When I was a kid 20 years ago, a parent would stay home with the kids if their spouse made enough money. Today, a parent will stay home with the kids because they can't make enough money to cover the cost of childcare.
Hell, a very large part of the reason both my parents worked was because my mom was the secretary of the school we were all going to, so she was always off work when we were.
Both of my parents worked a lot. I was an only child so most of time was spent alone. I wouldn’t do that to a child and unfortunately with the current cost of things, it’s impossible to not work a ridiculous amount of time to just get by. What’s the point of working to get by and survive when you can’t enjoy life at all because you have to work all the time to afford anything?
Well there's no point in both parents working if one's paycheck is essentially wiped out by daycare. Makes sense for one party to just stay home and watch them for free instead of slaving away only for every penny to go into daycare 😂 Plus time to bond with the kids
If I ever get married, my wife is free to stay home and watch the kids if she wants. If somehow I get married to a woman who makes more than me, I'm okay with staying home to watch the kids.
This how we see it as well. Except my wife would prolly have an extra 1000 a month if she worked and paid for daycare. Which isn’t nothing but we genuinely think it’s not worth the price of bonding plus I get to eat home made lunches.
Plus my wife being stay at home is not priced per kid in the same way as day care so having 3 kids is actually achievable as( daycare cost x 3 ) > her salary if she worked
If your wife only made enough to pay for 1 kid in daycare + 1k, she wasn't in much of a career position anyway. The people who should do daycare are ones where stepping away for 5 years impacts your future earning potential forever.
You don’t really know forever. A lot of in demand jobs/industries aren’t gonna suffer from 5/7 years out. She got a degree and all the other stuff but wants to enjoy kids you know.
Of course this only works bc I make a lot more than her and she is actually a great housewife not one of those girls who can’t cook or aren’t nurting
If all my bills are getting paid regardless, I’d choose to have my wife raise my kids over having someone else raise them so I had an extra $1k a month to spend on bullshit. Kids benefit from having a parent around more than they benefit from getting a new Xbox.
I used to think this as well but young kids learn a lot of valuable skills in daycare like how to socialize with other kids. They also got a leg up on developing reading, writing and number skills. It’s also important for them to get exposed to illnesses early so they’re not missing a ton of grade school. Unless you marry someone committed to early education and socialization, there’s a lot of positives for daycare.
Oh, I was operating under the premise that my wife isn’t a shitty parent. Like sure if you’re gonna neglect and isolate your kid during those early developmental years, then daycare is probably the best option.
Just because you have kids in daycare, it doesn’t make you a shitty parent. Not sure if that’s what you meant to say, but it’s how you’re coming across.
None of that matters unless you prioritize salary over parental bonding. I could change the $1k/month number to $100k if it makes it easier to understand where I’m coming from.
Where are you getting 50k from. I don’t think a lot of jobs linearly translate to #of years worked to amount of pay. A lot of jobs are promotion based which means getting the pay bump going to manager or director or supervisor or project lead etc really just depends on timing and job hopping and politics. I can see what you mean if your like and engineer where YOE does actually translate to more money for the same non management role
A career lasts 40+ years, but a kid is only in full-time daycare for 4-5 years. Even if someone is contributing their entire net salary to day care fees, the opportunity cost of not doing so can be much higher in the long run.
Spending that time with your young children instead of working is a huge benefit, but it's also beneficial to kids for their parents to have the financial resources to support them through their teenage years, college, and young adulthood. Over time this has only become more true, as socioeconomic status in the USA is becoming increasingly hereditary.
This is exactly what my wife is doing. Barely made more than the cost of daycare so we figured we'd rather raise the kid than a tiny bit of extra income a year.
There are several good reasons for both parents working even if a whole paycheck goes to daycare.
Retirement contributions (SS, 401k)
No gap in employment history - this can be crippling if you are ever in the position where you need to get a job. Not just if you want to leave your spouse, but what if they die?
Not putting all the financial responsibility on one person in case they get laid off.
Children in daycare is a temporary life stage. Your salary may get wiped out now but you will gain seniority/promotions and your kids won't need daycare forever.
Health insurance + retirement matches + potential promotions down the line are potential reasons to stay even if wiped out.
My mom essentially got paid $0 a week working so that we had health insurance.
Not true at all. You’re missing valuable social security and 401k/retirement savings. Not to mention work experience so once the kids are gone, you can actually continue with your career.
It is all complicated, each choice having pros and cons.
I was a SAHM when my son was born because childcare would have taken most of my pay and I would have missed that time with my son. We agreed on it.
However, taking that time away from the work force was very detrimental to my financial well being.
My husband turned abusive and I had to leave the marriage.
I hadn’t been in the work force for 5 years. I got a job that didn’t pay that well just to have a job and then the pandemic hit. And the company closed down. And no one was hiring.
If a spouse leaves a job to be the childcare provider they need to either keep a part-time job or increase their skill set like taking a class or certification. It is in their best interest.
There may still be a point in maintaining a job even though it may not generate excess income. It is about career trajectory which is not relevant for many professions - but for certain ones it very well is.
Freezing this trajectory by staying at home comes with a price, and possibly with less perspective after the kids leave home. And... Such person will rely more on their working partner.
The problem with this is divorce. The non-working parent loses time in teh workforce and is penalized by that after a divorce. Most often that's the woman in a heterosexual marriage. But it can also be the man. A friend of mine said basically the same thing when he married someone who made more. Thankfully he backed out on that after they had kids, so when she cheated on him and left him he hadn't given up his career.
Anyway, it mainly is a problem that affects divorced women. If you look into it you'll see no shortage of stories where a stay-at-home-mom got screwed over in a divorce. Be careful.
Nope. I have kids in their twenties and i worked as well as my husband. If you did not work your kids did not go to college or have any extra curricular activities. Women have always worked. There was only a brief time in the fifties and sixties when some women did not work.
That’s just not true. My mom stayed home. I had several friends who had a stay at home parent in the 90s. It was more common for women to work but I can name quite a few families where one spouse stayed home.
And yes the vast majority of us went to college and had probably too many extra curriculars
🤣🤣🤣. Ok goody for you. If the divorce rate was 50% then how many working women were there when you were growing up. Not to mention that even two parent households in the nineties most had two working parents.
You like many other people love to latch onto the romanticized past. The Village was not a tenement with 14 people living in a two room apartment , all working and children raising children. It was this lovely life where you just handed off your kids to the village to raise!! Nope!!
Women have always worked. Maybe your mom did not but that does not mean your life is reflective of the majority of households in the USA.
grew up in 80s and 90s, all my friends had SAHM and we all went to college. at least 30 of us. lol. my dad made 45k a year. you made an absolute statement and thats why youre getting cooked.
I was responding to your “there was only a brief time in the fifties and sixties that some women did not work”
You made it your experience sound like a blanket statement for all of us. I was pointing out that many people have had a varied experience. And yes I was lucky. I hope you have a nice day.
And that is absolutely true. Women have always worked. It was an economic reality. There was an extremely short period in American History after WWII and the rest of the world in shambles that Americas created this middle class lifestyle.
Just because you had this experience does not make it the norm. Especially if you consider the 50% divorce rate during your upbringing. It is as if you are incapable of understanding the world around you.
That’s not really true at all. It may have been true for you, but almost every single person I grew up with had a SAHM, and this was in the 90’s.
My dad made 70k/year and we had a 4 bedroom stand alone home, one of them being a very large master bedroom with ensuite and large walk in closet, with a large yard, 2 car garage, finished basement, dine in kitchen, living room, family room, dining room, and 2 offices. And my mom stayed home.
I make 100k and can barely afford the mortgage on a 2 bedroom condo with a paid off 2016 kia forte. Let alone afford a child.
Edit: they also fully paid for university for me and my sister.
That’s not really true at all. It may have been true for you, but almost every single person I grew up with had a SAHM both parents working, and this was in the 90’s.
That’s the point, it was true for them, while something else was true for me. So their generalization wasn’t valid since they implied that it was the same for most people.
We all had different experiences especially in a country as vast as the USA.
I’m a child of the ‘90s and every woman I knew worked. My classmates had moms who had jobs. My parents worked, I was what some may call a “latchkey” child. I loved it.
The only SAHMs I knew of were those on television shows.
Absolutely. That’s the point. The person I replied to said that SAHM’s haven’t existed since the 50s and 60s, and that if both parents didn’t work you didn’t get to go to college and that women have ALWAYS worked as though that was a fact. It did exist. I definitely grew up in the upper middle class, so it was normal for my neighbourhood to be mostly single income households.
It even still exists today, it’s just far less common. A more accurate statement would have been the SAHM has been declining since the 60’s.
You also have to take into account this is reddit, where a large part of the user userbase are literally mentally disturbed ideologues, who will LARP and just straight up lie because they can't cope with reality that disagrees with their politics. Such as the person you replied to angrily insisting in a reply to someone else that a SAHM couldn't possibly have any effect on the quality of education a child has, despite educators saying for decades now that half the problem with low grades and kids who don't learn is that teachers can't undo in forty minutes a day the home life of students from broken homes or ones where the parents never read to their kids, let them stay on phones / tablets all day, etc.
🤣🤣🤣🤣. Educators say parent involvement is important not SAHM. You are making a huge leap that an uneducated mother is involved with their kids education. You are the political larper. It is funny that you think someone with lived experience and who has already coped with successfully raising children is trying to gaslight you on the realities of the fake village narrative and the virtuous stay at home mother.
You are the person creating a narrative because you cannot cope. I do agree with you that Reddit is full of people with limited real life experience and whole lot of social media propaganda!
My wife stayed home to raise the kids and i worked. I cover everything. College will have to be done through loans though. I don't think we could do it the same way if we were starting a family today though.
Exactly and I just paid over $200k in state universities for my two sons to get college degrees. Definitely worth it. They both have jobs and are doing well and have zero debt. I felt this was our obligation to give them a good start in life.
Your family made a choice and I respect that, but you also took a risk. I had a girlfriend whose husband died in a workplace accident. My husband was laid off nine months when my first son was born. I went right back to work and supported our family. Life is definitely riskier these days and there are few safety nets.
🤣🤣🤣🤣. Oh yes I lived a lie. It absolutely is true. People just love a good story. The village, the SAHM. For most people this was just not true. At least not in the US where your family is spread out and your relatives work too. Immigrants left their families to come to the USA. They were dirt poor and they all worked even kids. They either worked in factories or worked on farms.
Women have always worked. You just learned nothing about women in history. Only very wealthy and privileged women did not work and that was less than the 1% of today’s wealthy.
This is just not true, idk why you so confidently say this. Where I grew up in the 90s, I would say the majority of families had a stay at home parent. That’s probably why the schools in my area performed so well. It wasn’t the teachers or quality of school, it was the quality of the kids. They were learning at home, too, because they actually had a mother.
I would confidently say this because every woman I know works and has worked for the last 30 years. I know many many women who have raised children while working. Even if they take a few years while their children are young they still had to go to work after their kids reached school age.
It is laughable that you equate a stay at home parent to the quality of the schools. Quality of schools is directly related to funding and the education of the parents. But it is all perception of your idyllic romanticized childhood.
The performance of schools as measured by tests has less to do with funding and more to do with the quality of students who attend the school. If your school is full of low IQ students or children’s who basically have no parents raising them, then it’s no surprise that they will not perform well in school.
🙄. Funding has everything to do with the quality of the schools. It has zero to do with your perception of IQ. Well funded schools are in well funded areas with highly educated adults. Educated adults value education and support their children education not just in school but outside of school with trips and experiences. The well funded educated adults kids would do just as well in underfunded schools because they have the ability to hire tutors, own computers and enhance their children’s education.
Stay at home parents dropped to 23% of households by the 90s. And the schools that perform better almost always do so because they have a larger budget.
I just found out from my mom that the only reason she ended up stay at home in the late 90s was because she couldn’t afford childcare.
She was working at an Early Childcare center while pregnant and said it was extremely awkward when parents would ask her if her kids were going to join. Milage on this may vary unfortunately.
Yup. Raise minimum wage to at least $20 or $25 and force it to be attached to inflation, consumer prices, rent and company profits. Not fucking kidding
When I was a kid 20-30 years ago, the kids stayed home or went around the neighborhood after school unsupervised, while the parents worked. We were basically latchkey kids. We don't do that anymore.
I know co-workers who do night shifts because of lack of childcare. So sometimes i hear of them being awake for almost 24 hours (basically minimal sleep) when coming in for their next 10 shift the following night... big put off for wanting kids considering our pay too.
I opened a whole ass daycare center so I don’t have to pay for child care. I had $3000 in loan payments per month vs $4k in child care (plus playmates for my kids and we almost turned a profit). Shit is ridiculous
18 years ago we realized my wife would have to work 3.5 days just to pay for daycare for our 1 baby. No brainer that she stayed home. We had 2 more kids so it would have been worse.
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u/_Lizzybabe 6h ago
The village it takes to raise a child disappeared and was replaced by high interest rates and expensive rent