>>I've seen a few people go off the deep end about Palin, but not many. I also think you're seeing a fair number of _women_ who have found out firsthand how difficult it is to balance a challenging career with marriage and motherhood expressing concern that, at the stage her family is _now_ at, she'll find it hard to make it work. I know that when my kids were little, there were occasionally weeks at a time when little or no paid work got done because kids were sick, school was closed, etc., etc. Add the fact that she has a brand-new special needs baby, and probably no idea yet just how intense dealing with that will be, and I do worry that as governor, let alone as VP, she'll have to make some unpleasant compromises.
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>Sophistry. Now you're trying to justify gender discrimination which, in any other situation, you'd be condemning.
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>>I saw/heard (can't remember which) someone try to compare this to Pelosi, who also has 5 kids, but the comparison totally left out the fact that Pelosi didn't enter politics until her kids were older (grown, I think, but I wouldn't swear to it--looked it up, she ran for Congress when the youngest was a senior in high school).
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>>I know that Palin's husband had to leave some job because of a conflict of interest. Is he now a stay-at-home dad handling the day-to-day running of the family? If so, and if that's what he intends to do in the long run, then the questions about her handling this are moot. If, otoh, he's also working, then there are legitimate questions to ask about how they're going to handle the kind of problems every family with two working parents has encountered. You or I can take a day off to take care of a sick kid. Can the VP or the president?
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>See my last point. You can't have it both ways. Either she can do the job or she can't and her personal situation is irrelevent unless you're willing to say all working mothers are unqualified to hold important positions. Goes right back to another post of mine where I talked about moral relativism. If you're going to ding Palin on this then, being true to your principles, I expect you to never again support a femail candidate with young children.

Doesn't the office someone is running for make a difference? The demands of serving on the local school board or even on a city council don't begin to compare with those of a president. FWIW, while I respect that every family gets to make their own choices, I've always believed that one parent should stay home with babies full-time for at least the first year or so. I've done it both ways myself, and my experiences trying to balance grad school with motherhood on #1 convinced me to stay home with #2.

I do think that this country needs to do a much better job of supporting those families that make that decision. Too many families I know are making the back to work choice not because they want it, but because they can't afford anything else. ("Can't afford" can also mean that the damage to career in the long run is too large.)

We also need to find lots more ways to let families mix work and family life--more job-sharing, more opportunities to work from home, etc. ,etc. FWIW, I started my own business because I had young children and wanted to be here when they left in the morning and when they came home in the afternoon.

My sister, who started her family a lot later than I did, is in the PR business. She had a job she really liked when her first was born, so she asked if she could work part-time for a while. Their response was that she could switch to 4 days a week, 10 hours a day. She quit and at the time she would have gone back to work, instead started her own home-based PR business. (She'd had several people over the years tell her to let them know if she ever went independent.)

However, she and I are in an unusual position, both because of what we do, and because immodestly, we're both very good at what we do. So we had more options than most women do. We need to find ways to support families with young children, so that they can make the choice that's best for their family in all ways, not just financially.

Tamar