Stay-at-Home-Moms vs. Working-From-Home-Moms: Who’s Telling Lies?
I recently received a pretty provocative inquiry from one of my followers, Megan, and I’m hoping you all can shed some light on this for her, because I’m unqualified to do anything other than make uninformed and judgmental speculations. Which of course I’ll do anyway.
Here’s Megan’s question:
So this is something that I think about a lot lately. You hear a TON about how hard it is to be a stay-at-home mom, how a lot of women who left the workplace say it’s the hardest thing that they’ve ever done, nobody appreciates them, blah blah blah. But then I also know a couple of moms who work full time from their house for an external company, and who ALSO watch their kids all day. So my feeling on it is that someone isn’t telling me the truth. Either being a stay at home mom isn’t really that hard (or the ones that say it is are making it way harder than it needs to be), OR the work-from-home moms are working about 10 minutes total at their money-earning jobs while they’re running around after their kid all day. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but I’ve been wondering about this apparent dichotomy for a while. Since you seem to be pretty fearless* about talking about these things on your blog, I was wondering if you’d ever given any thought to it, and if you’d consider writing a post about it.
Feel like I’m stepping into the lionness’s den with this one, but here we go! To start, some abbreviations:
- stay-at-home-mom = SAHM
- working-from-home-mom = WFHM
We’ve all heard (repeatedly) that being a mother is the toughest job in the world. We’ve all known at least one SAHM who cannot go without a nanny and/or a maid (or is that an LA thing?), and still manages to look like a frazzled wreck by the end of the day. We’ve all heard horror stories of new moms not being able to shower for 3 days at a time or going to bed and realizing they didn’t brush their teeth all day. We’ve all seen these greasy-haired wits-end zombies falling asleep standing up at the grocery store. And I don’t dare roll my eyes or shake my head, because I’m 99.9% sure that would be me if I joined their ranks. But I do question how these same women find a spare 8-9 hours to do some clear-headed, high-level corporate work.
To be clear, I’m not saying it’s hard to believe that women with kids can work 8-9 hours (or more) a day – AT AN OFFICE. In fact, many working moms I know say the office is a pretty nice 8-9 hour break from their kids. And when they’re there, most of them are happy to disconnect a little from their homelife to throw themselves full-force into projects that don’t involve removing fingerpaint from white carpeting.
What I AM saying, and what Megan is saying, is that in the face of such overwhelming evidence (and reminders) that being a SAHM is a rather difficult full-time job requiring full attention, how can they hold down another full-time job at the very same time, in the midst of all that chaos? What could REALLY be going on in that house all day? Let’s examine the options:
- They’re parking the kid in front of Nick Jr. for 6 hours and letting them nap another 2 to squeeze in a full 8 hours of work
- They’re only working about 4 hours, but since most people are so wildly incompetent at their jobs, the super-efficient WFHM produces the same volume and quality of work as some of her peers can in twice that amount of time at the office
- They work as much as they can during the day given the kiddie interruptions, and make up for lost time by hitting the Blackberry hard after Dad gets home, determined not to receive any special treatment as a WFHM.
Frankly, they all sound pretty awful. Someone’s getting shortchanged here, whether it’s the kid, the company, or the WFHM herself – right?
Maybe not; there’s a lot of variables here. Some WFHM’s are probably built with superhuman abilities. Some kids are self-directed, well-behaved and solid sleepers. Maybe the Moms who’ve chosen the WFHM route have done so because they know they’re better equipped to handle it than some of their SAHM counterparts.
And maybe part of the reason that those who choose to remain SAHMs feel so overwhelmed, is that they don’t have the distraction of work or a break from the insanely constant demands on their attention. Or perhaps the expectations are higher – you’re expected to be nanny, chef, laundress, maid, chauffer and maintenance crew if you’re home all day, while WFHM’s may have more opportunities to hire out for tasks that they strongly dislike or aren’t good at. I also suspect that our stress levels swell to fit whatever room we’ve made for them. If being a mom is your sole occupation, you’re going to squeeze the full load of stress into that. If you’re a working mom, you’re going to divide your stress between the office and home. The strange thing is that from the outside, the latter of these is the only one that seems to get any credit.
What do you guys think – are WFHM’s not really working a full day? Are SAHM’s overdramatizing? Or is every mom and kid just different, and some can have it all while others will always struggle just to get through the day?
*PS, I love that Megan thinks I’m “fearless”, when in reality, I’m quivering on weekly tightrope between speaking my mind and being ex-communicated from every friend group and family circle I have. As Drew is fond of saying, “The ironic thing is that you’re going to alienate so many people with your blog, you’re actually going to have to have a kid so someone will love you!” Oh, Mister Maybe! So clever.
[photo credit: thissideoftypical.com]
43 Responses to Stay-at-Home-Moms vs. Working-From-Home-Moms: Who’s Telling Lies?
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It’s certainly a provocative question, and not a very new one. As a dad, I’m sort of uninterested in the whole “mommy wars” thing, partly because a lot of it seems to be derived from cattiness that I don’t really identify with, but probably even more because I don’t really have friends and I’m not trying to impress anyone except my daughter. It can be a big self-esteem booster as a parent to live like a hermit and be happy that way.
Anyway, both my wife and I work from home, and we roughly split the child care (although last week my wife conceded that I get to say to people I care for our daughter the “majority” of the time because I get up with our daughter in the morning and at night of she wakes. It was worth the extra little bit of care to get those huge bragging rights).
If I had my daughter to care for all day, I’d get about 1 hour of work done during her 2-hour quiet time (she stopped napping about 6 months ago when she turned two), and if there was any work that required just a minute or two (make a blog comment or something), I could do that in little bits all day long. Every other day I might give her a 2-hour movie to watch, and I could use most of that effectively. Also, since I do a lot of reading, some of it for work, I go to the gym and read for about an hour on the stair-stepper machine while Addison is in the Kid’s Club.
Add that all up, and that means that on average for a day I could probably get…2-3 hours of work in during the time that Addison is awake. MAXIMUM. Then, I’d try to put her to bed by 7:30, and I’d work from 8:00 until…11:00 maybe (I try to get 8 hours of sleep so I’m not mean, and so I don’t kill anyone while driving. But a lot of people would probably get less sleep in order to get more done). I could get 5-6 hours of work in a day that way, but I’d have to be a superdad to get other housework type stuff done while wrangling the little one, and those work hours wouldn’t include any down time or time with my wife.
Bottom line, at least until Addison can read to herself, she’s a handful. We can get a bit of a break by letting her watch TV, but we try to keep that to less than 2 hours per day, and less than that if we can help it. At her age, she mostly needs us to be with her, and engaged.
I have hopes, though, that by the time she can read to herself (which we’re working really hard on, desperately, even), she’ll be more self-sufficient and will allow us parents more time during the day…and by the time she’s in school, that would make a big difference. If her kids are in school, a mom could feasibly put in an 8-hour work day.
Another thing worth considering: working from home cuts a lot of the prep and commute time that other people have to live with. So, in my mind, a person who commutes a half-hour one way actually loses something like 10 hours or more to: commuting, parking, shower/shave/primp, etc, even though they’re only being paid to work 8 hours. If you can be diligent in a home work environment, it could be a source of time savings.
Also, our daughter has always been quite energy-intensive. We’ve NEVER been able to put her down in a play yard and let her just play happily on her own for any length of time. She wants to be engaged by us (unless she’s watching TV, which we started using a bit with her when she turned 2). But I have a friend whose daughter could happily play by herself in her play yard for 40 minutes or more, from the time she was just a couple months old. The type of kid you have makes a big difference.
Why is this comment do DAMN long? Surely I could have done this in half the space. It must be too early in the morning. I only have a few minutes before Addison wakes up, so I’ve made up for quality with quantity. Sorry.
Yup, I think it’s probably a lot easier if both parents are working from home – that way, if one person has something urgent they need to work on, they can focus on that while the other picks up the slack, and you can at least be more flexible with your time. I’m sure things will get a lot easier for you over the next couple of years, especially when she heads off to school. But until then…WOW! I’d say you’re lucky you’re even getting 5-6 hours of sleep from the sound of things!
I’d like to sound awesome, but in my hypothetical above, I muddled what actually goes on at my house to consider the question put by Megan, and imagined what I could realistically do if I was the sole caregiver and trying to swing a full-time job. In reality, I take our daughter from when she wakes up until around 1:30. Then she has quiet time. Then my wife has her from about 3:30 until 7:00, when we eat and put Addison to sleep. So, I actually start my work day around 1:30, and my wife does her work in the morning before that. Neither of us can put in full-time hours, but we’re okay with that. We try not to be too busy, and we try to get our sleep.
Which is always completely fine – as long as you’re not an exempt employee at a company who thinks you’re each putting in 40 hours a week. If you work for yourself, or bill truthfully at an hourly rate, then it shouldn’t matter how much you can get done, as long as it works for your family financially.
I’m really glad you wrote this blog. Your point is a good one, and not just when it comes to mothers and their work arrangements. We are all different. Every single one of us handles life – and all that comes with it – differently, whether we have child or not, work full time or not, etc. The “who’s life is harder” game seems like a silly place to be trying to one-up each other.
We all know someone who doesn’t have children than can hardly seem to handle a seemingly unstressful job. At the same time, we all know someone who has a boatload of kids, works full time, and still manages to coach the team, stay fit, and do a million other things successfully. Maybe the key is that one isn’t better or worse or more stressful than the other, but just a realization of what each of us can handle on an individual level.
Exactly. I think this whole concept of people having a set stress level, regardless of what they’re doing, is pretty interesting. I’ve had to think about it a lot myself since I stopped working full-time to freelance and focus on the blog…and it seems like I just now find different things to stress about. Funny how that works.
One way to tell if a mom really thinks childrearing is very difficult is to look at how she treats her nannies or babysitters.
If you really thought parenting was the hardest job in the world, wouldn’t you pay your babysitters a really high hourly rate? If you trust the care of your children to a teenager for several hours and pay the teenager minimum wage, then you must not think childcare is really all that difficult. You would expect that if taking care of children really is the hardest job in the world, then those mothers would be adamant about making sure teachers are better paid, because K12 teachers are doing a lot of your job for you.
If childcare really was incredibly difficult, one would expect enormous gratitude for the nannies who do part of the work for you.
Very true – but part of the problem is probably that most of their expendable income is already being drained by the kids, and when they think about throwing even more of it away…it’s probably a tough pill to swallow. And good grief, you just reminded me that I started babysitting when I was like 13. I can’t believe anyone entrusted their baby to me at that age!
My husband, Neal, who wrote the ridiculously long comment above was mentioning this blog post/comment thread, and well, I got sucked in even though this is my work time. I definitely see the point that you’re making, Scott. In fact, when we first got a babysitter for our daughter so that I could hit my Master’s thesis hard, we paid higher than her going rate. It made me feel better because I thought even when my high-maintenance kid was difficult, the babysitter would hopefully feel that she was still being compensated well to give her time and love and attention. I come from a family of educators so I also think that teachers should be well compensated for their very difficult word.
That said, some of the parts about mothering and stay-at-home with my child that have been the hardest for me are precisely those things that I don’t and could never outsource. I want my daughter to not whine, to treat people excellently, to say “please” and “thank you.” It takes a lot of patience to continually work with her on those things, and I never expected my part-time babysitter to do that as diligently as I need to. For me as a mother, one of the most difficult parts is that the buck stops with me. Even though my husband takes care of her half-time (or the “majority” as he would like to be noted), I can never disconnect from my feelings of responsibility for my daughter in the same way he can — no less because other people still perceive me as more responsible for her. I do personally think parenting is the hardest job I have ever had (maybe in the world, but I haven’t tried all those), and it has a lot to do with the physically demanding nature of it right now. But it also has a lot to do with the psychological aspects that babysitters and teachers don’t relieve me from (nor do I think they should).
That’s a great point, Lindsay – even when you have adequate childcare, there’s probably something in the back of most moms’ minds, wondering if they could be doing it better themselves. It must be difficult to disconnect.
The friends I have who are stay at home mom’s to kids under age five work their butts off!
I would never argue the fact that being a Mom is one of the hardest jobs in the world – it totally is!
Hence why I am not signing up for the job
Ditto – I think I’m grossly underqualified anyways!
Thanks for doing a blog about my question! As a woman who has no kids and no plans to have any, I have no dog in this race. I’m just really curious about this subject since I know both SAH moms and WFH moms. I feel like I can’t ask them directly without risking offending someone, so I decided to let ML take all the risk for me!
I’m really looking forward to reading the comments.
I’m curious to hear what they have to say too – I’m sure it will be interesting! Thanks again for starting the dialogue on this one Megan.
Interesting question. My thoughts:
A day at the office is far less stressful than taking care of kid(s) all day. Not even close. SAHM is probably on par with air traffic controller from a stress level, and there is no way they could make any sort of meaningful contribution to an actual job (unless they were a blogger or something). IF THE KIDS ARE AT HOME. A SAHM who drops the kids off at school from 8-3:30 could easily get work done during the day and I hear working a job at home is pretty efficient (no small talk, less meetings, etc.). So I could buy that. But honestly, taking care of a 0-4 year old is so taxing, you’d have a heart attack trying to juggle both. This is coming from someone who didn’t think there was anyway being a SAHM was “work” in a sense of the definition until I had kids. Now I smile Sunday night thinking about the 10 hour break I will have on Monday!
It would be an interesting experiment to hook air traffic controllers and SAHMS up to some stress measurement device and see who wins. Then we’d get to the bottom of this! Thanks for bringing the 0-4 Mom perspective here, good to know.
I do have to point out that although, logistically, it resembles what an Air Traffic Controller does, there is a HUGE difference – when you’re in ATC, you might have HUNDREDS of lives depending on your skills. I used to be in the Marines and knew a couple of ATC people – their jobs are MUCH more stressful than SAHM or WFHM has to deal with. Wiping little butts or cleaning up grape juice mess is nowhere near as stressful as having to guide airplanes safely to the ground.
Now, although I do understand that people have different tolerances for stress, I will say this…it might feel like it is as stressful as ATC, but it is most definitely not.
~Audrey
A great point, Audrey. I think we’re programmed to foolishly believe that our stress is always somehow deeper than others. Strange how that happens.
Just found your blog and am enjoying it, thanks! But as someone who works at home for half of each week, I wanted to emphasize that it isn’t just SAHM vs WFHM-w/o-childcare! Many WFHMs use childcare — in fact, unless you are freelance or deliverable-only, your employer probably requires that you do so. I am salaried and my telework agreement actually requires that I describe my childcare arrangements in writing. Working at home gets a bad rap already, so I hate to leave unchallenged any suggestion that we are not pulling our weight as compared to those in the office.
I will second the poster who says there are greater efficiencies in working from home, though — saves me at least 3 hours / day!
Very interesting about childcare being written into the agreement! I never would have guessed that, so I’m glad you added that to the discussion. And yes, it is great not having a commute, isn’t it?
I don’t have children myself, so I can’t really speak to that… but I do work from home. I’m sure if I did have kids, I’d likely be doing all of my work when they’re asleep. I can barely even work when my partner is at home and awake! I can’t even imagine what it would be like with a kid around…
Actually, wait… I can, I babysat for a friend’s two year old while I was working from home once and he kept ripping the laptop off my lap and throwing it on the ground and it got so bad that I had to call my ex-MIL to watch him.
Haha! If only kids were like cats and slept 19 hours a day, the WFHMs would have it made!
I imagine the hardest or most demanding time for mums who are at home is from birth until that child reaches an age where they can head off to kindy here in NZ children over the age 3 are entitlted to 20 hours free childcare a week hence my point. bearing this in mind i would think that those mums or dad who choose to work from home and do childcare must have some sort of help to be able to do both justice. Prehaps those that work from home do the work while their child is having a sleep or is quietly entertaining themselves. Most people work from home have flexible hours so i imagine they work around this and do what works for them this would of course depend on the job.
Yes, and I suppose remote jobs are becoming more and more flexible, where you don’t necessarily need to be in communication only from the hours of 8-5, so I’m sure a lot of catching up gets done when the other spouse gets home.
I’ve pondered this question before, and although my answer in only speculation, this is how I feel: Everyone is different! For some women, they love being homw with their children all day and all night while for others it feels like the ultimate sacrifice. from what i’ve observed in my friends who are SAHMs. It SUCKS. Children are demanding lol. However, my friends that work, that’s even worse,spend 2-3 waking hours with their kids tops and that’s after a long day. Their on auto-pilot, exhausted, and quite often miserable.
Auto-pilot is how I imagine I might feel if I tried that – and that’s not good for anyone.
Unless a WFHM works for herself, I would expect her to use childcare. That is one of the requirements at my company if you telework. If she doesn’t use childcare, the company is getting cheated. Regardless of the amount of work you get done, most companies require 40 hrs/week, and that seems nearly impossible if you’re tending to little ones at the same time. We childfree desk-monkeys suck it up and put in our time. WFHMs should too.
I don’t envy either situation. If I decide to have kids, I know that I’ll be a working at an office mom. Not only do I derive a lot of my self-worth from earning an income, but I also need the adult interaction. Good for you if you just can’t stand to be away from your kids for one second, but I’ll never understand it.
Desk-monkey has a nice ring to it – better than cubicle rat.
It is entirely possible that parents feel more extreme highs of happiness than non-parents. It’s entirely possible that on average parents are happier than non-parents. I can believe that.
By the same token, though, we ought to ask about the extremes of highs and lows. I would guess that parents feel more deeply UNhappy more than nonparents do. Parents may have the highest highs but also the lowest lows.
If there’s regret involved, regretting having children has GOT to be more depressing and stressful than regretting not having children.
I agree with something someone else said about factoring out people who are childless not by choice. If you deeply want to have children but are unable to, that must be an incredibly unhappy situation. Separate childfee from childless, and you might get very different numbers.
Sorry, this was meant to go with the earlier post about happiness.
That’s a really good point about the extreme lows. I imagine parents probably have a higher percentage of complete emotional breakdowns than the Childfree, and that does need to be factored in.
I will be a WFHM, my son is 2 months old, was conceived after 4 years of hell running around seeing doctors trying to conceived him so I can tell one thing: being a mum is a walk in the park compared to being childless infertile trying to concieve. Actually it’s a pretty cool job also compared to many regular jobs (like being a nanny). It confirms what I already knew: parents overdramatize their job as parents, especially within a circle of people having good jobs, the SAHM need to validate their no income life somehow.
Sounds like you have a well-behaved baby, Lara – congrats! And congrats on conceiving after so many years of trying, I’m sure you must be ecstatic. Good luck as you move into WFHM territory, hopefully that goes smoothly for you as well.
I find it interesting that there is a lot of concession to the fact that parents are different, kids are different, and stress managment skills are different…but not a lot of acknowledgement that some jobs are more stressful than others. I suppose it makes sense, as this is a blog about the contemplation of parenting, not job stress. I am likely just taking umbrage because I am tired and cranky from moving and having a stressful job–but I still think it is a point worth making.
There is a pretty wide range of responsibility and accountability, even (perhaps especially) among exempt positions where you are expected to put in 40 hours (at least) a week. Jobs where there is little individual accountability, or the absolute stakes are low, are inherently less stressful. More tedious, perhaps, but it seems such jobs would be more compatible with working from home with kids. It isn’t that these people would necessarily do less work, but the urgency just isn’t there. Compare that to a job where there is clear and indeflectable individual accountability, and were the safety or rights of others are at stake. The stress level is substantially higher and therefor seems less compatible with working from home with kids.
Before I skulk back to my cranky-cave and await the resolution of the box-pocolypse that is currently my home, I would like to express a point of appreciation: I genuinely appreciate it when people clarify that they think parenting is the hardest job THEY have ever had. I sometimes have to bite back the snark when certain people tell me it is the hardest job in the world. I just don’t believe them.
Your last point is so true. There’s really no one who’s qualified to say what the hardest job in the world is. We really can only speculate.
The best answer to this question is the variety in all the comments. As a coach for working moms (from home and from the office) I have learned that no one answer is right for everyone. Plus, every child is different. Working at home with a toddler is pretty much impossible. Working at home with a 10 or 12 year old is do-able. The answer is to identify the top 5 priorities and be creative about fulfilling those priorities. Let the rest of the list go if it is to stressful. Have a vision for the future – but enjoy life now.
Jamee Tenzer, shesarealmother.com
Haha – thank you for the reality check on the age groups Jamee, I’m sure you’re quite right about the toddlers.
I’m not sure there is a black or white answer to the question SAHM vs WAHM. That being said, I often wonder if we don’t, more often than not, make parenting more difficult on ourselves. I don’t have children myself. I have fertility issues and I never had a deep desire to have my own. I also taught children for close to 20 years. So, I have some toes in each world. I’m not passing judgement, I would most likely do the same thing. I just feel that maybe parents/society make parenting more difficult. Does little Johnny need 15 snacks and toys when he goes to the zoo? Does he need to be in 3 sports? Does Jenny need those Uggs? My sister has two beautiful girls – age 10 and 8. She works, as a teacher, full time. She is one of those moms who is constantly on the go and stressed out all the time. However, it’s not just about things like their education or health. A lot of it seems to be about things that could be avoided. Right now, she is headed to Disney in Florida. So is hurricane Debby. Why is she going and stressing about the weather? “It’s for the kids.” I hear that a lot and I understand that everyone wants better for their kids. It just makes me wonder if we aren’t letting society pressure us into being that “perfect” parent (which doesn’t exist) and this is leading to so many unhappy parents. Just a thought. I have no answers.
And the interesting thing is that it’s more important that kids have less-stressed parents than it is that they’re in that third sport, or have their fifteen snacks, etc. It’s the same thing when unhappy couples stay together “for the kids” – they’d be better off with both parents happily separated. Somehow it’s hard for them to see it in the moment though.
Well, I’ve been a WFHM for over 9 years now. I work in the new construction industry as a project administrator and estimator. I did this same job in an office until my oldest was about eighteen months. I was given the opportunity to do this same job from home and took it without a second thought. My thoughts, almost a decade later, and another child later, are:
1) Working from home is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s got its own problems. My job never leaves or goes on vacation. I haven’t had a sick day in almost a decade. Yes, I can go pick the kids up from school and take them to different activities, but a lot of the time I’m yelling at them to be quiet, so that I can “take this phone call.” Or I’ve gotten an email that requires immediate urgent attention while I’m supposed to be watching my daughter dance. At-home time and work time have blended so that they are indiscernible from each other. I never mentally have the relief of knowing that I can’t get to it til Monday when I get back to the office, because, well – I can ALWAYS do it right now.
2) You can get 40 hours worth of work in, but you will be working after the kids go to bed and on weekends. It’s a trade off for being there when they leave and come home from school.
3) Stay at home moms whine too much. I’m sorry, I’ll go ahead and be the one who says it. I had my children from age 4 and up in a preschool during school hours. But I had them at home with me when they were babies. And I did it. Without dumping them in front of the TV, etc. They played at my feet while I sat at the computer. And now during the 12 weeks out of a year that they are on school breaks and every weekday afternoon, I still do it. With the neighbor kids running through my house, and my own children running inside and out, it’s sometimes akin to a nightmare – especially when working on a specific project with time constraints, which most of my work is. So every time I listen to a SAHM complaining about how dirty their house is, and how whiny their kids are, and how their husbands better not get mad about the lack of dinner when he gets home….I go crazy. No, my house isn’t the cleanest, and no, I probably spend less one on one time with my kids, but come on…! If being a SAHM was that hard, there wouldn’t be a third of the number of blogs out there right now, complete with pictures, on that mom’s latest recipe and / or craft project. SAHMs just need to be grateful that their significant others make it possible for them to be at home for their family, and stop trying to prove how hard they work. Moms have done it for centuries and didn’t feel the need to complain about it until the 90s. Being a SAHM is a blessing these days – when most families need two incomes!
4) One final thought – I wouldn’t go back to work in an office unless I had to. Yes, I feel I would be less stressed, or at least the stress could be compartmentalized. However, it is STILL all worth it for my kids to see me when they come home and for me to always be available for them.
Just a little rant – I’ve been wanting to say some of this (and more) to some of my friends, and for obvious reasons, can’t. I’m giving thought to the idea of a person’s personal stress level and how that stress level will fill the space it’s given. This might make me a little more empathetic towards my fellow SAHMs, but I felt the need to voice some of my feelings..
Well it’s good to see there’s someone who’s doing it all, and not feeling like you’re shortchanging any one area of your life. I agree that there’s something satisfying about being able to leave the office at 5 (or 6, or 7) and just completely shutting off that part of your brain because you know you won’t have to deal with again until the next morning. I think I’d have a REALLY difficult time being on-call day and night (and weekends) as you are. Hang in there!
I am in a similar situation as “WhereTo?” above (though her job sounds much less stressful than mine). My kids are 3 and 15 months, and I feel like I’m always stuck choosing between time with them and work…even though I don’t put in much more than 20 hours. But I do disagree with some of her points.
Trying to work, have a clean (note I didn’t say “spotless”) house, make home-cooked healthy meals, and spend time teaching the kids the 3R’s so they’re ready for school is a lot of work. There’s so much pressure put on moms to give their families the best they can that the stress can be really overwhelming. Think about it: I gave up a job I was actually really good at (and was told so) to take care of my family…and now all I hear from everywhere is that I’m doing it wrong. That sucks and makes me feel bad about myself more than I should.
Being able to stay home with my kids isn’t because I’m “lucky,” it’s the result of careful financial planning. It’s my firm belief that families don’t “need” two incomes if they plan correctly. We decided, even when we were both working and no plans for kids yet, that we would only live on one income and save the other. So we live in a modest home and buy cars that are 5-7 years old. No vacations and careful consideration of our monthly budget before we make any “fun” purchases. Is this how everyone is OK with living? Probably not, but it works for us.
The bottom line is, some choices are tough for some people, but not for others. I had a very hard time giving up my full-time job, and still struggle with wanting to work more hours than I do. That’s tough for me. Some mothers have a tough time giving up a certain lifestyle, so they continue working. It’s all relative. We shouldn’t care so much about others’ choices, but on our own and doing what works for us, regardless of what the world says about it. A mom’s first responsibility is to take care of her family, and I think we all do that the best way we know how.
That’s such an interesting point that you left a job that praised you, to take on a role where there’s not a whole lot of thanks involved, but there is a whole lot of judgment about parenting styles and what you may be doing “wrong”. I’m sure NOBODY feels like they’re doing it right these days! And amen about how we shouldn’t care so much about other people’s choices – INCLUDING how people parent!