The Unexamined Plight of Stay-at-Home Parents

How and why we need to bring this group into the child care conversation.

This may be the way I once perceived what parenthood would look like - well behaved kids smiling for the camera. Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

Of all the misguided notions I had as a younger person, one of the top ones might have been the role of stay-at-home parents. 

I am not entirely sure where this idea came from, perhaps it was part of the movement to empower women to be whatever we wanted. But there was also this idea, crystallized from watching the high-powered, suit-wearing, power-wielding characters on TV (think: Amanda Woodward from Melrose Place, Samantha Jones on SATC, even Jill Brock from Picket Fences*) that if you didn’t work for pay as an adult, then you were drastically missing out on something significant. 

My peers and I seemed to share the same sentiment - we would want kids one day, but we would always keep working. We’d never stop, not even slow down. We really believed Hilary Clinton when she said: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies,” implying that the brilliant minds didn’t actually do that. 

But then real life happens. You have the kids. Maybe you and your partner have an even split of incomes and responsibilities. Maybe one kid needs more. Maybe one partner needs more. Maybe the income split becomes lopsided, or a path begins to form where it makes sense for one of you to put the all-in effort at work, and the other runs the all-in crazy at home.  

And then you realize that your younger self had it all wrong. No one stops working when they become parents of a young child. They are working all the time. They just aren’t always paid for it. 

Because our GDP does not measure the caregiving work of parents, we have largely relegated this care work to be irrelevant. I have argued before that this current GDP model is a failed metric, and it’s contributed to the overall devaluation of care work, including why our caregivers are also paid such low wages.

We have also done a disservice to the parents who opt to stay at home - whether by choice or necessity. Child care is so expensive that parents’ after-tax income may not cover the full cost - especially if they have more than one child. And some parents decide, for millions of valid reasons, that taking a step back makes more sense for their family unit.

Elliot Haspel, whose work I have cited and referenced many times before in my own Substack, has written on this paradox of stay-at-home parents. In this widely cited article from the Atlantic, he writes: 

While stay-at-home parents tend to be left out of public benefits, they are frequently used as a wedge in policy debates. For instance, opponents of large-scale public child-care funding are quick to point out surveys that find many parents prefer the idea of a stay-at-home parent. Future Senator J. D. Vance claimed in a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed that major public investment in child care would be bad for children, who would be better cared for by a parent at home. A lot of Democratic rhetoric, meanwhile, focuses on the needs of parents working outside the home without mentioning stay-at-home parents. When Vice President Kamala Harris announced in 2023 a series of executive actions on child-care affordability, she explained, “As we know, for millions of parents, child care makes it possible to go to work and to be productive during the course of their day. Child care helps these Americans stay in the workforce, go to job training, or secure a paid job and earn money for college or retirement.”

Both of these approaches ignore that homemakers need support too. Many stay-at-home parents are isolated in an age when they are the minority. In 2023, the organization Mother Untitled commissioned a study that included a survey of 1,200 college-educated stay-at-home mothers and women actively considering becoming one. Although most of the mothers surveyed were glad that they had the chance to be home with their children, half said leaving the workforce shrank the size of their mom-friend circle; a similar number reported that making friends as a stay-at-home parent was hard. The all-consuming nature of stay-at-home parenting makes outside child care an important resource for them too—sometimes, they simply need a break. Research has linked child-care availability to parental mental health (for both working and stay-at-home parents), and also to better parenting practices.

Elliot and his colleague Ivana Greco at the think-tank Capita have been engaged in a first-of-its-kind research project looking at how stay-at-home parents intersect with public policy, particularly child care policy. I plan to report more on what they find in this space, but also give a bit of a sneak preview on how and why this conversation is happening and what data may be forthcoming to help shape the conversation.  If we are going to truly invest in a child care system that works for everyone, then we need to do more to bring the stay-at-home parents into the fold and understand their needs too. 

Q. Elliot & Ivana, you’ve been arguing that stay-at-home parents have become a “political cudgel” in the conversation surrounding child care policy though are actually given very little material or cultural support. Can you explain why that is, and where this came from? 

Elliot: I’ll let Ivana get more into the overall history, because she’s deeply steeped in it, but I’ll say this: the easiest way to argue against public investments in licensed child care is to say – true or not – that it’s an attack on the family, that it’s the government trying to get parents to stop taking care of their own kids. Back in the ‘70s, this was wrapped up in anti-communist rhetoric, since the USSR did provide a lot of government child care. And then on the other side, the messaging you hear from Democrats is all about women’s labor force participation, over and over again, implicitly (or explicitly, as in the Hillary Clinton quote) saying that mothers normatively should be working outside the home. So there’s this battle line drawn, often a quite emotionally charged one, but I think it’s completely false and unneeded! We can, in fact, support both stay-at-home parents and parents working outside the home.

Ivana: I think it might be helpful to know that Elliot and I come from different sides of the political spectrum; Elliot from a left-of-center perspective, and me from a right-of-center perspective.  My view is that in recent years, neither political party has been particularly interested in supporting stay-at-home moms or dads (I can only think of a handful of current politicians who are interested in this topic).  The important work these stay-at-home moms and dads do isn’t captured by the GDP or similar stats because it’s unpaid, and so it often gets ignored. I agree with Elliot that there’s now an unhelpful dynamic where policymakers will discuss child care issues, but either ignore stay-at-home parents or get caught up in fruitless debates that don’t move the ball.  I think our family and child care policies really need creative, bipartisan solutions that support parents in making the right choices for their own families — whether that’s working outside the home, or doing the important work of caring for children and family at home.  

Q. So what would such support for stay-at-home parents look like, and how would that be integrated into a larger, universal plan for child care?

Elliot: Here’s where I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves, because we’ll have a lot more to say in the near future! Generally, you can think of this in a couple of buckets: one, how do we broadly support stay-at-home parents’ financial stability and security? Ivana’s written some great stuff around these parents and retirement, social security disability insurance, etc. Two, how do we directly support these parents’ child care needs – and make no mistake, they have child care needs, even if they look different than that of parents working outside the home! And third, how do we marshal cultural supports to ensure these parents are not isolated and feel welcome in and supported by their communities? Many of these policies fit snugly alongside funding for licensed, external child care options and for other informal options like family, friends, and neighbor caregivers.

Ivana:  I agree with everything Elliot said.  I’d love to see our discussions of child care mimic more closely the way eldercare increasingly is provided.  For our frail or seriously ill seniors, there’s now a growing recognition that there is no such thing as a “one-size-fits all” solution.  For some seniors, the right place for them is to be in some sort of institutional care—but almost always, they still benefit from the support of family members, whether that’s aid with finances, medical appointments, companionship, etc., and so it’s important to help facilitate that.  For other seniors, families would rather care for them at home, but they often need significant help in doing so, especially for older people who need significant assistance with activities of daily living. Obviously, there are significant differences between child care and eldercare, but I’d love to see child care policy makers make more of an effort to understand what families actually want, rather than proceeding with a top-down vision of how families should operate.  

Q. We have this nostalgic view of stay-at-home parents that doesn’t quite match the reality. In your article, you mentioned that this set up of a single male earner and a woman unattached to the labor force never exceeded 57 percent of married households, even at its peak in 1940. Yet we have all of this cultural attachment to the mom who stays at home to focus on their kids, while the man goes out to make a living. I’m reminded of this line from Rachel Cusk’s book, AFTERMATH, referenced here:

“The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world.”

How and why do you think this image has persisted so long?

Ivana: So first, it is important to recognize that stay-at-home parents are a very diverse group.  There’s a lot of stay-at-home dads now.  There’s a lot of ethnic diversity in families with a stay-at-home parent.  For example, polling conducted by others shows that Latino and Hispanic families are particularly likely to want their children cared for at home by a parent.  Lower- and working- class families also often prefer their kids to be at home, rather than in daycares.  One thing we’ve found through our polling is that many stay-at-home parents work, whether remotely, or at night after their kids are in bed, or some other solution. So this is an area in which our popular culture has not really caught up to the reality of stay-at-home parents in 2024.

I don’t have an explanation for why the modern perception of stay-at-home parents doesn’t match reality, other than I think it serves certain unhelpful dynamics on both the Right and the Left.  On the conservative side of the spectrum, there are some who would say an ideal family is one where mom never works and dad makes all the money.  On the liberal side, there are some who say every female homemaker is essentially oppressed, and she’d be better off in the paid workforce.  (Simone de Beauvoir once famously argued no mother should be permitted to stay home with her children).  Whatever the reason, part of what we’re hoping to accomplish through our research is presenting a fuller picture of modern stay-at-home parents.    

Q: You have some exciting research coming out this fall, about stay at home parents and their role in the child care debate. And this research includes both progressives and conservative thinking as to how to better integrate this group into the larger goal of raising thriving children. What can you tell us about what’s coming out, and how you hope it will shape this conversation?

Elliot: Absolutely! So we’ve been conducting a multi-pronged research approach: we commissioned a survey of 1,200 stay-at-home parents, conducted a series of focus groups of stay-at-home parents, are doing research into both U.S. and international policies regarding stay-at-home parents, and we’re talking to child care policy and advocacy folks on both the political left and the political right. That will all be rolled into a report that we’re planning to publish by October. We’re hoping to do a few things: first, make this a conversation! By establishing baseline qualitative and quantitative data, we can shine a light on this important group and offer a way to discourse around how we integrate them into public policy, and especially child care policy. I think that will benefit all families, whatever their caregiving setup, because it means we build bonds of solidarity, we strengthen community supports, and we smooth the path toward a comprehensive and inclusive child care policy. 

I should note this is just phase one, there will be more work to come. 

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Did you miss the chance to hear our conversation on the future of child care reporting? I’ll have a writeup soon on this topic, but the video to watch is available here. Thanks to so many of you who joined the conversation and participated in the lively discussion. As a writer who covers this topic, there is no better motivation than to hear from people who read and are informed by this work!

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*I would love to hear from people about who were their equivalents of the power women that their younger selves admired.