How do families have SAHMs?

[LikeDaisies]

Financially - I cannot comprehend how it’s possible!

Husband is a teacher. Earns around £44,000. That isn’t enough to cover our bills if I were to leave my job and stay at home with our baby.

Mortgage is £900. Other bills come to around £700 - not considering food, leisure, etc.

Not that I’d want to leave my job, but I’d love to be able to drop down to 3 days a week. But financially it just isn’t possible. We wouldn’t be able to afford our mortgage and bills.

So it leaves me wondering how I see so many families who are able to manage having a SAHM.

Please can anyone who is in this situation explain how it is possible/how you make it work?

Same here. We both work full time and dd does activities outside school 4 nights a week. She's a competitive gymnast so it takes a lot of commitment but working full time means we can afford the coaching, kit and travel

How do they get to the clubs?

How does she get there?

I bring them…or my dh does. Ds has scouts that starts at 6:30. Dd has a sports club that starts at 6. We have other sports that happen on Saturday and Sunday mornings. We finish work at 4:30 and are home by 5. I wfh. 2-3 days a week too.
ds once had a sports club that ran from 4-5 so I car pooled with another working mum for that one, we took it in turns and wfh on that day. Both our jobs were ok with that which helped.
A lot of clubs run in the evening though

Always worked full time (much as a lone parent).

Swimming lessons at a young age was a problem because the evenings were used for club swimming. They did have classes on a Saturday but I couldn't commit to that.
Ballet, Scouts, rugby and football were never a problem as they had evening classes. I guess I don't know what late afternoon/early evening classes they missed because I didn't explore those, we looked for ones which fitted my work hours.
Our after school club was very local to the primary school and were happy to collect children from any clubs that ran straight after school. That was great.

My parents always worked full-time and I was in a constant stream of extra curricular activities.

In a car with us? We don't get her to hitch a lift 😂.

🤣🤣🤣

@EvieBB surely you realise that not every child in every extracurricular activity has to stay at home parent?! in fact the reason a lot of these clubs are on later in the evenings is because the people holding them are in fact parents who hold down full-time jobs…

I run an Extra curricular club (in addition to my day job now I'm working) and its very usual for a group of children from the same school to arrive together as one parent has picked them up from Wraparound and brought them to us. (At 5.30pm).

But presumably if you work full time and school finishes at half 2??

Us too. Both work full time and husband has an additional part time job (farm). Our kids play every sport there is. We get the three of them there somehow even if “dinner” is waffles, beans and fried eggs.

It's great if you can finish at that time an wfh some days and make it work.
Unfortunately my job sometimes doesn't finish until 6.30pm, so not home until 7pm. It's whatever works for you as a family I guess 😊

School finishes at 15.30ish. When she was little she was in wrap around care but clubs started later. Now she's older she walks home and we take her from here. We make sure one of us will be home to sort it out. I've got promoted to the point I'm trusted to make up time so it's not an issue at all.

Yes of course I realise that :) :)
Many jobs though have varying shift patters e.g. those in healthcare so having set availability on particular evenings of the working week is a concept that goes out of the window when that's the case. For me personally, I was also struggling with chronic fatigue at the time so really had to pace myself. (I was eventually diagnosed with a b12 deficiency via private doctor). I was also on hand to help my elderly mum and didn't have any family nearby who could help with childcare. I don't regret being a sahm for those few years that I did it for a single minute. ....as I'm sure you don't regret your decisions. Whatever 'works' for you and your family is the right choice.

If it works for you and your family then that's great.

I was thinking this. There were a few SAHMs amongst the parents at DS’s school. Once they had had a second child it wasn’t worth their working as the cost of childcare would have been more than they earned.