Welcome to Thomistic Womanhood. In today’s video, we’re going to talk about careers if you want to be a homemaker later. So obviously, us women, we have to have some sort of career unless you have really well off parents or something all of us do need to think about the career question. And if you would like to be a homemaker later, it does kind of pose some challenges. And there’s some additional considerations I think you should keep in mind to kind of help you pick a career, that’s going to help you do what you really want to do later.

So yeah, for those of you that want to be homemakers, or Trad wives, this is your video, because all of us kind of have to come up against this question sooner or later. Now, if you’re watching this, and you love your career, and you don’t ever want to be a stay at home mother, that’s fine. But this isn’t the video for you, you’re just gonna get angry if you watch it. But for those of us that do want to be a stay at home mom later on, maybe you just graduated high school or you’re in college and you’re  trying to pick a major and you’re figuring out what you’re going to do with your life. But you want to be  a stay at home mom and have kids at some point, it can be challenging,  because our entire career and educational system is set up on the assumption that you are going to work like a man, men pick a job, and they do it the rest of their life. Women are a little more fluid, but the educational and the career world kind of ignores that fact, they’re just making the assumption, you’re going to do the same thing for the rest of your life. And that is not an assumption that usually plays out for women.

If you look at Career statistics, women more than men will often take a career break, sometimes women will leave altogether, for to have children and they’ll be out of the workforce. For a while women take sabbaticals more often than men, where you take maybe a year off work, and you come back. So those are, those are things that are kind of different there. Now, before we begin one of the big objections, or I want to call it a pseudo solution, because it isn’t really a solution. I don’t think in the 21st century, it probably was more back in the day. But it is the option of just having a girl skip out on a career altogether, she’ll just live at home, she won’t go to college, she’ll just live at home until she’s married. And that’s, back in the day, that was I think more of a viable option. And again, this is a highly personal decision, there’s a lot of nuances here, it’s a very serious decision.

It’s one you should talk over with your parents, any sort of mentor or person that’s really maybe that’s a grandma, maybe that’s an aunt, but talk it over with the people that are close to you that you trust, if you have older sisters, that have gone on to get married, and they had careers, talk to them. But this is the kind of thing that is a very personal choice. And this has lifelong serious consequences. So you want to take this with the seriousness it deserves. And that’s why I say that for most of us, again, there could be situations, maybe you have parents that are really well off or something you have a trust fund somewhere that’s a little different. But for most of us, living at home with our parents, and just opting out of a career altogether, I don’t think is a good option. And here’s why I say that. Because in today’s world, pretty much anything can happen. We have a lot of economic instability. And I do think it behooves women, even us more like conservative, traditional minded ones, to have some sort of trade, you need to have some sort of marketable skill. And I don’t think it’s really fair to girls, when we just act like we can just ignore the career question and they’ll just live at home until they’re married in today’s world where women are getting married later.

And later in life, you could be facing a long time of being single, a lot of people are getting married in their 30s, whereas before they get married in their 20s. And so you could theoretically have a gap of like 10 to 15 years, where you’re single, and you need to do something constructive with your time. And if you stay at home, I find that a lot of women and I say this as somebody who comes from a lot of like religious circles, conservative circles, and I have seen women who did this and I’ve seen how it turned out and a lot of times these women are often.. by the time they end up 30 to 33, they’re still not married, they’re like, Gee, I guess I better get a career because I don’t know when Mr. Right’s coming, and my parents are getting older, they’re not going to be around forever. So then they do enter the workforce, or they do go to college and get a degree and then enter the workforce, and they’re at a disadvantage, because they’re a lot older than their peers. And, there is a certain maturity that you develop by having to have a job and have that responsibility. And, usually that doesn’t get developed, it usually doesn’t get developed other ways.

But it depends on your family, you may have a very strict family and your parents, maybe you come from a large family, and your mom definitely puts you to work when you’re at home. So it could be different. But in general, I think for most of us, completely opting out of a career and an education is not the wisest move, I do think us women need to be doing something until we get married. And, again, it’s a highly personal decision, this is something that one YouTube video is not going to be enough to help you make this decision. I think this video is kind of a springboard, I’m going to bring up a few things to consider. And then take these considerations to your parents, your mentors, any family members, relatives, older sisters, and talk it over with them, because everybody’s situation is going to be very unique. But anyways, having said that, I do think you should have some sort of career, but these are the things to watch out for, so that your career doesn’t end up sucking you into this black hole of just work, work, work. And then it harms your chances to get married, or, have children later on.

So basically, this video actually was inspired by a comment somebody left, and she asked me this question. And so I answered her on the comment thread on the comment section, that video, but I figured it would be a good video to make for all of us, for those of us that maybe didn’t see that comment, this is really good information. So thank you for your comment, who you are. But anyways, so basically, some things to keep in mind, for those of you that are more, conservative minded, you don’t want to be a career woman. But you recognize that this is a 21st century, and women do have to work, at least until they’re married, and they have some sort of plan B, a financial plan B but so these are the things to keep in mind, I would say you can do any job or career you want, it’s more the aspects of the work conditions that you need to watch out for. So I’m not going to sit here and be like, oh, you can’t be a doctor, that’s man’s work. Or you can only do, nursing housekeeping or daycare, because that’s women’s work, it’s not really about like what is stereotypically like, men jobs and female job, men jobs and women jobs, like that’s not what it is you can have any job you want, or any career you want. It’s the work conditions, okay? Like you have to watch out for the working conditions, that’s what’s going to really, arm you that’s going to kind of make or break whether this is going to be a good job for you. So the number one thing to look out for, is trying to avoid jobs that have very long, exhausting hours.

This is often the case in the nursing field, which, these women they often are on call, they often have to work nights that is very hard on you, like as a woman, our thyroid, our reproductive system, it’s very delicate, we need our sleep so working these late nights, long hours, that’s really going to be hard on you. And I know a lot of people go into nursing, especially a lot of women who are like conservative and they’re more kind, they’re not necessarily a little more old fashioned. Let’s put it that way. I’ve seen this a lot, in the circles I’m in, they’ll go into nursing because they’re like, Oh, that’s a really feminine job. But then they get worked to the bone. And that’s not a feminine working condition. So if you like nursing, and you have your heart set on going into it, awesome. But just be careful that you watch the amount of hours and you watch your work life balance. And don’t let them take advantage of you for that this is an area I kind of messed up in which I will tell you number two is going to understand why I ended up in this but I ended up in a career that had a lot of long hours. I worked in tech in Silicon Valley, I was a DevOps Engineer, and we did a lot of night work, a lot of long hours and it was very exhausting. It really hurt my health. So that is something to keep in mind. If a job requires you to work nights or on call, or there’s a lot of overtime, that’s a red flag. For a woman that wants to eventually get married.

You need that time to rest. You need to have time to date preferably you want your weekends off, so you have time to meet men and date them and things like that. because, meeting a guy nowadays, it takes time. And it takes effort. And it takes a little bit of strategy and conscious work. We are not in a society where everybody’s encouraging you to get married, we have a society that is literally set up to encourage the opposite, okay? This is why the average age at marriage keeps getting later and later, this is why millennials and Gen Z, when you look at the statistics every year, people are getting married later. And later, this is not necessarily an accident, this is the way our society is set up. We are a very economically focused society, versus a more values oriented society. And when you’re economically focused, you want everybody out in the workforce, you don’t want half of them at home, passing on their values to their kids, okay, you want everybody in the workforce, and you’re going to optimize the Society for that, which means, people are not going to get married as soon, we also have a lot of people talking about climate change, and how Oh, there’s too many people. And there’s, population explosion, blah, blah, blah.

Incidentally, Elon Musk, who is a huge billionaire, he’s actually been quoted in interviews, and I’ve watched the interviews, he has actually said, he’s the guy that’s trying to get everybody to go to Mars, okay, like, he’s like, very, I don’t know how that’s gonna go. But I mean, he’s very innovative, and he’s very he’s a lot of successful companies. He’s the guy that made Tesla. And he said, he’s gone on record saying that we actually have a population decline. And he says, we have a population shortage, we actually need more people, we’re not going to have the workforce, and the economic labor that we’re going to need in order to do all these progressive things that we as a society want to do. And he wasn’t just talking about his goals, he was talking about society as a whole. And he was saying, we actually don’t have enough people rather than saying there’s too much population growth, he was saying, no, it’s actually the opposite. We don’t have enough people. And so, however, the myth of a population explosion, and too many people on Earth, that myth has been perpetuated very strongly in all of academia and a lot of our media. And so things like that encourage marriage and childbirth and all that just anything having to do with that is kind of downplayed and discouraged, because oh, well, that might lead to more people, and then we’re gonna hurt the earth.

So again, watch the hours that this job requires, and try to get a job that doesn’t require too many, usually 40 hours is the standard workweek. Now, if you can live at home with your parents, and still pursue some sort of a career, I think that’s kind of the best of both worlds, because then you can kind of save on rent and stuff, and you’re still in that family circle, you’re still with people who love you, you kind of don’t have to be isolated, like if you move out on your own, so it can be really good to live at home. And then that way, you don’t have to work as many long hours, maybe you can get a part time job, and, work less hours and still bring in some money and build up your work experience. So there’s that, just be careful about the long hours, you don’t want a career that is going to gobble up too many evenings and weekends. Now, there’s always going to be emergencies at work, there will be times you have to work overtime. So, don’t get too huffy about that. But if you find that, suddenly, there’s always an emergency and just week after week, you’re exhausted, you might want to look into a different job. And also one, one side note to all this, talk to people that are in the career, get on LinkedIn, start direct messaging, people ask to connect to people I know, it’s really intimidating to message strangers on LinkedIn.

But if you have some sort of career fair, or some sort of thing at your college where you can see these jobs and talk to the people in them, that’s going to give you the best idea of working conditions, okay? Don’t read some glossy brochure, or online article about how cool it is to be a journalist or how cool it is to be a doctor, go out there and actually talk to doctors, talk to journalists, and talk to the actual people who are doing this job every day. Because that’s how you’re going to find out these things on my list. The things on my list, you’re not going to find out from a job description. Job descriptions are marketing tools. They’re trying to market the job to you. They’re gonna make it sound amazing. You need to talk to the people that have nothing at stake. They already have a job, they don’t need anything from you informational interviews, that’s another thing to ask them. Hey, can I buy you a cup of coffee and we can chat about this career in this industry? It’s really important because that’s also how you’ll find out how many hours this job really takes. Or this career really takes So that’s it. Number two, trying to avoid careers that require college debt. If you want to be a homemaker, college debt is kryptonite, you do not want to take on any more college debt, then you absolutely have to, especially if you’re in America, if you’re in another country your country gives free college. Awesome. Like, I wish America was like that. We have a really screwed up university system, I avoided college debt by going into tech, I was good with computers. And I was good at writing code. But I was also really good at fixing the computers that the code would run on. And so I didn’t even have to get a software engineering degree, they don’t have degrees, for basically like fixing computers, they only have degrees for writing the code, it’s getting better.

But in general, that’s kind of how it is. And so I was able to establish a career without having college debt. However, the trade off was that in tech, you have really long hours, I did a lot of night work, a lot of evening work, a lot of weekend work, and it sucked. And I Yeah, we could go into more on that. But so that was the trade off that I had to make in order to avoid debt. So again, you’re going to have trade offs here. So but if you’re looking at two jobs, and they are both equally appealing to you, and you like them, and they, they’re good on these other things on my list, and they’re just equally the same, you can’t make up your mind, then I would suggest going with the one that requires less debt, or if you can get scholarships, work on getting the scholarships, before you sign on the dotted line, that you agree that you’re going to take out this loan or take out this tuition agreement, a lot of these scholarships, basically scholarships for college are like a discount on the the tuition, they call them scholarships, which is, at this point, it’s almost becoming kind of a more highfalutin term, it’s kind of like a discount. But a lot of these college funds, they’re, they’re hard to get, if you’re some sort of a minority, that’s great, you’ll have a good job trying to try to get as many of those as you can. But if you’re not a minority, it can be more difficult to get scholarships. So don’t let people tell you, Oh, yeah, just go to college, take out a bunch of loans and get scholarships, it’ll be easy. It’s not always easy. And that’s what a lot of people thought, and they went to college, and they took out these loans. And then, getting scholarships in the following years was actually very difficult. And they ended up graduating with a lot of debt.

So don’t fall into that trap. However, think outside the box, there are other countries that are way better about their education system, and they will offer free education, sometimes you can get student visas, and you can actually go to college in a different country. And, actually save a lot of money on tuition like France, for example, France has state funded education, and you can actually get a student visa and go do your education over there, it’s a little more tricky. And yes, it can be very scary to go overseas. But if you’re serious about being a homemaker, but you are also serious about getting a degree, you need to seriously consider maybe leaving the US if you’re American, then you need to consider leaving the US and getting your degree abroad go to a country that has either very affordable tuition, or go to a country that has state funded tuition, that will give you free education provided you you do all the right, you get the visa,you do all the travel requirements that they require when you jump through the hoops they want. But yeah, it’s getting to the point where if you are a woman and you want to be a Trad wife, you want to be a stay at home mom, you’ve got to do whatever you can to avoid debt. And I’m very serious when I say like, you may need to go overseas to do your education. Everybody does it, they come to the US, and they do it here for us. So there is no shame in doing it the other way. Just because you’re American doesn’t mean you have to pay $100,000 to get a degree you can easily get an affordable one overseas. And you may need to learn a foreign language. There are a lot of places that speak English, but you may need to learn a foreign language but it’s worth it. It really is because of debt, if you’re going to be a stay at home wife, you won’t be working and it’s not really fair to expect your husband to pay off your student loans. So you need to do everything you can to either, just avoid college as much as you can. I’m not going to keep harping on that.