Dara Torres-Amazing

...The stay at home mom thing being more respectable for an over 40 woman came over like neanderthal view...forget dark ages... Actually, stay-at-home moms are a fairly recent thing. Neanderthal mothers would have been too busy scraping roots out of the ground, searching for edible plants, and snaring small animals to simply watch the kids and wait for their mates to bring a mammoth home. In the dark ages, most people were agricultural laborers and both parents would have had to work hard in the fields, plus women wove most of the cloth and spun the yarn for it. Even wealthy women spent a lot of their time making cloth. In fact, if you look at parenting through history, you could get the impression that people couldn't wait to get rid of their kids. If they were rich, they sent them off to boarding school at a young age, if they were tradesmen-class they were packed off to be apprentices at about 12**, if they were really poor they might sell off a kid or two into indentured servitude or send them to the factory or mine to work at about age 6. Even royalty - Marie Antoinette's dolls and toys were taken away at age seven and she was dressed as a little adult and expected to act like one. The Victorians started the sentimental ideal of mom at home, surrounded by adoring children, but of course that was mainly for the emerging middle class. And even they had nannys and nursemaids. (**To those of you with annoying teens at home, this is NOT a recommendation!!!) To both points I suggested the main problem is the way media portays women as goods, and depreciable assets who's value is linked to their size, shape, colour, etc etc. These are at the crux of societial influence on eating disoarders. Eating disorders were around at least as far back as the middle ages - some of the saints and martyrs that the Catholic church has since demoted were young women who starved themselves to death. It's a form of mental illness, it has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, and while the media attention to thinness doesn't help, it probably doesn't cause it in the first place.

...The stay at home mom thing being more respectable for an over 40 woman came over like neanderthal view...forget dark ages... Actually, stay-at-home moms are a fairly recent thing. Neanderthal mothers would have been too busy scraping roots out of the ground, searching for edible plants, and snaring small animals to simply watch the kids and wait for their mates to bring a mammoth home. In the dark ages, most people were agricultural laborers and both parents would have had to work hard in the fields, plus women wove most of the cloth and spun the yarn for it. Even wealthy women spent a lot of their time making cloth. In fact, if you look at parenting through history, you could get the impression that people couldn't wait to get rid of their kids. If they were rich, they sent them off to boarding school at a young age, if they were tradesmen-class they were packed off to be apprentices at about 12**, if they were really poor they might sell off a kid or two into indentured servitude or send them to the factory or mine to work at about age 6. Even royalty - Marie Antoinette's dolls and toys were taken away at age seven and she was dressed as a little adult and expected to act like one. The Victorians started the sentimental ideal of mom at home, surrounded by adoring children, but of course that was mainly for the emerging middle class. And even they had nannys and nursemaids. (**To those of you with annoying teens at home, this is NOT a recommendation!!!) To both points I suggested the main problem is the way media portays women as goods, and depreciable assets who's value is linked to their size, shape, colour, etc etc. These are at the crux of societial influence on eating disoarders. Eating disorders were around at least as far back as the middle ages - some of the saints and martyrs that the Catholic church has since demoted were young women who starved themselves to death. It's a form of mental illness, it has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, and while the media attention to thinness doesn't help, it probably doesn't cause it in the first place.