UNITED KINGDOM – A single mother who works as a house cleaner has received a storm of backlash on the Internet after she brought her 4-year-old son to work and allegedly spent a quarter of her work shift looking after her child, Newsweek reported.
According to a post from the cleaner’s employer who said they are “elderly and physically disabled,” on a forum on the parenting site Mumsnet, noted that the single mom cleaner, who usually cleans the employer’s home for four hours once every two weeks, was asked to do an additional “one-hour special clean” at the employer’s request.
The single mother asked if she could bring her son to the hour-long shift and the employer agreed to it, “as I did not want to seem unreasonable and she was doing me a favor.”
However, the employer was “not happy” with the cleaner because they didn’t realize “how much time she would spend not cleaning,” but rather keeping the boy occupied and making sure he doesn’t touch anything in the house, among other things.
The employer claimed that looking after the son “took up about 1/4 of the time” she was there, meaning around 15 minutes. They also “noticed she had not done all of the tasks we agreed on. I felt a bit irritated that I had paid her an hour for 45 minutes [of] work but I said nothing.”
The original poster also said that the cleaner is now asking whether she can bring the son along to her regular 4-hour cleaning sessions.
“I want to say absolutely not as I feel she could easily spend 1 hour of it focused on him and only 3 hrs cleaning and she won’t get it all done and she might miss things because she’s distracted by having to keep an eye on him, but she’ll expect the whole 4 hours pay,” the Mumsnet user said.
Several Mumsnet users supported the employer in the latest postings, suggesting they should decline the cleaner’s request.
One user said: “yanbu [you are not being unreasonable], any other job you wouldn’t be allowed so don’t allow it here. I would just politely say no without offering any explanation.”
A Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories published in December 2019 said the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households.
Another Pew Research study published back in April 2018 showed that Americans were “far more likely to express a negative view” about the rise of single moms than any other trend.
Two-thirds or 66 percent of those surveyed said that “more single women having children was bad for society,” while only four percent said this was “good for society.” The remaining 29 percent said the trend “doesn’t make much difference.”
The American Psychological Association (APA) says: “Life in a single parent household—though common—can be quite stressful for the adult and the children.
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