As a stay-at-home mom, I love thinking about expanded care opportunities beyond Ikea, the gym, and the church nursery. It would be great to have had a place I could have dropped my kids off when they were tiny so that I could have gone to the doctor or dentist without impacting my spouse's work schedule, for example. It would also have been a great resource when I was facing weeks of solo parenting as my partner traveled for work.
I wish we talked more about how many parents who are working outside the home or who stay at home have grandparent support and how often. Parents, working or not, are in very different places if they need paid childcare or if they have another set of adults available to lend a hand. To me, that's as big a piece of the puzzle as working/not-working parents.
Tiffany this is such a good point and I agree that more needs to be done looking into this. I’m fairly confident that Elliot and Ivana are looking into this, and I’m excited to report on what they find/are finding when the research comes out! It also speaks to the idea that many parents are staying home/not working for pay/not paying for child care for many different reasons, and that understanding some of those reasons can help create a more supportive system for ALL families.
Great comment. Where I live, in a mid-sized Texas city, there is a church with an MDO (Mothers' Day Out; some update it to PDO ☺️ ) program on every corner. I have been mostly a stay at home mom and my kids all went to one and for some time I taught in one. It's typically three days a week, say 9 am to 2 pm, for kids of preschool age. Most of the clientele is stay at home moms who need the dependable break (or work at an at-home part-time job) and want a gentle, play-based but professional instructional program for their kids. There is a lot of military in our town and lots of families don't have that extended network for either "hey can you watch the kids for a couple hours while I get a haircut and buy some jeans" or "Grandma wants to do messy crafts that Mom doesn't have the bandwidth for." It's more structured than drop in care, with a defined schedule and curriculum, but also of limited hours so that stay at home moms don't feel like they're putting their kids in "day care." The day is usually three hours of themed and seasonal play, books, music, crafts and outdoor time, followed by lunch and a 90 minute nap and then pickup. 2 pm - bedtime, plus mornings and the other 4 days a week, are still plenty of time for stay at home moms to feel like their kids are being raised "at home" while giving them a necessary break, their kids a change of scenery and developmental activities, and their families a chance to make friends.
This is a wonderful solution for many families but it's not available everywhere, I understand. I have a local friend who realized a longtime dream of buying a horse property outside of town and they made it maybe six months before buying a house and moving back into the city because she underestimated how difficult it would be to be alone with three preschool aged children on twenty acres an hour outside anywhere that has an MDO. (For some people that would absolutely be living the dream and many people historically did just that but where we live you can't just let your young children free-range on your property, due to venomous snakes, fire ants, coyotes, aggressive wild hogs, hornet nests, etc.) She also, to the other part of your comment, realized how much she had relied on her mom for support.
I 100% feel the grandparent thing, as well; I have been a mother of a large family for over twenty years. My husband's parents passed long ago and we've never lived close to my parents and they're not really the doting grandparent type anyway. I've never had a mom or MIL come help after coming home with any of my six newborns - oh how I envied my friends whose moms would come stay for six weeks and cook and clean and help with the siblings! I've never called a grandparent to pick kids up from school when a meeting ran long or I had a flat tire. I've never dropped the kids at their grandparents' so husband and I could take a long weekend away. And that's to say nothing of how important actually having that those relationships - not just pinch-hitting for actual childcare - are to happy, emotionally-regulated, stress-managed families. These supports are very important and doing without them is hard and those who have them are very VERY blessed!
Yes! The experience of me and my husband (stay at home/breadwinner situation) being hours/states away from both sets of grandparents is... entirely different than the neighbors two doors down, with the same setup and similarly aged children. Pretty much all their family is in town so the informal, spontaneous support does give me a sting of jealousy sometimes. I've never had childcare in four and a half years of parenting (except for church nursery sometimes & maybe a couple hours when grandparents make the trip to visit). And that kind of sounds crazy when said like that! It certainly contributed to some intense overwhelm and depression in recent years.
Same. I doubt that in the last decade, my sister and her husband have ever had to turn down an opportunity to do…anything at all, fun or un-fun, due to lack of childcare, because his parents are a few blocks away and mine are an hour away. And yes, the jealousy gets to me sometimes. It’s not even that there’s all that much I *want* to do, but I hate seeing how our work schedules affect my kid when we have a couple weeks in a row of endless church meetings, for example. Date nights are simply not a thing, and “an anniversary weekend away?” Not a chance.
The other impact of this is if we could ask our parents for help, it wouldn't be them caring for two children for a couple of days. It would mean they are now caring for four children for a couple of days, two of whom need a some extra support. They can only come to us when my brother's family has arranged childcare coverage--so school breaks aren't usually an option. It's an exponential ask for us who don't regularly have support.
We live on the other side of the country from our family, too. It's tough and I hear you on the jealousy. My brother and his family live next door to my parents, so the differences are stark.
I’m a stay-at-home mom, and per the research, I also “work” very part-time (in addition to homeschooling my son, which is a whole other job in and of itself). What I’m hearing in some of these comments (and correct me if I’m wrong or over-interpreting), is that SAHM is viewed by “working mothers” as a sort of second choice one might make only if one couldn’t find reliable childcare. Whereas at least for me, SAHM is my primary vocation. I chose it, with the support of my husband who wanted to make sure I didn’t feel like I was being relegated to the kids table after going to all the effort of getting a graduate degree.
Fortunately, my husband also has a very flexible job, so my part-time can fairly easily be patchworked around his full time, which is unique and a great gift. That said, while all 4 grandparents are alive and generally supportive, they live on the other side of the country and are not part of the childcare picture.
The thing is, the times when work and home conflict, I rarely if ever think about how much I wish we had reliable childcare, and am instead much more likely to be resentful that work is pulling me away from my kid.
If we’re going to talk about policy that could be helpful to stay-at-home-parents, I think we need to make sure that we’re not automatically assuming that these parents wish to be freed from the burden of childcare. I honestly don’t think there’s anything more important that I should be doing right now, so talking about me like I secretly wish to be contributing to the economy in a significant fashion if only I had free childcare is simply…not true, and frankly, borders on offensive.
I love that Ivana pointed out that many stay-at-home parents/primary caregivers are also employed. I think the oft-cited high maternal labor force participation rate can gloss over 1) that it varies a fair amount by youngest child’s age and 2) lots of families have one parent working part-time/flexibly who wouldn’t necessarily be served by a child care model built solely around a full time 9-5 (which can also miss shift workers, health care workers, etc). Based on federal survey data on kids before kindergarten (updated data slated to come out this year!), just over 2 in 5 young children are only regularly cared for by their parents. It’s even higher for kids under 3.
We just need to refuse to conflate the language of “work” with “paid jobs.” All mothers work. Stay at home (I don’t like that language either) mothers work. Sometimes they do that work in place of a paid job because their children’s or partners’ needs demand it. I get that we aren’t going to change the paying situation anytime soon. But we can start pushing back on the language to expose the hypocrisy of saying there are such things as “working moms” and, by implication, non-working moms.
What fascinated me by the early preview of what Elliot and Ivana are working on is that a lot of these stay at home parents actually work for pay too. Some are doing shift work to avoid paying for child care but are exhausting themselves in the process. Can you imagine taking care of a kid all day and then working all night on top of that? We KNOW there is a better way to raise families and we need to find to convince the policymakers that child care is a wise investment in ALL of our futures.
Adding, I would be thrilled if we could start a movement to interrupt the work-vanishing language. The comparison I think of is the shift from talking about “slavers” to “enslaved people” and from “slave owners” to “enslavers”.
I remember that Clinton moment so well! and honestly, as the daughter of a single working mother, I loved it, and I kind of still do!
this is such an interesting conversation around childcare and the need to include stay at home parents, and part of what Ilana especially says here makes me wonder if there are meaningful subcategories within that group. like, a parent who takes care of their kid during the day and *also* works at night or on the weekend or whatever strikes me as meaningfully different from someone who is not in the paid workforce at all. (I'd argue that the first group is really more like working parents without access to high-quality affordable childcare than they really are "stay at home parents" in the way we typically use that term.) I'll look forward to reading more from their research!
It goes to show that our idea of who is a stay-at-home parent and why they are doing so is really outdated. I'm glad the idea of bringing this group into the policy conversations is finally happening, and it's something I'm excited to keep covering. Thanks for reading!
yes, exactly! like, maybe it's married, middle-class white women whose husbands are making plenty of money and who are happy to step away from work--but it's clearly *also* people who are making that choice for lots of complicated reasons and some who are maybe less happy about it, and I think you're right that this kind of research and reporting is really important for developing better policy.
I feel like that Clinton moment was such a defining conversation for so many of us of a certain generation. Of course, knowing what I know about her now, I know she has such strong support for families of all stripes and would likely be on board with all of these discussions on the best way to support mothers, kids and families. Cookies be damned.
This is a very important topic and I was intrigued by your comment about child care improving parenting practices. Would love to hear more about the research on that. My mom was a parent educator (and early childhood teacher trainer) back in the 70s and that’s why she did it. She saw the evidence daily that it improved outcomes for kids in all walks of life.
Fascinating, I’m very interested in this research! I’m a stay at home mom and I have noticed a distinct increase, since Covid, in the number of appointments I make where additional people are not welcome. I understand the desire to decrease people in close quarters -particularly during sick season-but it has made it much more complicated to complete basic tasks or bring one child to an appointment when I have to find care for the others.
This intersects well with an exciting new project from Dr. Misty Heggeness, designed to quantify the economics of caregiving, including unpaid labor at home. Stay tuned!
We decided that I should be the at home care giver when I retired from the Navy in 1993. The budget allowed for it and I thought my efforts were better utilized preforming that function. Taking care of the kids and home was very much like being Navy. I truly felt I was in my element. I am not sure how good of a parent I was but many times it seemed just being there at home was important for the kids and my spouse. The spouse had a great career and the kids are alright with families of their own. So the decision was a win for us.
This is so, so important. Parents have been divided and conquered along these lines for far too long. Something I would like to add that hasn’t already been said is that under the status quo, parents of children with special needs are struggling mightily. Local daycares will often find ways to avoid enrolling them or excuses to counsel them out (which is awful), many providers aren’t adequately trained to support them, and specialty programs that are well set up to support them are often waitlisted or too far away to reasonably access. Some grandparents can be wonderful supports but not all, and not everyone has living, trustworthy family members nearby. So often, it is a parent who must stay home to support that child until they are old enough to access public education. It’s not a choice. It’s simply a necessity. I would love to see more visibility and voice for this parent constituency in this conversation.
I am a homeschooling SAHM in a tight knit group of other homeschoolers. We are all across the political spectrum. And all of us have some kind of part time work. I’ve been a SAHM basically since my college graduation in 2012. For at least 8 years of that (not consecutively), I have either had a <20/hr/wk job, had a small business or wished I did! And childcare has ALWAYS been a struggle. My friends who homeschool and have the most success as small business owners or part time work do it bc they have grandparents who live nearby. I’ve never had that. Without access to quality childcare, our society is missing out or creative small businesses, we are missing out on workers who could contribute positively to our communities and individuals like me miss out on opportunities to use more of our talents and make a difference in our communities. Homeschooling makes sense for our family but hello we are living in 2024 and if we ever want to pay off our house or go on a trip without debt then we need more than one income. Childcare is an issue that touches everyone and I am so glad we are creating a more inclusive conversation here. Happy to hear about the research and survey!
I really appreciated reading this piece Rebecca. I've been on both sides--working full time with my first 3 kids and navigating childcare with a demanding job and then shifting to full time at home parent after my 4th was born. It's complicated on both sides.
It is indeed - and the more we can understand the gray area that so many people live in, the more we can try and advocate for policies that serve a wider swath of people!
As a stay-at-home mom, I love thinking about expanded care opportunities beyond Ikea, the gym, and the church nursery. It would be great to have had a place I could have dropped my kids off when they were tiny so that I could have gone to the doctor or dentist without impacting my spouse's work schedule, for example. It would also have been a great resource when I was facing weeks of solo parenting as my partner traveled for work.
I wish we talked more about how many parents who are working outside the home or who stay at home have grandparent support and how often. Parents, working or not, are in very different places if they need paid childcare or if they have another set of adults available to lend a hand. To me, that's as big a piece of the puzzle as working/not-working parents.
Tiffany this is such a good point and I agree that more needs to be done looking into this. I’m fairly confident that Elliot and Ivana are looking into this, and I’m excited to report on what they find/are finding when the research comes out! It also speaks to the idea that many parents are staying home/not working for pay/not paying for child care for many different reasons, and that understanding some of those reasons can help create a more supportive system for ALL families.
Great comment. Where I live, in a mid-sized Texas city, there is a church with an MDO (Mothers' Day Out; some update it to PDO ☺️ ) program on every corner. I have been mostly a stay at home mom and my kids all went to one and for some time I taught in one. It's typically three days a week, say 9 am to 2 pm, for kids of preschool age. Most of the clientele is stay at home moms who need the dependable break (or work at an at-home part-time job) and want a gentle, play-based but professional instructional program for their kids. There is a lot of military in our town and lots of families don't have that extended network for either "hey can you watch the kids for a couple hours while I get a haircut and buy some jeans" or "Grandma wants to do messy crafts that Mom doesn't have the bandwidth for." It's more structured than drop in care, with a defined schedule and curriculum, but also of limited hours so that stay at home moms don't feel like they're putting their kids in "day care." The day is usually three hours of themed and seasonal play, books, music, crafts and outdoor time, followed by lunch and a 90 minute nap and then pickup. 2 pm - bedtime, plus mornings and the other 4 days a week, are still plenty of time for stay at home moms to feel like their kids are being raised "at home" while giving them a necessary break, their kids a change of scenery and developmental activities, and their families a chance to make friends.
This is a wonderful solution for many families but it's not available everywhere, I understand. I have a local friend who realized a longtime dream of buying a horse property outside of town and they made it maybe six months before buying a house and moving back into the city because she underestimated how difficult it would be to be alone with three preschool aged children on twenty acres an hour outside anywhere that has an MDO. (For some people that would absolutely be living the dream and many people historically did just that but where we live you can't just let your young children free-range on your property, due to venomous snakes, fire ants, coyotes, aggressive wild hogs, hornet nests, etc.) She also, to the other part of your comment, realized how much she had relied on her mom for support.
I 100% feel the grandparent thing, as well; I have been a mother of a large family for over twenty years. My husband's parents passed long ago and we've never lived close to my parents and they're not really the doting grandparent type anyway. I've never had a mom or MIL come help after coming home with any of my six newborns - oh how I envied my friends whose moms would come stay for six weeks and cook and clean and help with the siblings! I've never called a grandparent to pick kids up from school when a meeting ran long or I had a flat tire. I've never dropped the kids at their grandparents' so husband and I could take a long weekend away. And that's to say nothing of how important actually having that those relationships - not just pinch-hitting for actual childcare - are to happy, emotionally-regulated, stress-managed families. These supports are very important and doing without them is hard and those who have them are very VERY blessed!
Yes! The experience of me and my husband (stay at home/breadwinner situation) being hours/states away from both sets of grandparents is... entirely different than the neighbors two doors down, with the same setup and similarly aged children. Pretty much all their family is in town so the informal, spontaneous support does give me a sting of jealousy sometimes. I've never had childcare in four and a half years of parenting (except for church nursery sometimes & maybe a couple hours when grandparents make the trip to visit). And that kind of sounds crazy when said like that! It certainly contributed to some intense overwhelm and depression in recent years.
Same. I doubt that in the last decade, my sister and her husband have ever had to turn down an opportunity to do…anything at all, fun or un-fun, due to lack of childcare, because his parents are a few blocks away and mine are an hour away. And yes, the jealousy gets to me sometimes. It’s not even that there’s all that much I *want* to do, but I hate seeing how our work schedules affect my kid when we have a couple weeks in a row of endless church meetings, for example. Date nights are simply not a thing, and “an anniversary weekend away?” Not a chance.
The other impact of this is if we could ask our parents for help, it wouldn't be them caring for two children for a couple of days. It would mean they are now caring for four children for a couple of days, two of whom need a some extra support. They can only come to us when my brother's family has arranged childcare coverage--so school breaks aren't usually an option. It's an exponential ask for us who don't regularly have support.
Yep. These things simply do not happen for us.
We live on the other side of the country from our family, too. It's tough and I hear you on the jealousy. My brother and his family live next door to my parents, so the differences are stark.
I’m a stay-at-home mom, and per the research, I also “work” very part-time (in addition to homeschooling my son, which is a whole other job in and of itself). What I’m hearing in some of these comments (and correct me if I’m wrong or over-interpreting), is that SAHM is viewed by “working mothers” as a sort of second choice one might make only if one couldn’t find reliable childcare. Whereas at least for me, SAHM is my primary vocation. I chose it, with the support of my husband who wanted to make sure I didn’t feel like I was being relegated to the kids table after going to all the effort of getting a graduate degree.
Fortunately, my husband also has a very flexible job, so my part-time can fairly easily be patchworked around his full time, which is unique and a great gift. That said, while all 4 grandparents are alive and generally supportive, they live on the other side of the country and are not part of the childcare picture.
The thing is, the times when work and home conflict, I rarely if ever think about how much I wish we had reliable childcare, and am instead much more likely to be resentful that work is pulling me away from my kid.
If we’re going to talk about policy that could be helpful to stay-at-home-parents, I think we need to make sure that we’re not automatically assuming that these parents wish to be freed from the burden of childcare. I honestly don’t think there’s anything more important that I should be doing right now, so talking about me like I secretly wish to be contributing to the economy in a significant fashion if only I had free childcare is simply…not true, and frankly, borders on offensive.
I love that Ivana pointed out that many stay-at-home parents/primary caregivers are also employed. I think the oft-cited high maternal labor force participation rate can gloss over 1) that it varies a fair amount by youngest child’s age and 2) lots of families have one parent working part-time/flexibly who wouldn’t necessarily be served by a child care model built solely around a full time 9-5 (which can also miss shift workers, health care workers, etc). Based on federal survey data on kids before kindergarten (updated data slated to come out this year!), just over 2 in 5 young children are only regularly cared for by their parents. It’s even higher for kids under 3.
We just need to refuse to conflate the language of “work” with “paid jobs.” All mothers work. Stay at home (I don’t like that language either) mothers work. Sometimes they do that work in place of a paid job because their children’s or partners’ needs demand it. I get that we aren’t going to change the paying situation anytime soon. But we can start pushing back on the language to expose the hypocrisy of saying there are such things as “working moms” and, by implication, non-working moms.
What fascinated me by the early preview of what Elliot and Ivana are working on is that a lot of these stay at home parents actually work for pay too. Some are doing shift work to avoid paying for child care but are exhausting themselves in the process. Can you imagine taking care of a kid all day and then working all night on top of that? We KNOW there is a better way to raise families and we need to find to convince the policymakers that child care is a wise investment in ALL of our futures.
Adding, I would be thrilled if we could start a movement to interrupt the work-vanishing language. The comparison I think of is the shift from talking about “slavers” to “enslaved people” and from “slave owners” to “enslavers”.
I remember that Clinton moment so well! and honestly, as the daughter of a single working mother, I loved it, and I kind of still do!
this is such an interesting conversation around childcare and the need to include stay at home parents, and part of what Ilana especially says here makes me wonder if there are meaningful subcategories within that group. like, a parent who takes care of their kid during the day and *also* works at night or on the weekend or whatever strikes me as meaningfully different from someone who is not in the paid workforce at all. (I'd argue that the first group is really more like working parents without access to high-quality affordable childcare than they really are "stay at home parents" in the way we typically use that term.) I'll look forward to reading more from their research!
It goes to show that our idea of who is a stay-at-home parent and why they are doing so is really outdated. I'm glad the idea of bringing this group into the policy conversations is finally happening, and it's something I'm excited to keep covering. Thanks for reading!
yes, exactly! like, maybe it's married, middle-class white women whose husbands are making plenty of money and who are happy to step away from work--but it's clearly *also* people who are making that choice for lots of complicated reasons and some who are maybe less happy about it, and I think you're right that this kind of research and reporting is really important for developing better policy.
I feel like that Clinton moment was such a defining conversation for so many of us of a certain generation. Of course, knowing what I know about her now, I know she has such strong support for families of all stripes and would likely be on board with all of these discussions on the best way to support mothers, kids and families. Cookies be damned.
I mean, also, cookies are delicious. Cookies were never the villain, which feels like another thing we've learned since the 90s 😉
This is a very important topic and I was intrigued by your comment about child care improving parenting practices. Would love to hear more about the research on that. My mom was a parent educator (and early childhood teacher trainer) back in the 70s and that’s why she did it. She saw the evidence daily that it improved outcomes for kids in all walks of life.
Thank you!! This work is invaluable, and I really appreciate you sharing it.
Fascinating, I’m very interested in this research! I’m a stay at home mom and I have noticed a distinct increase, since Covid, in the number of appointments I make where additional people are not welcome. I understand the desire to decrease people in close quarters -particularly during sick season-but it has made it much more complicated to complete basic tasks or bring one child to an appointment when I have to find care for the others.
This intersects well with an exciting new project from Dr. Misty Heggeness, designed to quantify the economics of caregiving, including unpaid labor at home. Stay tuned!
https://thecareboard.ku.edu/
I am a huge fan of Misty Heggeness’ work and looking forward to seeing it!!
We decided that I should be the at home care giver when I retired from the Navy in 1993. The budget allowed for it and I thought my efforts were better utilized preforming that function. Taking care of the kids and home was very much like being Navy. I truly felt I was in my element. I am not sure how good of a parent I was but many times it seemed just being there at home was important for the kids and my spouse. The spouse had a great career and the kids are alright with families of their own. So the decision was a win for us.
This is so, so important. Parents have been divided and conquered along these lines for far too long. Something I would like to add that hasn’t already been said is that under the status quo, parents of children with special needs are struggling mightily. Local daycares will often find ways to avoid enrolling them or excuses to counsel them out (which is awful), many providers aren’t adequately trained to support them, and specialty programs that are well set up to support them are often waitlisted or too far away to reasonably access. Some grandparents can be wonderful supports but not all, and not everyone has living, trustworthy family members nearby. So often, it is a parent who must stay home to support that child until they are old enough to access public education. It’s not a choice. It’s simply a necessity. I would love to see more visibility and voice for this parent constituency in this conversation.
I am a homeschooling SAHM in a tight knit group of other homeschoolers. We are all across the political spectrum. And all of us have some kind of part time work. I’ve been a SAHM basically since my college graduation in 2012. For at least 8 years of that (not consecutively), I have either had a <20/hr/wk job, had a small business or wished I did! And childcare has ALWAYS been a struggle. My friends who homeschool and have the most success as small business owners or part time work do it bc they have grandparents who live nearby. I’ve never had that. Without access to quality childcare, our society is missing out or creative small businesses, we are missing out on workers who could contribute positively to our communities and individuals like me miss out on opportunities to use more of our talents and make a difference in our communities. Homeschooling makes sense for our family but hello we are living in 2024 and if we ever want to pay off our house or go on a trip without debt then we need more than one income. Childcare is an issue that touches everyone and I am so glad we are creating a more inclusive conversation here. Happy to hear about the research and survey!
I really appreciated reading this piece Rebecca. I've been on both sides--working full time with my first 3 kids and navigating childcare with a demanding job and then shifting to full time at home parent after my 4th was born. It's complicated on both sides.
It is indeed - and the more we can understand the gray area that so many people live in, the more we can try and advocate for policies that serve a wider swath of people!