church authority seems so all powerful to someone who's on the inside. As it once did to me, but once you're through that, it's just really perplexing why they need such a high degree of control of everything just to keep things from crumbling and you see what a weak institution this actually is, my goodness.

It can't withstand even a question, even someone asking for an explanation, someone having contact with someone outside of this group. And unfortunately I've come to the conclusion that keeping moms and kids at home and inside the group is not actually done for the good of the children as claimed. It's just a blatant self-preservation move on part of the group, which is so disappointing to me as a mother who loves her children and the other children in the community.

So many people are motivated truly by love of the children when they try to follow these teachings. And to see that that's not the basis of this teaching or is in large part, not the basis of this teaching is really disappointing. So why do I say that? That's a pretty big claim on my part to say it's not based on the wellbeing of the children.

But here's why I've concluded that if these groups cared about the wellbeing of children, there would be some kind of discussion about. Any of the other factors that could impact children in a specific family scenario? I never heard a single discussion weighing the factors or talking about how, in a particular family or for an individual decision maker what might be best for this particular mom and this particular dad and this particular child, because of course the family circumstances of each family would impact.

What was ultimately best for the children? What if the family was struggling financially and the mother working could alleviate that and better cover the family's needs? Or what about considering the possible benefits to the children of the mother? Being able to use her personal gifts for the good of the world and enjoying her work, doing something meaningful that she wants to do.

Not in place of parenting, but in addition to parenting as the men in the group do. Or what about the potential benefits to children of having more social contact with other children at preschool or at daycare, rather than just staying in their home with their siblings all the time? Or what about a discussion about the benefits to children of having contact with other reliable adult role models in their lives, especially adults who feel like it's their calling to work in early childhood education, or who've studied that specifically in college?

It seems like there could definitely be benefits to that, but no one. Considers any of that. It's just a hard line rule somehow. When I was growing up, everything was about talking about the horror, the risk of taking your child to daycare and how life-threatening that could be. But then there's never a discussion about improving the supposedly life-threatening conditions of daycares.

It just, it's completely inconsistent with a group that actually has an extreme interest in the wellbeing of children, because if they did. Some of these things would've come up in discussion or be considered in certain circumstances, so it's not hard to see where the real interest lies, which is unfortunately preservation of control and continuing of the religion at all costs.

The rule also leans pretty heavily on some common logical fallacies. There's an appeal to tradition, which is the idea that, because it used to be common a couple hundred years ago, for families to look a certain way that that means they should look that way forever.

That's not necessarily true, you know, just because we've done something one way and it may have seemed to have worked, doesn't mean there's not another way or other ways that could also work. The naturalistic fallacy, which is the idea that biological differences between men and women automatically dictate which social or economic roles we should take, you know, without looking at any variability between people and what their skillset is.

Maybe some of the people wanna primarily care for the children. Other people might wanna be parents, but during the day, they might wanna be lawyers, and that makes sense for society. Also,

there's the false dilemma. Either you stay at home. A hundred percent of the time for your entire life or else you don't truly love your children. And there's no middle ground, no nuance, no room for reality or personal circumstances. And of course, appeal to authority, which is, you know, God said so our religious book said so.

The prophet said, so whatever your group relied on specifically.

But there's quite a bit of inconsistency in the fact that men are allowed to be both good fathers and be professionals, and women are told that they can only be one thing. It's also quite inconsistent that stay at home work or caregiving of children is praised when it's done for free, but it's completely undervalued when it's done by a paid.

Trained professional caregiver. That's a very inconsistent position that we see. And some religious groups even have stories where they celebrate strong, capable women in their history, women who maybe led nations or groups or prophesied or did certain influential work. And yet modern women in the same group are discouraged from pursuing anything except a domestic role.

And, and of course just the inconsistency of selective interpretation where this particular part of our cultural.

Background and practice of women staying with the children and not working outside of the home is something we have to uphold. But there are lots of other ancient cultural practices that have been abandoned without even an explanation. If you look in some of the religious texts and things like that, a lot of them have quite detailed descriptions of life that we completely ignore and no longer practice.

So here are some of my thoughts about whether or not to stay at home as a mother, and please, of course, make your own decisions according to your own conclusions about what's best for you and your family. But these are some things you might wanna consider. You know, life often doesn't go the way we planned and hoped.

That certainly has been my experience and that's been one of the most educational things. Yes, you could in theory get married young, stay in the home the whole time. Your spouse could work, earn enough to support the family. You raise the children. He could stay in good health and save up enough for your comfortable retirement for both of you, and then you could both die together in your sleep at age 95.

Which would be great if that's what you wanna do, but you can't rely on that being your only plan. You know, the plan only works if that's exactly what happens, because you could also experience things like his death or a divorce. Or abuse that you need to escape or he could be in an accident and become disabled and no longer work, and then you would need to work and take care of him potentially for decades.

Or what if the political or economic situation in your area shifts and it's no longer possible to afford to live on just one income and take care of your children? What if there's a natural disaster?

There are so many different things that can happen in a lifetime that were unanticipated it's. Pretty unreasonable just to not have a backup plan for any of the things that could happen and assume everything will go exactly as you expected in the best case scenario.

And it is so much easier to get an education and develop a skillset that earns money and learn about adulting and learn about finance over time when you are not super desperate like you would become if any of those. Things happen to you. You know, the time to prepare for those possible eventualities is ideally way before you actually need to use it.

So saying that you're going to wait until your destitute and need to make money today to start your first adventures earning money is just not a great plan and puts you at great risk and would be extremely stressful.

Women are not. A monolith. No single lifestyle fits everyone. And when women and families are free to choose what works best between the adults to take care of the home and to take care of any children they may have.

Whatever that looks like, if it's both working, you know, part-time jobs, taking some time off to do this, and then coming back into the workforce, whatever works best for you. I think families are healthier and more financially secure when they make a independent decision about what works best for them.

Research seems to consistently show that children thrive in a lot of different family structures, and it's not true what we've been taught about needing to have a stay-at-home mom and a male and a female adult. It's just factors like whether the children feel loved and safe and stable are the most important things to the child's wellbeing, not things like whether the parent stays home full time.

So rejecting this rule that we were taught does not mean devaluing childcare or stay at home motherhood. It just means considering it as one possible option, one path, but not the preordained path for you specifically.

So to reflect, if you could design your life without pressure, without judgment, what balance of caregiving, career and personal fulfillment would feel right for you? If you plan to spend time as a stay-at-home mom, how long would you be planning to do so how would you develop or keep your skillset up to date during the time you're home so you can rejoin the workforce if and when you choose?

How would you protect yourself financially if you're staying at home, making sure you have access to funds in your name, and how will you participate in family and financial decision making with your partner, even if you're not the one employed outside the home at any given time, and if you plan to work while you have small children.

How will you develop your relationship with your children? You know, you'll have fewer hours to do that, so how will you make those hours count? What about your work will enrich the lives of your children? And what about your work life will make life more enjoyable and fulfilling for you so that you can enjoy your life and that spills over to your children?

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