AIBU to think SAHMs are lazy?

[Fluffyscrubberdo]

As a stay at home mum how often do you get this judgement online vs real life?
It seems no one really says it in real life but there seems to be so much vitriol on here that there must be a fair amount of people who think it.
Has anyone made a rude comment to you in person?
Or are you a person who think sahm’s are lazy?

AIBU to think sometimes a sahm is in a family’s best interest?

Do they really though? When I was on maternity leave with each of my children I did the vast majority of household chores and childcare. H dealt with the children when he could but he often didn't back from work until late or worked nights. He has all his clothes washed and ironed, his house is kept (relatively) clean, and he gets to rest when he comes home. I work part time now too but still do the majority of the housework. My husband has a very stressful job but even he says it's harder mentally to stay at home with three children!

Well it depends.

once the kids have started school and still being a SAHP..….

I’ve done both working parent and stay at home parent. I actually found the sweet spot for me was working part time and at home part time.

full time working and parenting is the hardest gig

I really don’t care what other people do

Yet another click bait where the OP plops a controversial statement and runs, never to be heard of again. MN is supposed to be a discussion board rather than let's post provocative comments without any intention of actual discussion or engagement but simply to wind people up.

@Mumsnet-I know this is really difficult to police but is there anything that can be done to clamp down on such threads.

Why would I class a whole group of people who I don’t know as lazy?

no I don’t think SAHMs as a group are lazy. Will there be some lazy individuals SAHMs? Of course. Same as there are lazy people who go to work.

i can’t vote as both can be true. I have no doubt that some SAHM are lazy and some work hard and are doing what’s best for their family. The same would apply to working parents. We are all different, whether we work or not.

If you can afford to be a SAHM and want to be it's a very sensible choice, trying to do everything is really hard and childcare is really expensive so unless you have a good job you don't gain much income by working.

Some SAHM are there to home school because their child school refuses. Are they lazy?

I’m a SAhm and my kids are In nursery 2 and 3 times a week ( eldest does 3) no judgement just people saying they wish they could do it. I judge myself tho- I assumed my house would be spotless and I’d be baking fresh bread everyday. Somehow it’s not the case

So what is your opinion then ? That a woman’s place is in the home ?

Are you putting together an article or something

As a single working parent with quite a few SAHM friends, I’d say that their lives were much easier than mine. Not that they were lazy.

@Fluffyscrubberdo I work from home FT now and whilst I do full-time hours 9-5.30, I still feel much lazier than if I had to go out to work. I don’t have the early start for getting dressed up and commuting as I once did and I don’t have the commute home. I benefit from sticking a couple of wash loads on during the day and being home for when my kids return from school and cooking dinner at an appropriate hour. So I don’t have that frantic evening having to get on top of things having been OUT at work all day. Being at home is a much more relaxed life, so lazier than going out to work.

So, on this basis and without even a paid job at home to do, I’m going to say yes, SAHM mums are lazy.

The core tasks a SAHM does can be outsourced and paid for and is called a job/career - until the Mother does it and is expected to do it without complaint.

I’ve said it on here before but my mum worked her whole life and died poor. She was also married to my bio father, working full time and he left her in a much worse position than I’d be if my husband left me, a SAHM. It’s not one size fits all and frankly no one else’s business how someone’s family chooses to care for their children. I’m certainly not lazy but if someone thinks I am then that’s not something I can or want to do anything about.

If the dc are home full time then no, SAHM are not lazy. However, they’re not really busy once the dc are at school for most of the day. I work full time and still do all the things you need to do with children and the house etc.

SAHM are putting themselves at risk. There’s been several threads lately where the SAHM is screwed after their partner/husband leaves them.

I have 'quite a collection' of children, as a stranger once put it to me, and i'm a SAHM. I have been since my eldest was born in 2012. I am far from lazy. My youngest starts reception in September and I start my retraining. I feel lucky to have been at home and I don't take it for granted.

There are so many posts on MN about mums not being able to cope with working, childcare and housework. I think being a SAHM just lifts the burden a bit, looking after small children at home and doing everything in the house is a full time job in itself. When the children are all in school in the day you might say they would be lazy not to get even a part time job (if they can), but there is still plenty to do just at a less hectic rate and people are allowed a bit of free time to do things they want to do as well as things they have to do.

ExDP constantly told me I was lazy. He was an abuser. I eventually managed to LTB.

I was a SAHM for donkey's years and I freely admit that much of the time I was lazy. Especially as the children got to all be in senior school, I had an insane amount of free time but it came at the cost of other freedoms over the years. I felt it was a fair trade off at the time, and still do. I have no guilt or regrets. Being a SAHM shouldn't be about working yourself to the bone every hour in the day just to justify to others why you are not in paid employment.

The most important thing for me was just to be readily available whenever needed, to be able to drop whatever else was going on without needing permission from an employer, to be there for my children.

Knowing that I never needed to miss a sports day, never needed to say no to an after school club or a play date they wanted. Knowing that I didn't resent my precious weekend time being taken up with running them around to birthday parties and other activities, or having my house always full of their friends.

Never not having time to get a home cooked meal on the table, or read to them at bedtime.

Never having a day where I only saw them for a couple of hours when they were very small.

Never having to worry about childcare in the holidays or on school inset days and having to butter up SAHM 'friends' I hardly knew and beg favours from them just so I didn't have to use my annual leave up to look after my own kids at short notice. (yes working mums, we see you and we know what you are doing.)

Never having to send them to school not potty trained because I didn't have enough annual leave left to spend on the three solid weeks we needed at home until we could finally crack it.

Never having to argue with my husband about which one of us should stay home if a child was sick. Never having to argue with my husband about which one of us carried the biggest load with the children or the household chores as well as holding down a job.

Never having that sinking feeling on a Sunday night.

Never having to spend my entire weekend doing laundry and hoovering and batch cooking for the freezer, just to keep the household from imploding.

Never having to spend an insane percentage of my earnings on childcare and wonder if the little that is left is actually worth the sacrifice and the stress.

Never resenting the unrelenting grind of my day to day life and feeling hard done by.

If that meant I could fanny around pleasing myself for much of the day once they were all at school, then so what?

Of course if I had stayed in work and developed my career further, I might eventually have had a high paying job that brought in a lot more extra money to the household, but I don't see that that would have given us a better quality of life. Only the ability to buy more expensive stuff, which isn't the same thing.

But these days so many working parents work from home anyway, and in reality get far more free time and flexibility than they technically should, if they are being entirely honest, that working FT is not quite the slog it used to be when mine were at school.

I’ve never thought of it like this. Really good point about the men who are benefiting from the Mother taking on the childcare including sickness which means he doesn’t have to take time off work!

Surely that would put him ahead of others career wise as he can take on extra travel, hours, doesn’t have to take much dependents leave etc…

Starting threads like this on MN is such lazy journalism.

Not lazy but I do recall a 36 year old gleefully tell me she had definitely retired (and had as soon as she had her first). Her second child was about to go to high school at this point. Her husband had some very strong ideas about how she should keep herself and shouldn’t be over a certain weight. Concerning on so many levels.

Context: DH is SAHP as we have small children but I do school runs and have majority of mental load whilst working too. He complains at times he has to work around everyone’s schedules, forgetting the down time he has for at least part of the time they’re at school. Parenting is rough regardless.

Easy now, pay later.

It's like the whole trad wife thing. We abandoned it because it doesn't work for women.

Betting your whole existence on another person is nuts.

I’ll bite.

I’m a SAHM, as a person, I can be lazy. I hate cleaning and cooking. as a parent, I am far from lazy. I am present for my kids every day and take on the full mental load for the kids needs relating to school and extra curricular activities.
I am also ND so too much time with my kids overwhelms me, but time away from them kills me.

I have a very present husband who does about 40% of the school runs, takes the kids to swim lessons, goes to kids parties, cooks about 75% of the time, pays for a cleaner once a quarter to do a deep clean and does 50% of bath & bed times.

I know working out of the home parents who do more than me and I know SAHMs who do less than me

yes and that's why I don't agree with the claim that SAHMing somehow benefits 'other people'. It benefits the working husband, for sure. Working parents without a SAHP at home, who need to compete with someone not affected by family obligations, not so much.