Light of the World, a City on A Hill
…thinking out loud about living missionally in the city of Sydney so that the city will come to know Jesus…Archive for women
Reclaim your life…really?
**Begin Rant**
I inadvertantly switched onto Mix FM this morning while station surfing on my way to work.
What an unfortunate accident that was.
Morning radio is terrible at the best of times, but Mix have decided that Todd McKenny, of Dancing with the Stars fame, would make a good morning slot host.
Anyway, McKenny and co-host Sonia Kruger are discussing motherhood and McKenny asks listeners to call in and tell them when and how they “reclaimed” their life after motherhood.
What???? Huh?
Reclaim…like when you become a mother you suddenly don’t have a real life anymore and you have to some how get back to what you were before in order for it to be life again.
I may be swimming against the tide here, but that is just crap. I felt like ringing up just to let him know what I thought of his question (and him).
I mean what if I wanted to “reclaim” my old life pre-kids? I could take up a few sports with training a couple of nights a week and a game for half of Saturday. I could go out with the boys every Saturday night and come in sometime in the wee hours. I could hang around for Friday drinks with my work mates and get home late. Etc Etc.
But I’m not going to do that.
My life is changed, but it’s still my life to live now.
**End Rant**
Stanhope Headline Demographics
As promised, I have pulled together some key stats on the wonderful place that is Stanhope Gardens. For those of you unfamiliar with the location, Stanhope is in the North Western sub-urban area of Sydney, about 40 minutes out of the city.
So who lives here…?
There are over 21,000 of us Stanhopians living in the suburb, and this is growing rapidly as new housing continues to be built, particularly in the Newbury Estate where I live.
Unsurprisingly, it is a young suburb. Over 75% of residents are <44 years of age, and there are two clusters in the 0-10 range and 32-34 range. Clearly this is a young family dominated area. By contrast the over 65’s only represent 4% of the population compared to over 15% nationally.
Most people were born in Australia (about 60%) with Filipino, Indian and Great Britain being the biggest contributors to the other 100 or so other nationalities. Correspondingly only 59% of people speak English at home with another 90 or so other languages spoken.
One interesting statistic is the percentage of people who are officially married (i.e. excluding de-facto relationships). For those over 25 years of age, 72% of them are married. This compares to 59% for the whole of Sydney. My completely unsubstantiated theory on this is that while couples are happy to live together initially, when they want to have children for many there is a compulsion to get married.
So what do people do?
The biggest single sector in terms of occupation type is “Professionals” who together with the other white-collar types make up about 60% of working people. What surprised me was that blue-collar jobs make up 36% of the population, compared with only 26% for total Sydney. I have already touched on what I believe is the significance of this in a previous post.
So who is working?
About 75% of males over 24 y.o. are in employment, mostly full time. Almost 70% of females are also working in at least a part time capacity, though most who are working are doing it 5 days per week. Given the high number of small kids in the area, it’s no wonder that local childcare facilities are bursting at the seams. Just under a quarter of women are not in the work force, presumably most being stay-at-home mums. These stats are right on the average for Sydney.
Most people are in the process of buying their homes and only 16% of households are rentals.
Households are pretty tech-saavy with 60% having a Broadband connection. In total less than 20% have no internet access.
So, onto Religion…
It seems Stanhopians are generally as spiritual as the rest of Sydney with only 19% indicating they have no religious label. The biggest sector is Catholic and they represent 31% of residents which is higher than the national and Sydney averages. The Anglicans are down vs the average. One of the most obvious anomalies is that Hinduism at 5% is more than 4 times the Sydney average and 10 times the Australian average.
There’s a lot more stats that I could quote, but that will do for now.
I’ll come back to some thoughts on what all this might mean soon…
Jeff
Stanhope Stats…
I have pulled together all the Demographic data on Stanhope…some very interesting things come out. I think I’ll grab Kellyville Ridge as well, just to see if anything else is significant.
I’ll try and post on some tonight…
Jeff
Counter Cultural Living…Part 3
Do you want to be “counter cultural”?
Be like me.
I am married (and never divorced), and live with three of my own children (admittedly one is still on the way) with aforesaid marriage partner.
According to social researcher Hugh Mackay, I am now a complete minority…on the fringe of Australian society.
The mainstream is now people living alone, or perhaps with one other person. No wonder ‘community’ (whether in the flesh or in the digital sphere) is so sought after.
Forgot my rant…
I have some issues with Feminism. There, I said it.
Now I will concede that the feminist revolution has had some positive effects, particularly around providing women with choices. I have grown up in the post-feminist world so cannot comment from first hand experience what things were like for women prior to the 70’s. Pretty terrible if you listen to the hard core feminist types.
My issue lies with how things have deviated from the original aims of the sisterhood way back then. You may not be aware, but broadly speaking the aims of feminism were two-fold: 1) To provide equality and opportunity for women, particularly as it related to the workplace and, 2) To esteem and dignify motherhood.
Now we have made huge strides in the first area, but the second area has been left in the dust. Success in the market-place for women has been painted as the only success worth achieving, automatically relegating motherhood to a distant second in terms of worth.
This is a tragic load of nonsense.
Again, our sick consumeristic society will only recognise you based on your earning capacity and output, the result being that mothers feel like they have diminished, or worse, no contribution compared to those in the paid workforce.
I have to say, this makes me so very angry. My wife’s contribution as a mother is so high as to be essentially priceless. If anyone dared downplay her role as a mother I can tell you they would not find the body.
To the mothers out there…you are awesome. I think so, and more importantly God certainly thinks so. The bible greatly esteems motherhood as one of the most significant things a women can do and it’s about time the rest of the world took notice of it’s wisdom.
Rant over.
Jeff
Working Mums…a follow up
I was reminded recently that when it comes to communication, only about 8% of our communication comes through the actual words said, and the rest is communicated via tone of voice and body language. Clearly in the written form (such as a blog) tone and body language are missing, so the communication task becomes much more difficult. It is a good reminder that I need to be extra careful in blog posts to make the best use of the 8%.
So on to business…
Some of my dear friends were very challenged by this post http://cityonahillstanhope.blogspot.com/2007/10/counter-cultural-livingpart-2.html which speaks to the issue of working mums. To that end I wanted to add further clarify some of the thoughts I put forward…
Firstly let me say unequivocally that I do not believe in a one-size fits all answer to the question of parents working, particularly where circumstances leave little choice in the matter. Sydney is right up the global list when it comes to cost of living, so making hard choices is a way of life for everyone in or crazy city, not just the Christians.
Secondly, I had some feedback that what I wrote implied that children in care were worse off in terms of speech development and so forth. Reading back on the post now I can understand how that link may have been made, but to clarify, that is not what I meant to say - sorry if I confused anyone. The point I was trying to make was that as well as all the development that occurs in language, physical skills etc during these early years, young children are also learning and growing spiritually, and therefore this needs to be a consideration when thinking about the whole area of working/childcare. Additionally, the other area of child rearing that is more distinctly Christian is that of discipline and correction, and depending on your child-care arrangement, you may come against very different (secular) philosophies about how this is done. Again, it needs to be thought through.
In the end, the issue of whether mum’s go to work is a secondary, or perhaps tertiary level issue. What has become clearer to me is the need to first critically reflect on the root of what drives our decisions. I touched on this in a recent post http://cityonahillstanhope.blogspot.com/2007/12/exegeting-stanhope-surrounds.html which talks about idols. This is such a deep-seated issue. Idolatry is, in a very real sense, the driver of almost every sinful thought we have and action we do. And it’s not a new phenomenon. Read the Old Testament and one massive theme that threads the whole story is Israel’s persistent idolatry. The only thing that has changed is the idol, the object of worship. Instead of the Baal’s and Ashtoreths, we have comfort, approval or image.
The challenge for us is to think honestly about what is driving our decisions. So for example:
“I (Mum) have to go to work for 2 days a week”. OK, why?
“We need the money”. What for? What’s driving the expenditure?
“The Mortgage”. OK, why do you need the level of debt you have?
“‘Cause we needed to borrow this much to buy our house”. OK, why this house?
“Well, It’s not so much the house, we love the area”. OK, so you live in X (Castle Hill, North Shore, Balmain, etc etc). Why do you have to live there?
“Well, it’s close to cafe’s and just a quick trip to the beach and we just love the feel of the area”. OK. Would you consider moving to somewhere further west?
“No”. Right. Why?
“It just wouldn’t suit our lifestyle”…(a loaded statement that would need further dissection).
Anyway, you get the point. You could just as easily apply the same line of questioning to, say, a bloke looking at accepting a promotion with more money/longer hours/more pressure etc.
It’s not easy, nor particularly pleasant to think through these as they can reveal some truths which challenge us very deeply. Unfortunately living counter culturally will not happen unless we actively choose it.
I hope that makes things a little clearer. Thanks for reading and helping refine the thoughts on how we live as God’s people.
Jeff
