_______________LESSONS OF THE NANNY MURDER TRIAL BY DAWN MacKEEN (10/31/97)
	I am one of the public who places not a small portion of the blame for the demise of Matthew Eappen firmly at the hands of the parents. To expect a 19-year-old to take full-time care of two young children is ludicrous. Please note I said PARENTS and not MOTHER! I am a divorced father of two children, a 3- and a 5-year-old. I share joint physical custody with the children's mother. I have nothing but sympathy for parents out there who have no choice but to both work full time and place their kids in full-time day care. But if parents are well enough off to sacrifice some of their work time to be more active parents and choose to place their careers before their parenting responsibilities (for that is what they are doing), I have no sympathy. Why have children to have someone else bring them up? I fought hard to get joint physical custody and I have sacrificed my social life and career growth to be a good father to my kids. Parents who do not expect to make such sacrifices to be good parents should not have children in the first place. One more thing. Any discussion about who is to blame for the plight of this poor child, be it the au pair or the parents, should be gender-neutral in my opinion. Mr. Eappen could have taken time off from work to take care of his child just as easily as Mrs. Eappen could have. -- Mike Morley
	The thrust of "Lessons of the nanny murder trial" is that mothers and mother-figures cannot win in the court of public opinion no matter what choices they make. I thoroughly agree, and would like to add another spin to the issue. I am a 38-year-old mother of two elementary school children. My husband has a very demanding job that keeps him traveling internationally 50 percent of the time. When he is in town, he works no less than 60 hours a week. All this effort pays off in terms of an income that allows us to live in the suburbs and pay our bills. We can't afford a house, though (we rent one), or a car (we lease one), and we sure can't afford to enroll the kids in the private school where we would like them to be. I recently earned a master's degree, but it is in a "soft" human-services field, and the jobs for which I qualify pay little more than what I would have to fork over to someone to care for my kids while I worked for the paltry remainder. For this reason, I have decided it makes more sense for me to stay home. The amount of flak I get for this decision is unfathomable, and it comes almost exclusively from my most educated friends. I am regularly accused of wasting my degree, foolishly getting us into debt (student loans) and even spoiling my children by being here for them after school! The working-class people I know give me no such grief, nor do my many European friends. It seems educated Americans are the only ones who cannot understand why anyone would choose to raise their children rather than take a job, any job. To be honest, I wouldn't mind working, on my own terms. I want a part-time job, with flexible hours, close to home, and no traveling involved. So far I haven't found any such thing, and until I do, I'm staying put. My new answer to those who ask, "Aren't you going to USE your master's degree?" is simple: I'm using it. I'm thinking. -- Deborah Hornstra SALON | Nov. 7, 1997

R E C E N T L Y+| WHO NEEDS DAD? BY SUSIE BRIGHT

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