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March 12, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
06:06
Marriage: Do you Regret or Advocate Staying at Home?
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Do you regret your decision?
Or do you, in retrospect, think you made the right decision?
If you were full-time, both full-time, or one full-time and one overwhelmingly at home, are you happy with your decision?
Looking back at life for you, for your marriage, and for your children.
Remember, there are three issues for parents, and they're all very important.
How did it work out for you?
How did it work out for your marriage?
How did it work out for your children?
That's what I'm asking, in essence.
1-8 Prager 776. The reason it's important for you to call is to help younger couples work this through.
You have now lived it.
What do you think you made the right decision in the way you allocated time?
1-8 Prager 776-877-243-7776 The spirit of the time, the zeitgeist, is it's better for you, specifically addressing the woman, it is better for you to have a job outside the home, it's better for you Economically, it's better for your self-image.
And I'm not taking a position on that.
I'm only taking this position.
That there are two other issues with any of these decisions.
Two other issues.
How did your decision affect not just you, but your marriage and your children?
Again, whichever you decided, now that your children are at college, in other words, out of the home, theoretically, I'm just using college as an arbitrary age, now that they are out, do you believe you made the right decision?
Whichever decision that was.
And I have to admit to you, I have no idea how the calls will go.
It's often I can predict, or I shouldn't say I can't predict, Often I do predict, and my prediction may be wrong, internally.
But I have no idea in this case.
Will people who work full-time say, you know what, I wish one of us had stayed home, or I wish it was I who stayed home.
Will people who did stay home call in and say, you know, I'm not sure now that they're out of the house that it made that big a difference, and I wish I had had full-time work.
I don't know.
I don't know which it will be.
Okay, let's go to Vince in Louisville, Kentucky.
Hi, Vince.
Hi, Dennis.
Thank you for taking my call.
Thank you.
I worked afternoons.
My wife worked days, and we did that so we wouldn't have to have childcare.
And that worked out real well.
I'm sorry, it's not clear to me.
You worked afternoons and she worked days?
What's the difference between day and afternoon?
Well, I started at 3 in the afternoon and she was able to be home somewhere around 4, sometimes by the time I left.
So we had very little overlap in somebody being at home all the time to take care of the children.
When did you see each other?
On my days off.
Does that include every weekend?
Well, I worked a rotating shift, so we would have typically three days a week where I was home in the evenings.
Okay, so looking back, did it work out?
You know, it did initially with the child care, but it put a lot of pressure on her to get the children to sporting events, school events, and I think I kind of slighted her.
In helping to raise the children in that regard.
So what do you wish you would have or she would have done?
I think it's a trade-off.
But I think that probably what they saw was a strain on our marriage.
And we're still together for 35 years.
Our marriage is doing very well.
But it was a strenuous time.
And I don't think they saw 100% family cohesiveness.
All right.
So, okay.
What do you wish had been done that wasn't?
That's hard to say.
I guess what I wish would have been done is once they were in school full-time that I could have gone to days and we all would have been home in the evenings together.
Right.
All right, I hear you, but that's...
Yeah, I understand that.
Okay.
I want to hear whether you're happy with the decisions you made or regret the decisions, the stay-at-home versus work issue and the making of your family.
All right, my friends, we'll be back in a moment.
I'm Dennis Prager.
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