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In the last blog we talked about learning our roles in the family so we know what our place in the family is.  We talked about acknowledging each other which gives a feeling of appreciation.  This, as mentioned before, leads to higher esteem.

Today we are going to talk about personal growth for the stay at home mom. All of us have heard someone say “I just out-grew him or her”, hence justifying the break up of the marriage or relationship.  How does this happen?  Why does this happen?  Is it real?  What can we do about it?

In answer to the most important question, Yes people do outgrow one another. Why?  Because, in our stay at home mom family, the husband spends his whole day with adults and is learning new concepts, ideas, talks politics etc.  Personal growth is based on constantly experiencing new things.  The stay at home mom spends most of her days with children and although those little munchkins are amazing, they don’t exactly have an opinion on world economics.  Since marriage goes on for years, if one person keeps on learning about the outside world, their growth curve is much faster.  It literally outpaces that of the stay at home mom.  So the husband comes home after work with all new information about the world and the stay at home mom can only talk about what the kids did.  The excitement about the kids is an experiencial situation.  In other words, if you weren’t there it wasn’t quite as exciting.  An example of this might be parachuting out of an airplane is not the same thing as watching someone doing it or even worse having someone telling you about it.  Unless the story teller is amazing it just isn’t that compelling.  The wife begins to feel like she has nothing to say.  She may begin to wonder whether she is becoming boring and the inevitable end play of this scenario is low self esteem.

What can the stay at home mom do? The beauty of the new world is the computer.  I highly encourage you to get on yahoo and read the news, the sports, the fashion.  Remember what made your husband attracted to you in the first place.  You don’t have to recreate the wheel.  If you do half of what you used to do you will become great again in no time.  Don’t forget, that guy who comes home every night is the guy who married you.  So you are already the kind of woman he likes.  If you used to have a great figure, work out.  Don’t be lazy.  You know when you look good you feel much better about yourself.  Join a gym, most now have nurseries.  Add to your role list, you wrote down before, to keep growing and before you know it you  will be and feel more interesting, attractive and guess what… no more low self esteem.

Dr. Robert is “the Problem Solving Experts for Families”.  If you have any question just email him at bocknek@takebackthehome.com.

The self esteem for stay at home moms can become a critical issue in the family if not handled well.  Where does self esteem come from?  By definitions it comes from within the person who has the problem.  It would be convenient to just blame the mom and tell her to shape up. The problem with that is it only worsens the dynamics in the family.  Common things seen in a family where self esteem issues are present are children not listening to the mother, a lack of respect, true or perceived, for her not just from the kids, but also from the husband.  This dynamic becomes self perpetuating, in other words, the esteem issue causes bad feelings which in turn causes more esteem issues.  This imbalance can lead to serious problems such as drinking, drug abuse, to infidelity or just a lousy marriage.

If one wants to change this situation we want to look at a few things first.   The first being, how did the mother come to be the stay at home mom.  Was it a mutual decision or did one of the partners decide this was how it was going to be and the other partner just capitulated.  Relationships are based on a series of agreements.  Whatever the agreement was that started situation it behooves the family to work its way out of it.

Without doing prolonged marriage counseling or individual counseling which often exacerbates the problem, because we are what we think about,  I often find the best way to solve this problem is to have everyone in the family go over what their role in the family is.  I say this because, if you have read my other blogs, you will remember that a family is not a thing like a table.  It is an entity based on a dynamic series of actions that either lead us to success or doom us to failure.

How do we know what actions bring success? The first thing to know is what role each person plays in the family.  Its like the old adage, if you don’t know where your want to go the odds are you aren’t going anywhere but a place you don’t want to be.  In the stay at home mom family, the dad goes to work, cuts the lawn etc. the mom cleans, cooks etc. and the kids go to school etc.  In those roles we need to acknowledge each other for doing our part well.  We need to do this often and with sincerity.  The father plays a critical role in holding the mother in a high place so to insure that all in the family know that she is critical to the success of the family and needs to be respected for it.  Part of the husband’s role is to hold the mother in this position.  In doing this, the mother will naturally feel in higher status which invariably creates higher esteem.  For the mother’s part, she too must appreciate her husband for going to work and support him in all that he does so he will want to appreciate her in return.  In part 2 we will discuss the part of the mother’s role that she herself can help with her esteem issues herself.

Dr. Robert is ‘the problem solving expert for families”.  Contact him if you have any questions.