Staying at home with kids IS a contribution and it is also WORK

[carshaker]

A lot of people don't respect a mum who's ' just at home '. Like she's not really contributing to the family.

The reality is though, that it's very much a big contribution, even if it's not financial.

If you took away the financial risk of staying home long term, what's the issue with it? Why is it considered by many ( especially women ), less than ?

If this is a woman's choice, what's the issue ?

Ever had to go to A and E because you turned your back long enough to take a shower? Or popped to the shop only to come home and find the neighbours helping your DH to find your toddler who went wandering? But wait, there's more .... I learned really fast and he didn't do it on purpose.

The only problem is the risk from not having earning power. It’s not just long term risk. It’s much harder for a sahp to kick out an abusive spouse. Money is power.

But you’ve decided arbitrarily that income is a measure of worth. DH switched fields from the one we both trained for and since has made far more money. But that doesn’t mean my career becomes any less valuable, or that it’s ‘natural’ for me to take on more childcare once DS was born. He’s the CEO of a major organisation. That doesn’t let him off parenting.

There's nothing wrong with a family deciding to have one career. Whether it's the most lucrative, or the person who is most interested, or for any other reason.

There are plenty of careers that place restrictions on family life. Not just CEOs. But military jobs which are quite common, for example, tend to put limits on what shape the family life will take.

My own father worked on a tanker ship and was gone for large parts of the year. Truckers, diplomats, there are lots of different examples.

In these instances the other spouse will often have to be the one to provide flexibility and be able to manage alone for periods. Being a stay at home parent may be worth considering for a lot of reasons, practically, and sometimes even financially. Especially with young kids.

I also think there is a lot to be said for women having kids a little younger than is now common - at least for middle class women - and pursuing a career after kids are a bit older. It can work out very nicely if the man retires earlier and can take over a more domestic role kids are going out into the world.

Yet he is high functioning at work and you didn’t know this before you had children? Seems really unlikely.

This is such an ignorant comment. You have no idea what experience sahp are having.

I was a sahp, I'm disabled, my son is significantly disabled (he was 2-5 at the time) . My mother was terminally ill and I was caring for her and my grandfather was end of life which I was also responsible for.
You really think my life was easy.

People become sahp for a few reasons-

Because they can afford to
Because they have to due to caring responsibility
Because it's better financially/other parent can't pick up slack.

I do not understand why women like to compare themselves with other women and find others lacking. Do you feel better about yourself if you look down on others? Life should not be a competition of who has the worst life.

There are often threads on here about working women who want to end their relationships but can't afford to as well.

I resent the posts on here about high flying careers means you can't engage and be a parent.

I'm really senior, triple figure salary, and I'm a lone parent. Raised my kid on my own from 1 and she is now 15

Careers don't render these men incompetent.

But they generally have more options

I also resent the “sahm are doomed dependent doormats” narrative. Far from
the truth for many. For me and the many other (temporary) sahm I know we were successful professionals pre kids took 5-6 years out and are back to being successful professionals again. This model worked really well for our family and many other friends too.

I go to work for a break.

Same.

@maybein2022 my husband outearns me 3:1 but still parents and does the childcare equally. Because our earning potential is ‘work’ and parenting is parenting. And we are equal there. And just because I earn less (we both have PhDs, but he’s a doctor and I am a humanities academic so he was always always going to out earn me whether we had kids or not) it doesn’t mean he hasn’t made sacrifices for MY career to succeed. Or that he doesn’t equally value my career. It isn’t measured by how many dollars I earn. He’s enabled my career in the same way I have enabled his. And we both worked 4 days a week at one point so our kids saw more of us. Because to him that was important as a father- and it was actually his idea. Did it mean it took him longer to finish his training? Yes. But parenthood was equally important for him and he didn’t see why I would be the one sacrificing. In fact as he said mathematically in the long run given his earning potential he could build it back more quickly than I could, so actually it made MORE sense for him to take time off than me. The reality is that even if he took 3 years off to be a SAHP within a decade he would outearn me so logically if we needed one of us to take time off it would be him. My career would recover MUCH more slowly and my earning capacity would hit a ceiling anyway. P

And now that our kids are older both of us have built our careers back up. Unfortunately most men will literally never ever consider that they could take a break/part time hours especially for their families and certainly not for their wife’s careers. And yes, my husband has had many a raised eyebrow about his choices.

@MangshorJhol I didn’t say that how successful/important someone is is only measured by how much money they earn. I just said that for us, personally, (and everyone’s situations are different) the facts are that we could not have afforded for my husband to take any significant time out of his working career to look after our kids. In fact the short period of time he did actually pick up a bit more slack with pick ups and drop offs when my job didn’t allow it was actually really stressful for everyone. Luckily this was a short term thing. That doesn’t mean he’s not an excellent parent, hands on and involved with our kids- he is. He does more than his fair ‘share’ when he’s not working. I just meant for us, that we didn’t share the actual ‘working week’ childcare as financially is didn’t, and still doesn’t, make sense, and it doesn’t bother me at all.

As above- income is not the only measure of worth at all. I don’t think my husband is any ‘better’ than me because he earns more, nor do I ‘let him off’ parenting. Just purely financially, whatever I do with my career, he will always earn more and money is what pays the bills. He is a great parent and does a lot of parenting, just not whilst he’s out doing his paid employment.

It’s interesting that that seems to be an issue on this thread, that women who ‘choose’ to ‘let’ their husbands do their job and not parent are getting a bashing. It’s perfectly possible for men to hold down a good job, and do a good job of parenting as well, same as it is for women. I totally agree that these men who have such ‘big jobs’ that they can’t do any parenting at all are taking the absolute mick, especially when the woman then ends up doing everything for them as well.

Caring work is not valued. See child care workers (paid minimum wage) care work.
Carer allowance is dreadful.
Plus not every woman has a career, some of us just have a job to pay the bills.
I dream of a life of leisure, I can fill my days very easily.

While I’m glad your choices worked for you I always feel a flaw in this logic is that if anyone can afford to go part-time, surely it’s the higher earner as the financial hit of dropping hours would be less? I guess you (or they) could argue that it’ll be detrimental to their career but why should only women (and it is overwhelmingly women) be the only ones to have their careers impacted by kids? It shouldn’t be a given that men (or the higher earner, whatever their sex) continue completely unencumbered while the lower earner sets back their own prospects even further. It’s actually me with the bigger career and higher earnings in my partnership but if it was my partner and he pulled the “but my career/earning potential” card I’d say well yes, that’s what happens when you have kids, suck it up, and insist we both go part time. It also sets a better workplace example and culture for the future if more men do this.

It's sad that so many women on this thread don't value it, just because they also work alongside being mums.

We should all be supporting women who work and women who are stay at home parents.

What’s ‘sad’ about it, though? Women don’t need to validate other women’s choices when they consider them anti-feminist. I’m not preventing anyone from becoming economically inactive. I’m just not prepared to pretend it’s almost always anything other than a deeply unwise decision which has longterm negative consequences for the non-working parent. And I think the bleat ‘I’m so fortunate to be able to stay at home!’ and ‘My DH earns sooo much more that naturally I was the one to stop work’ are signs of chronic underthinking.

I absolutely get that some people are forced into being a longterm SAHP by circumstances. The only people of either sex I know (including two men) who have been longterm SAHPs were so because of significant disabilities in their child, their own illness/MH issues, or being a trailing spouse who couldn’t find work.

I see this everywhere on MN, except these 'debate' threads. Interesting, that!

Do you think it’s sad that posters try to devalue women because they work and have kids? telling them they feel sorry for their kids? As an example?

Because it only seems to be ‘so sad’ when it’s going one particular way.

What support do sahp want from anyone outside their family?

I work almost fulltime (4.5 days) and have a DD.

My own mother was a SAHM with a lot of kids, she instilled in me to never become dependent on a man like she had. When my father left we went from a nice middle class existence to my grandparents having to buy us food very quickly. It took my mother 15 years to get back on track.

Before this all happened she was very vocal about the virtues of stay at home motherhood, even going on a major talkshow about it (was something about tax breaks being taken away in my country).

This downturn in circumstances has stuck with me, I would never work less than 4 days and I am in a well-paying career which means I can survive without my DH if I had to. It would made me very nervous if I wasn't able to. DH earns a lot less than me and does not have the same hangups.

@ShouldhavebeencalledAppollo I do, I think it's really sad.

I think we should all support both choices.

As I've said MANY times on this thread.

I think working mothers are amazing. I think stay at home mothers are amazing.

I think we need to support each other.

I think nurseries can be good for children.

I think staying home with children can be good for them too.

I think working mothers still spend quality time with their kids.

I don't think they're outsourcing parenting. They still do plenty of parenting.

I think it's hard being a mum today and we should all stop judging each other so harshly.

What I find odd is that no-one thinks retiring early is a bad thing. In fact most people aspire to it. They would have no issue with someone giving up work if they win a large amount of money either. It would all be positive, go for it vibes. I chose to stop working at 38, because I could, and it worked for us. Its irrelevant whether I happened to have children or not, or what I chose to do with my free time.