I am a member of the Work It Mom Community. I subscribe to the blog and as I have time read entries. Some of them are relevant to me, some are not. Some of them are interesting, some are not. Some of them are in my opinion intelligent, some are not. Yo…

I don’t feel bad about staying at home with my son just because I read the article. I certainly don’t let someone I don’t know dictate how I feel about my choices.

I read the article early on, so I guess I’ll mosey back over to see how the comments have shaped up.

As someone who worked as professional for over 20 years, I understand the arguments. What I don’t get is when people judge others when they change their life path or make a decision different from the one they are advocating. My perception of Ms. Bennett’s writing is that they tend to lecture or scold those of us who aren’t on or have veered from the path she believes is the only right one.

I believe I’ve earned the right to figure out what works best for me and my family without having someone talk at me while shaking their finger in my face and insinuating that I should be ashamed that I’m not back in an office. I am smart enough to know what the possibilities of divorce and going back to “an office” are. Let’s skip the lectures and stick with respectful conversation about mothers and their choices.

Leslie is not the first person (or organization) to become a member of WIM for the sole purpose of promoting the sale of a product. If you go search member names for the word “prevention” you’ll see that “The Editors of Prevention Magazine” are quite active on this site. I doubt they want support and guidance from us either and they have been active on this site for quite awhile now. Food for thought.

I choose to be part of this community to find support and guidance from other working women like myself seeking the same support and guidance, free of judgment. I find it distasteful that someone who presents a highly judgmental, one-sided agenda was invited to join this community. She derides the decision and lifestyle of stay-home moms in a condescending manner. I am all for healthy debate, but I find her style of argument more incendiary than at all healthy.

What’s bugging me has nothing to do with filtering content on this site. It’s that someone with no vested interest in the goals and well-being of the community has been given an ongoing forum within the community. It doesn’t seem to me that Leslie Bennetts wants support or guidance from us, she wants us to buy her book.

As for me, knowing there are 9 more articles from her on the way, I will also let this simmer before coming back to WIM.

I’ve really enjoyed WIM and have responded to many different posts of totally different types–from recipes to traveling to surrogacy. WIM touches many aspects of my own life, and I’m sure the issues with which I resonate differ from the issues in others’ lives.
There are articles on WIM I have no interest in, or can’t relate to. That’s fine too–if we were all the same, what a boring world it would be!

Nataly, I have recommended your site to many of my working mom friends as a great resource and source of support. Please keep up the good work and keep the diversity going!

A few people have brought up the point that we should be featuring other perspectives along with Ms. Bennetts — and I’d like to turn that into an invitation for all of you, our members, to submit articles sharing your perspectives, thoughts, opinions, rebuttals, feelings, and observations. I can’t really think of any other better way to encourage a “balanced” discussion on the site.

I would never leave a site because some of the articles were from a different perspective than my own. (I LOVED being a SAHM mother; those years were among the happiest in my life.) I would leave a site — a site intended to be an interactive community, at any rate — if I felt that my perspective was being ignored/unrepresented.

Which led me to this idea: if an article like that is highlighted, you need, in the interests of balance, to provide another from the opposite perspective. BUT… then I got to thinking what that would look like: the anti-SAHM article followed by the anti-WorkingMom article, and there we are, smack bang in the middle of the freaking tedious boring relentless hateful Mommy Wars. Oh god, please no.

So, *deliberately* seek out a balancing/opposing perspective to highlight in conscious response to Bennet’s article? No, thanks. Please don’t.

However, future editorial decisions do need to be made with an eye to that kind of balance. You can’t please everyone all the time, so perhaps the best you can do is to spread the offense equally…

And members need to understand that a free community will necessitate being expose to opinions you disagree with, even those you find offensive. Freedom of speech does not give someone the right to spread hate, but it also does not mean “you get to say whatever you like so long I agree with it.”

Nataly, keep doing what you’re doing and running diverse articles like this. Listen to your dad! Don’t let your emotions get the best of you. You created this site as a way to share various views on all kinds of topics for moms, whether working or not.

KathyHowe, I thought your last paragraph was so funny! I too am glad I get to interact with all types of personalities in my job. It’s made me a very open-minded, non-judgemental person!