Here's a good post from a blog I just found, Plain and Joyful Living.
The "M" Word
One of my missions in life, and in this blog, is to show people they can live on less money than they think. That one income for a family, or even no outside income if you choose to have home-based businesses (farming, crafting, etc.), might just be plenty. In this post from Plain and Joyful Living, Tonya gives specifics on her family's income and how their family of 8, soon to be 9, is able to live on it. I appreciate when the taboo topic of numbers is discussed openly, as you could guess from my own blog! If you look around on her blog, it looks like this is a common subject for her, and I love it.
I'm reading the book Better Off: Flipping The Switch on Technology by Eric Brende right now and it has me thinking a lot about lifestyle, technology, and the need to make so much money just to, as he states, make the machines go round. Environmental Blogger Crunchy Chicken is discussing this book for her April book club. Find post one here.
A favorite quote from this book, again on centering one's life around the home instead of the industrial society, from a later chapter entitled "husbandry":
The word house-husband is redundant. Of course! This startling thought came to me as I reached for the hand pump. The "hus-" from "husband" is simply the Old English form of the word "house," while "band" means "bound." The man who stays at home to work is returning to a long-forgotten calling preserved in language like a fossil. There is no linguistic need to add the extra "house."
The book is very well written, by an M.I.T. student who, along with his wife, goes to spend a year living with the Amish as something of a thought- and practice-experiment into how technology betters or worsens our lives. I love that he discovers the distinction between technologies that bring us closer to our community (generally ones that make us work together, an old-fashioned threshing machine being one that comes up in the book) and those that take us further apart (cars for the most part, tvs, computers, etc.) I know all too well how my computer and smart phone become the main focus of my eyes, instead of my kids and husband, and I deeply feel how wrong that is. This book will change the way I live, hopefully, in helping me be more intentional about what technologies I choose to have in my life and those I will leave off or at least put in their proper place. Even before I started reading this book, I took Facebook off my smartphone because I was spending way too much time looking at it instead of my family. It's been great.
And lastly, I want to share this link from Sharon, about her family's foray into foster parenting. I love what she has to say about the industrialization of the family. I appreciate it when people across a wide political spectrum can embrace the family as humanity's major mode of operation. I don't think there's anything more important than family. A quote:
I also find foster parenting fascinating, because foster parenting is the one place where the family has not been industrializable. This is an important point - for the most part, we have industrialized most segments of the family to encourage participation in the formal economy. Kids go to daycare centers and to public schools. Elders go to senior programs, assisted living and nursing homes. Meals get produced in restaurants and cafeterias - we eat a majority of our meals out now. Many of the things that were done by families in the informal economy were industrialized so that the informal economy could be dismantled.
Foster care is an odd piece out, because children simply don't do well in industrialized settings without a family. We know that children can only really attach and grow appropriately in families. We know they die at higher rates, we know they suffer trauma, we know they end up having kids who end up back in the system if we try and industrialize their experience. The only way to raise healthy kids is in a family. Foster care is just about the only place in the system where this is explicitly acknowledged - everyone else will tell you that Grandma is much better off in the exclusive company of her peers, that it is just too hard to care for her at home. Everyone will tell you that daycare and homecare are the same, and that Mom should put the baby on formula and go right back to work. There is, however, a fundamental place where that *cannot* work - families are the only way to successfully raise kids, and the foster care system is a deep and implicit acknowledgement of the value and importance of informal economy family work - this is one of the reasons it interests me.
They also treat you like crap as is typical of informal economy work. There's no sense that foster parenting is treated as skilled labor (although it obviously is, at least a lot of the time). But the rehabilitation of the informal economy really needs to include the issue of foster parenting, because in a society that negates any claims that industrial structures aren't just the same as familial ones, foster care stands out as a significant, if limited, acknowledgement that children need families and someone has to do informal economy labor.
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Helen