Book Review: How to Help Your Husband…
Posted on August 20, 2008
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Well, the title - "How to Help Your Husband Make More Money So You Can Be a Stay At Home Mom" is not only too long to fit comfortably in the header, it is also misleading. A more accurate title would be "How to Drive Your Husband Away Or To an Early Grave So You Can Live Off of Alimony Payments or Life Insurance."
I found this book by accident while searching for a personal finance book on Amazon. Since I've been dabbling with the idea of starting my own business with my wife's help, I figured this book might be worth looking at. I figured wrong. Instead of being a book on how a wife can help her husband, it is more of a manual on how to manipulate him into what she wants him to be. The first give away is the table of contents. For example, Chapter 1 is titled 'The "Team Work" Decision: Great Ideas Come Before Great Actions.' The problem is the "decision" the author is talking about isn't one that a husband and wife have reached together, but one the wife has reached on her own to be a stay at home mom. Here is a passage from chapter 1:
Is your secret (or not so secret) desire to be a stay-at-home mom? If so, you are NOT alone. Many working mothers would prefer to stay home with their children, if their husband's income alone could support the family.
Gee, if only under-performing husbands would just get off their lazy butts and find a better paying jobs, women everywhere could fulfill their desire to stay at home and live off their husbands' income. Here is another passage:
However, without guidance on how to make enough money to be able to afford to have their wife stay home with the children, and for lack of a better alternative, the situation continues.
In How to Help Your Husband, you will be taken step-by-step through the actions that can give you the life you want, but the decision is up to you.
Maybe you're not too lazy to get a better paying job - maybe you're just too ignorant! Thank God this book is available to your wife so she can set you straight. And notice how the decision belongs to the wife? This much crap already, and we're not even done with the first chapter! Let's skim through the rest of the book.
Chapter 3 (Knowledge Is Power - And More Money!) sounds good, but it's really about the husband spending time and energy to gain more knowledge in the hope it will enable him to get a higher paying job to "better" support his wife. In other words, the husband expends the effort, while the wife reaps the reward.
Chapter 4 (Is Your Husband Underpaid?) includes sections to help the wife judge whether her husband is "worthy" (Resources on salary surveys) and interfere with his work relationships (How to help him negotiate a raise). In addition, there is a very helpful section (When it's time to move on) to help the wife determine when the husband should quit his present job and find another. What if the husband likes his present job, though?
I quit reading before Chapter 5 (Networking: A Husband and Wife Activity That Can Get Your Husband a Better Paying Job), but based on the first 4 chapters, it's probably full of instructions on how the wife can control her husband's personal and professional relationships. Chapter 7 (Marketing Your Husband) is probably about how the husband is a slob, and what the wife can do about it.
The rest of the chapters continue in the same vein, and I would stop here, except that Chapter 10 (Continue to Grow) deserves extra comment. Continue to Grow... what? By this point in the book, the wife should already have achieved her secret (or not so secret) desire to be a stay at home mom and live off of her husband's income. Apparently that isn't enough. The first section of Chapter 10 is titled "How to make sure he keeps that better paying job." In other words, how to make sure he can continue to support the wife in the manner she's become accustomed to. My question is, after all this "progress" the wife has "enabled" the husband to achieve, why would this even be a matter of concern? Is it possible that the husband might find he preferred his old, lower paying job and might try to go back to it? Is the author saying the wife's ability to stay home and not work is more important than the husband's satisfaction with his job? Is so, then the talk of "Team Work" in the earlier chapters is nothing but a big load of crap. Even more offensive to me is the second section of the chapter - "Moving up to the next level." WTF??? STILL not happy??? At this point, not only does the wife get to stay at home, she's even possibly convinced her husband to stay at a job he doesn't like just to maintain a higher income. Now, they (meaning he), need to keep moving "up?" I guess some people are just NEVER satisfied.
Should you buy this book? I would not recommend it.
Ken
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