The Importance of Educating Our Young Girls
Times are a changing

The older I get and the longer I practice, the more impatient I seem to get with clients who have chosen to be stay at home moms. I don't inherently have a problem with women who make this choice, if they are educated and able to support themselves and their children in the event of a divorce. The problem I have is with women who choose not to education themselves or attain a skill or trade and come into my office basically at their wits end because they feel they have to stay in an abusive marriage because of their inability to earn a living.

I am far more sympathetic to the older women of generations passed who were raised in a different climate and from whose mistakes we of the later generations should have learned. While they were supporting their career driven spouses taking care of the house and the children these women put their educations and careers on the back burner. When their now highly educated husbands choose to have affairs or leave their marriages; these women are faced with the harsh reality of trying to support themselves and or their children on minimum wage earnings and sometimes hard to get child support.

I cannot understand the younger generation of females who feel they do not have to educate themselves and who choose instead to live off their spouses and fall back on the line that "my husband does not want me to work." Stay home if you want but education yourself in the event that staying at home no longer becomes an option. A young woman no more than 35 or 36 entered my office with her pre schooler, the youngest of four children. She had absolutely no education and claimed the most she could get in the the work force was maybe $10 an hour in light of the fact that she had no marketable skills. Her husband was not making fortune but his one income was sufficient to make ends meet on Long Island. When I discussed her child support expectations and the small amount of maintenance she would receive for a short period of time, she seemed both annoyed and defeated which in turn annoyed me. This young lady still had options she chose to ignore, like taking some classes and learning a trade before she thought of divorce. Instead, her view was that of a psedo martyer feeling very put upon and forced to stay in a horrible marriage. I felt no sympathy for this woman. She in fact made me angry enough to write this blog entry.

There should be a course in high school about the simple economics of running a household. Each student should be given a role and budget and asked to run a fictious household on their given salaries. There should be a varied mix of occupations and varying salaries so the students can gage how their peers are faring at the same or similiar tasks. All sudents should be assigned jobs with various salaries and they should all have the oportunity to make large fictious purchases. Perhaps this introduction into real life will cause all the students to realize that being able to support themselves is as important as taking Drivers education.

Nothing is guaranteed in this life, and I think our young women need to be as prepared as we expect our young men to be as they head off into the world.