The best arguments against staying home with kids — and my replies
Childcare is not a mystery, or a math problem for the elite. Every developed country except the US guarantees paid maternity leave, because science has shown that the majority of a baby’s brain forms after birth, and the baby needs a single, primary caregiver during that formation.
Your child’s attachment style for the rest of their life is determined by their relationship with their first primary caregiver. Pick carefully.
Group daycare does not work because there’s no primary caregiver. Research on Head Start reveals the truth: daycare makes a positive difference only if children are living in poverty. Are you living in poverty? Then daycare might help. Otherwise, someone needs to stay at home with the baby.
Options are: parent, relative, or nanny. If you go with someone besides the parent, then get clear with yourself that you are not the primary caregiver. You are not bonding with the baby. Someone else is. If you push to get more time with the baby, it’s not helpful: it’s confusing.
I spend a lot of time telling people that kids do best with a stay-at-home parent. Which means I hear a lot of arguments about why this is not reasonable to ask of parents. Here is my reply to the five most common ways people push back:
1. Aren’t women in single-income families trapped?
Yes. Single mothers are trapped. Don’t have a kid without a partner.
Two percent of college-educated women are divorced, and even fewer are single mothers. If you want to solve that problem, start with fixing public education — which no one knows how to do.
But it’s not just single mothers; everyone without a trust fund is trapped in one of three ways:
- Relying on shelter
- Relying on a paycheck
- Relying on someone else’s paycheck
Once you have kids, you’re trapped in an extra way: if you earn money, you can’t care for them; if you care for them, you can’t earn money. Adult life is hard. It’s not whether you’re trapped, it’s how.
2. How is having no income empowering?
If you ask that question, you should also ask how it’s empowering to have income. Answer: it isn’t. That’s why women quit working.
Empowerment is a legal trope left over from last century. We were fighting for female empowerment when job listings specified that they would not hire women. Because that was legal.
Today women have equal rights under the law. We have equal opportunity at work. We are done with that fight.
3. Not everyone can afford to stay home!
That’s the same as saying single parents are screwed — which is still true.
If you’re not a single parent and you have enough for food, clothes, and shelter, there’s nothing you can buy that will benefit your child more than having a parent at home.
And if you think you need two incomes to live in a “good school district,” you’re not in one. Families in truly good districts almost always live on one income.
4. Having my own money is important to me.
This is a phrase left over from last century, when women were treated like children.
Today, in families where one person earns money and one takes care of the family, it’s very clear who manages the household budget: the person who runs the household.
If the person running the household does not like how the money earner is treating them, the person running the household can threaten to leave. That is extremely expensive for the money earner, because legally, that person will have to support two households instead of one.
That’s why money does not equal empowerment. Legal protections equal empowerment. And, as you know, money doesn’t equal independence unless you have a trust fund.
5. I’m happier at work than at home.
That’s probably true. But it doesn’t outweigh the detriment to everyone else in a family with dual-income parents.
Adult life is hard. And it’s most difficult for people who did not have a good childhood. So instead of working to compensate for not feeling important in your childhood, stop working. Make your kids feel important. It’s too late to save your own childhood, but your kids still have a chance.
Lack of specifics leaves this black/white view of parenting without teeth. E.g, Countries with guaranteed paid leave is not until the child is 18. So if it’s only for the 1st year, does that support your theory/argument. Also, I would hope my children have varying styles of attachment and I hope I would be around to help them work through those, not dictate them. And without any actual scientifically produced data in front of me, I would almost bet my bottom dollar that children will choose a “primary” caregiver even in a daycare setting. And maybe we should discuss primary with some consideration of hours spent in the the role. Even if a child goes to daycare 50 hours/week, there is someone else caring for that child the other 118 hours. Even if the child is sleeping, I would assume this does not count 1 to 1 as time away from the child.
And again, you provide no time frame for your theory/argument. Are we talking the 1st year? Are we talking the first 5 years? 18 years? What happens when they go to school?
Regarding #5. This is waaaaay too black and white. Everything we do should provide fulfillment for some aspect of our needs and desires. Nothing should or does provide 100% for most if not all people.
And sorry to burst your idyllic bubble, but women still do not have equal opportunity at work.
Sorry – just not buying into this unnuanced view of working parents.
Hi Cherie. You’re right that it’s not a nuanced view about working parents. The post is about what all parents owe to their kids. Just because a parent works doesn’t mean their kid is born differently. All kids need the same thing at the very beginning.
I think you misunderstand the term “attachment style”. You should google it. The idea is that all people should have secure attachment. The people who don’t have secure attachment had a problem during the start of their life.
It’s great that you want to help your kid later in life deal with their specific form of attachment. But it’s a lot less heartache and disappointment for parents to give a child secure attachment from the start.
Dr. Gabor Mate in his book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture writes about a child’s essential need for secure attachment in great detail. He lays out a convincing argument for why and what happens if it’s not provided.
It used to be that the father worked and the mother cared for the children and the household. From my view now the mother is expected to hold down two jobs. True mothers can do it but it’s not optimal for the mother OR the children.
The U.S. capitalist system values money over everything else. I believe it manifests in the current explosion of mental health diagnosis particularly for the “Millennials” (1980-1994).
You simply can’t do justice as a parent when you are working full time.
I was able to stay home with my son until he was 1 1/2 years old and then my savings ran out. I agree with your assessment that a baby needs a single primary caregiver for optimal development.
My relative went to college and earned a degree in medicine, and also learned there that marriage is a patriarchal institution, and so she never married, and also that the woman can and probably should be the primary wage-earner. Fast-forward to now when she has a toddler and a full-time job as an OBGYN and is completely responsible for everything, while dad is out chasing his next fling on dating apps, working just enough to keep literally only himself fed, while still getting to see his son AND putting his word in on how he thinks the kid should be raised and educated. My relative even pays for all the “family” counseling, trying to make it all work. It doesn’t look very empowering to me. But she will tell you she’s so glad she didn’t marry the loser and she’s so grateful for her career, and from her viewpoint, how can you disagree with that? But the son is clearly stressed and resentful when it’s dad’s turn with him, and mom is stressed and resentful whenever I talk to her. It’s a big mess. Thanks for the book rec, I need to read it.
A wonderfully arresting graphic, P. Followed by welcome brutal candour. Being childless, I can’t pontificate. I merely offer that Australia’s love of paedophiles is now playing in the ‘child care’ sector. Maybe something to consider. Best to all, P.
Thanks for metnioning the graphic. It took me more time to make than took to write the post and I’ve been telling myself all day that I have to be a better time manager. Your comment makes me feel less terrible about the whole thing :)
Wow. I thought you took 2 seconds to grab it from royalty free. A fascinating glimpse under the veil.
Since I spent so much time, I feel compelled to write about it. I tried to grab a picture, but it’s very difficult to fill in the US without good photoshop skills. So then I needed a map that already filled in the areas of countries with no paid maternity leave. I took this one and then I discovered that the map was outdated. I had to make countries in Africa blue and I had to figure out where all those little islands were and add them. And then I realized that I made Palau way too far east. And I was like, OMG this is absurd. No one knows where Palau is. But then I remembered when I was coaching a bunch of families in Bermuda, I learned that whenever Bermudians see a map, the first thing they check for is Bermuda. So I got in my head that I might have a reader from Palau and I have to fix it.
What a value add! Even more interesting than the post. As I’m a visual learner, who almost couldn’t tie shoelaces, your pic conveyed an essay in a heartbeat. Worth it. :)
Wow, this has a throwback feeling to your old posts 10-15 years ago. Great post.
I have a nearly 5-year old now, so it’s been really interesting as a follower of your writing to see how being a parent plays out in the workplace.
Thanks for saying that, Chris. So encouraging. And I hope you’ll keep commenting about how it plays out in the workforce — I always want to hear from the front lines!
Ironically, the most pressure she felt for not having kids was from women in the office. Lots of negative pressure to avoid taking much leave after childbirth.
That shocked us.
When my mother was a child, her family had a stay-at-home mom. When she had me, she put me in all kinds of weird babysitting and daycare patchworks. I hated it. Sometimes it felt like overstimulation or neglect. Sometimes it felt like abuse.
When I was planning to have my own child, I knew there was no way I would send him to daycare. I tried to make a job on the internet where I could build a following without needing to leave home. I knew the money wasn’t going to be good, or even enough, but I wanted some kind of visibility and power because that feels like options.
I don’t know if my plan worked. We’ll see! But I’m glad I was there for him.
This post brought to mind one of my favorite Chesterton quotes, “Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.” I’m thankful for people like you who can intelligently challenge the “live your best life” arguments and highlight what matters most – the kids!
I am from Russia and we have 1.5 years of paid maternity leave and you can stay home untill the child is 3. Those with lower income receive money untill 18th) . When i was pregnant, i learnt very carefully that the most important thing i can give to my child is to be with him up to 3 years and create that bond for the rest of his life.
It was great 3 years, great time of my life))
I feel sooo sorry for women in USA who really need to make a hard decision to get pregnant or not, because its so expensive to stay without one income.
I agree with you, however many cases need to be vied individually. There can be a granny, there can be distant work, there can be several hours a week of work to fulfill the need to work.
And all this issues is coming back to basics, where we need to think of with whom we make family, and decrease the number of diverses.
This issue goes away if we have normal family and good husband, which is not luck but the result of focusing on this value.
Do you have a source for your assertion that 2 percent of college-educated women are divorced?
The sources I can find suggest that about 25.9% of people with bachelor’s degrees are divorced, e.g.:
https://divorce-education.com/divorce-rate-by-education-level/
Also, could you share what you did with your two lads in the first 18 months after they were each born? It seems like you’re leaving that out here. Did that work for you, and for them?
We have decided (on the conversation on Substack) that the number is wrong. I can’t find it. So I’m retracting that til I find a better link. But it’s not really important for this post. The point of the post is don’t get divorced. My obsession with my (wrong) statistics is that I think we normalize divorce and then let ourselves do it casually when it’s really damaging to kids. I just haven’t found a good way to talk about that since my data is bad.
I blogged when the kids were really young! You can read all about it. I stopped working, and I thought I could just write one column a week, to support us, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t handle the writing and the childcare and I got fired. And then we had no money and I cashed out my 401K. It took me a while to figure out how to have money and not leave the kids. It was rough.
I usually find it more interesting when a blogger grounds her assertions in her own choices and history rather than a recap of (sometimes dubious) statistics.
I recall reading some of the posts you read around that time, and I have the impression you were in desperate straits. I can’t imagine you’d recommend the choices you made then to anybody else. But, again, was that really so terrible for your kids in the long run? What sub-optimal choices did you make back then that had the worst long-term impact, and which were least bad in the long run?
I agree that divorce is damaging to kids, though I don’t think that’s universally the case (just mostly). I say this as a child of divorce who doesn’t feel harmed by it. My mother made good choices and did great by us. My dad was a shiftless hippie musician, and our household was more stable without him. She had good – not greedy – employment throughout, and a ready crew of babysitters. And no stepfathers. I agree with you that we shouldn’t normalize it.
Your figures for what percentage of college-educated women are single mothers are also way, way off, as far as I can tell. Logically, it’s lower than the rate of college-educated divorced women, but it’s probably above 20%, as almost that many women currently in college are already single mothers.
https://iwpr.org/single-mothers-in-college-growing-enrollment-financial-challenges-and-the-benefits-of-attainment/
I struggle with this. I really do. I appreciate the intention behind the post – children’s welfare and wellbeing should be at the centre of parent’s decision making. That’s perfectly achievable and fine in a society where there is sufficient safety nets built in to allow people to avoid poverty and inequality. The late-stage capitalism we are living in does not actually value parents staying at home with kids to “give them the best chance”. The assertion that “If you’re not a single parent and you have enough for food, clothes, and shelter, there’s nothing you can buy that will benefit your child more than having a parent at home” is so over simplified and out of touch it’s not funny. What happens when someone gets sick? What happens when something breaks down? What happens when your rent keeps increasing year upon year, when your wage and or benefits don’t? God forbid what happens if a parent dies?
We need to be asking how we change the system to allow people to make the best choices, not just telling them they are making the wrong ones when they don’t have an alternative.
I completely agree that we have to change the system. But because the system is so bad, no amount of money that we earn as a yearly wage will give us the type of security you’re talking about. Very, very few people can ever achieve a sense of financial security in the current system. But we can give children a sense of emotional security. We need to focus on what we can control.
Money doesn’t give the ultimate security children want. I know many more “poor rich kids” than “poor poor kids.”.
Poverty stinks but it doesn’t mean you don’t have emotional security any more than wealth guarantees you do.
This seems like such a negative outlook. After homeschooling for years, I know many families who make the sacrifices to make a SAHM life work. Yes, they have all the fears that you name. Faith helps. So do extended family, friends and church family. Life is full of fears, including not knowing the day we die. If science ever figures out how to stop death, people will wonder how we ever managed to live or even be happy with death hanging over heads, and yet we do. Having a parent stay home requires sacrifice, for sure. For me its shopping thrift stores for 99% of clothing. No vacations. Rarely eating out. No new cars. No movie theaters unless someone gifts us tickets. No Starbucks runs. I do notice a correlation between the people who say they don’t have enough money and their spendy habits.
I agree. We have certain standards in the US and Canada for what are needs that really aren’t. I used to be a single woman buying way too many clothes and then went to live abroad as a very poor English teacher. I learned to go to thrift stores and not buy into marketing when it came to makeup and skin care. I also bring snacks with me anywhere and enjoy that more than having to find something healthy on a restaurant menu.
If we are living in late stage capitalism, what stage is or should be next that will allow the choices you are envisioning?
Even in the most planned of planned economies, certainty about anything is not guaranteed.
I’m not trying to be contentious. Just offering questions for thought.
I appreciated Carrie’s comments.
My comment was meant to be in response to Angie.
I can tell — though it’s actually a great question for all of us to think about. Where do we want to go from here. The politcal landscape we’re operating in is for baby boomer – it served them and it’s not anything that will map to the future. I like the way you asked what do we want now.
What if the ultimate problem is not the system, but the people in it? Can capitalism work if the people are corrupt, greedy, lazy? Can socialism? Can a dictatorship? Feudalism? Communism? I warrant we won’t find the magical governance system that will take care of all the problems we face and not add more or different problems. The change needed is at the individual level, and moms staying home with kids and raising more whole, well-adjusted adults who are able to make life about others instead of themselves would go a long way towards that.
Facts.
I think the next stage can be one where we address gross wealth inequality and over production/consumption. Maybe the next stage is one that truly recognises that indefinite growth in profits and productivity is not sustainable – particularly not for our environment, resources or the climate. Maybe governments can properly tax billionaires and big corporations. Maybe they can use that money to provide proper safety nets in communities – Free medicare, more affordable public housing, free education, basic income??
I don’t know if that is the solution – I’m just an average person who can see the system isn’t working for everyone. I”m sure there are many people who are living on next to nothing and have done all that’s been suggested to ‘tighten their belt’ but still feel trapped. We need to stop allowing ourselves to be gaslit into thinking that individual decisions are going to solve systemic issues when governments and big corporations hold the power and money that could fix them overnight (if they wanted to).
Totally agree! One reason people don’t push for more equality is they believe if they just “get a good job and work harder” they can be rich too. And they’d rather believe they can be rich than equal. So a key piece in the drive for more equality is convincing people that parenting matters at a deep, core level and has way more impact than “increased wealth” that you can gain from having a second income instead of a stay at home parent.
The combined messaging of “you can be rich too!” and “kids are resilient!” is deathly to the idea of a middle class.
As it is, the government does few things efficiently or well – to put them in control of everything is what dystopian nightmares are made of. For example – we have free education now for k-12 – how nice! But 70% of American public school 4th graders are not proficient in reading. 61% of American public school 4th graders are not proficient in math. (according to 2025 NEAP results.) Give the government more power, and the corruption at the top will only increase, while greater numbers of us not at the top will suffer.
I don’t think anyone here is talking about more government control. Or less.
The issue is what do we care about. That’s about 400 steps before the discussion of what sort of government can protect the things we care about.
Angie mentioned free Medicare, more affordable public housing, basic income – those things aren’t controlled by government?
The answer to your question is no. When it comes to safety nets, government is the most universal entity but not the most reliable entity. Historically and today large non-state institutions have created parallel systems of safety nets. For example, they guarantee healthcare (papacy/church with alms for the poor), income floors (corporations with transparent minimum income), or job security for their members (universities with tenure).
Angie said “government and big corporations hold the power and $ that could fix them overnight” and then specifically listed items like Medicare that are government-controlled. So clearly she was talking about government control. I’ll posit she didn’t have churches in mind for her post.
I absolutely agree there are 400 steps before the discussion of government comes in. But some people jump right to the government part.
And recently we found out that a lot of the church charity, like Catholic Charities, for example, is funded by government grants that can be pulled on a dime, and the entire program collapses. Perhaps I was naive, but I thought at least some of the Catholic Charities budget was funded by parishioners.
The impression that I’m getting is that the people who have been elected to run the country don’t give a rat’s ass about the people.