Exactly lazy. It’s a nonsense question. You might as well ask, what is proper “work” - being a pizza delivery person or a gardener?
I personally would have found it harder bringing up my kids if I’d also been working, but that’s because I was working in Child Protection and I would have found it difficult to switch between the two, eg you’re fussing about the your own kids homework or something in the morning and then you go to work and there’s babies being born addicted to heroin. But if I’d had maybe a creative job or a fairly low stress office job with a group of people I enjoyed working with, then it might have been a good balance and, as such less mentally draining overall. Because what’s draining as a SAHM, is not the individual tasks, it’s the relentlessness of it and you never get a change of scene or a break.
My friend who always worked, employed a fantastic nanny, so of course she looked forward to the hours she spent with her kids in the evenings. Her and her husband would both come home at 6pm. The kids had had dinner; homework done; house tidied and laundry on. So of course they could enjoy reading stories with the kids or playing at bedtime. They wouldn’t have felt the same if they’d been doing the same all day.
I do think it’s very hard for parents who have to rush in the mornings to drop their kids off very early at day nurseries and then fight through traffic to pick them up. Then they get home and have tired cranky kids and still have everything else to do before they do it all again the next day.
But as someone said upthread, it apples and pears. We had 4 children so I was with at least one pre-schooler every day for ten years. My idea of a “break” was sitting on a tube without kids, or going round Tesco handsfree, even though the tube had been the bane if my life when I’d been working. It’s funny how your perspectives change.
I never even thought about whether I was “working” or not because frankly when you’re with 4 children you don’t have time. When people used to say to me, “How do you cope with 4 under 8 and your DH away so much?” I used to wonder what they were talking about because that was the life we’d chosen and what else was I supposed to do?
I have a plan to return to “proper work” now, in my mid 40s and this will happen in the next two years (though I’ll be working for myself). Yes it will put more pressure in the family in one sense, but in another sense, it will give me a “break” in the sense of an identity outside being a mum and wife because what’s draining as a SAHM is that you can very easily lose yourself and this is bad for mental health.
There’s no right or wrong here and it doesn’t matter who is working harder or whatever. There will always be people who have more or less stressful lives than you and it’s not a competition. In different circumstances, I would have been working no doubt. Maybe I would have only had one or two DC? But I married the man I did and this is how we have organised ourselves because it make the most sense in our psruvukst circumstances.