The WFH Mama: Stay at Home Moms and Dads

My husband and I were talking about this Facebook video he saw where the husband was pissed because he was the only one with any income because his wife stayed home with their two year old. This got us talking about Stay at Home Moms and Stay at Home Dads and the stigmas surrounding them. Like, where did this mentality start that says if you’re a stay at home parent, it must mean you’re lazy and don’t want to work? Is it because, all too often, being a stay at home parent is also tied to financial issues? The cost of daycare is often the catalyst for a parent deciding to stay home. 

But that doesn’t mean the parent at home is lazy or useless. They do a lot. Caring for a child is a lot, as you might already be all too aware of if you’re reading this blog. In fact, when I’m talking to clients about life insurance, I have a conversation with couples about what services the surviving spouse would have to enlist if something happened to the stay at home spouse. This is how I get them to see the value of that role. 

I know stay at home moms, but I want to focus on the stay at home dad I know instead. Sometimes, they actually get treated worse. This guy was treated like a live in deadbeat dad. He and his ex are no longer together, and now she has to pay for daycare and a housekeeper to keep up with everything he did. There’s more than monetary value to stay at home parents. You can’t put a price tag on how much better it was for the kids to have a parent caring for them instead of a place that pays minimum wage to their workers and is filled with so many unknown entities. 

So I want to take a moment to point out that stay at home parents are the unsung heroes in the parenting world. They do so much for their little ones and get so little credit or appreciation for it. They probably hear about how lucky they are and how “I wish I could stay home with my kid or could have, but we just couldn’t afford it.” That might be true of their situation, but they don’t have to present it in a way that invalidates someone else’s hardships.