One additional complicating factor is that "stay at home parent" isn't exactly a homogeneous experience. My niece lives within 5 minutes of 4 grandparents and a great grandparent all of whom are actively involved at a "several times a week" level. I know parents who live in very walkable communities where the cafe 3 minutes away has a half dozen other stay at home parents every morning and there are three different parks within a 5 minute walk where you can trust the other parents you see every day to help keep half an eye on your toddler while they are playing and you are chatting with another adult.
Compare those experiences to the prototypical "stuck at home by yourself because your family is distant/useless in a car based suburbia with few amenities" and they are worlds apart despite all being "stay at home parents".
I have worked part-time, full-time and now stay at home. Thanks for delving in! I have so many thoughts about all of this! But my first thought is about loneliness. One thing I lost when I left paid work was a bunch of adults to chat with, many of them friends. In our highly capitalist culture, work has become the center of adult social lives for most people. I was deeply lonely for the first year I was home and it was HARD! Because we are homeschooling, I actively sought out social relationships and now have a large group of moms I see and chat with throughout the week. I can imagine that many parents don’t find this network, though, and that isolation could be profound. I think we need a huge cultural effort toward community building that shifts our social hubs away from school and work, institutions that often fail people, to more intergenerational and inclusive models.
An opposite theory is that it’s less stressful staying at home because you’re the “CEO of your home” compared to having a boss, coworkers, and rules to follow in a corporate environment. This was the hypothesis of a cardiology paper trying to explain the increased rate of heart attacks in women over the previous 50 years (women actually die more than men now from heart attacks). As with a research, a million confounding variables….how many kids, relationship/role of husband, finances, etc..
"The work of stay-at-home parents should be recognized as “real” work and they should be provided with the same benefits as working parents (breaks, holidays, etc)"
-- practically speaking, what on earth would this look like?
The thing about comparing "SAHM"s to working parents is that it makes a false equivalence between the two lifestyles, as though being at home raising children and maintaining a household is a "job" in the same way that my job as a school counselor is a job. It's not. Motherhood / parenthood is a relationship, and maintaining a household, while work, is not the same thing as paid employment on behalf of a corporation. They are fundamentally and profoundly different and trying to compare the two to see which one is "better" is really an exercise in futility. If anything, we need to reject this idea that paid work outside the home is superior to work within the home on behalf of family and relationship, AND that said family / relationship work should be treated more like corporate work. A mental framework that forces us to think of family life in corporate terms is unhelpful at best and, I think, unhealthy at worst.
I wonder if the things that make it totally unlike a job (cannot quit/pivot, very little clear feedback on how you're doing, lack of breaks, lack of training) are the reason why some of the research can show such high cortisol levels, not the actual parenting itself. It also seems like there are lurking variables: I'd imagine that people who choose the SAHP life have a very different approach than those who must do this lifestyle due to financial strain, preferences of their partners, other hard-to-shift factors.
One additional complicating factor is that "stay at home parent" isn't exactly a homogeneous experience. My niece lives within 5 minutes of 4 grandparents and a great grandparent all of whom are actively involved at a "several times a week" level. I know parents who live in very walkable communities where the cafe 3 minutes away has a half dozen other stay at home parents every morning and there are three different parks within a 5 minute walk where you can trust the other parents you see every day to help keep half an eye on your toddler while they are playing and you are chatting with another adult.
Compare those experiences to the prototypical "stuck at home by yourself because your family is distant/useless in a car based suburbia with few amenities" and they are worlds apart despite all being "stay at home parents".
I have worked part-time, full-time and now stay at home. Thanks for delving in! I have so many thoughts about all of this! But my first thought is about loneliness. One thing I lost when I left paid work was a bunch of adults to chat with, many of them friends. In our highly capitalist culture, work has become the center of adult social lives for most people. I was deeply lonely for the first year I was home and it was HARD! Because we are homeschooling, I actively sought out social relationships and now have a large group of moms I see and chat with throughout the week. I can imagine that many parents don’t find this network, though, and that isolation could be profound. I think we need a huge cultural effort toward community building that shifts our social hubs away from school and work, institutions that often fail people, to more intergenerational and inclusive models.
I think this is such an important point. Social support is essential for mental health!
An opposite theory is that it’s less stressful staying at home because you’re the “CEO of your home” compared to having a boss, coworkers, and rules to follow in a corporate environment. This was the hypothesis of a cardiology paper trying to explain the increased rate of heart attacks in women over the previous 50 years (women actually die more than men now from heart attacks). As with a research, a million confounding variables….how many kids, relationship/role of husband, finances, etc..
"The work of stay-at-home parents should be recognized as “real” work and they should be provided with the same benefits as working parents (breaks, holidays, etc)"
-- practically speaking, what on earth would this look like?
The thing about comparing "SAHM"s to working parents is that it makes a false equivalence between the two lifestyles, as though being at home raising children and maintaining a household is a "job" in the same way that my job as a school counselor is a job. It's not. Motherhood / parenthood is a relationship, and maintaining a household, while work, is not the same thing as paid employment on behalf of a corporation. They are fundamentally and profoundly different and trying to compare the two to see which one is "better" is really an exercise in futility. If anything, we need to reject this idea that paid work outside the home is superior to work within the home on behalf of family and relationship, AND that said family / relationship work should be treated more like corporate work. A mental framework that forces us to think of family life in corporate terms is unhelpful at best and, I think, unhealthy at worst.
Both roles are challenging—stay-at-home and working parents deserve respect, understanding, and support for their unique struggles.
I wonder if the things that make it totally unlike a job (cannot quit/pivot, very little clear feedback on how you're doing, lack of breaks, lack of training) are the reason why some of the research can show such high cortisol levels, not the actual parenting itself. It also seems like there are lurking variables: I'd imagine that people who choose the SAHP life have a very different approach than those who must do this lifestyle due to financial strain, preferences of their partners, other hard-to-shift factors.
Yes I agree! All important points. We need more research!
I wonder how this maps across nannies and other child care professionals?
Great question!
Every nanny I've ever heard talk about it says being a nanny is much easier than raising their own kids.
It would be interesting to see some research (ethnographic or otherwise) dig into why that is.