So question for both men and women. Men: how would you handle being a Stay at home dad? Would it affect how you see yourself as a man? Women: how would you feel if your husband became a stay at home dad? Would it affect how you view him as a man?
I believe that I have the temperament to be a SAHD. Would that the question were more than a hypothetical.
I have done it before and it didn’t work out well. I could take care of the kids just fine but on the other side, it is one of those things that many women claim that they want but few really do. They start to lose respect for you really quickly no matter how good a job you are doing at home.
One constant source of conflict is that most women still see the home and child-raising as their domain even if they are working and the husband is taking care of the home. That leaves the man being viewed as her employee and that is extremely incompatible with a husband-wife relationship. Money becomes more of a conflict too because a lot of women have a ‘what’s yours is mine’ and ‘what’s mine is mine’ attitude at the same time which screws everything up when you only have one income. In short, men and women tend to see those roles very differently when you try to divide them along non-traditional lines.
I am sure there are plenty of couple that pull it off somehow but it generally does not work well in my experience and I would never do it again. Thankfully, I am divorced now and get to take care of my own daughters by myself. That works great and it is one of the things I love the most but it isn’t something I would try if there was another woman living in the same house.
Depends on the couple. I have been a SAHM and in that relationship, it worked really great but the reverse would never have worked. As soon as I got my first job out of college (in law enforcement) the relationship crumbled. He is with a teacher now and is much more comfortable. Now it would likely work much better in current relationship. I work quite a bit more and already make more of an income and my husband has no problems picking up the extra house work. I’d like to think I would have no issues with sharing income as well. Currently I pay more bills but that’s not really the same thing as someone relying on you for their income too. However from all that I have seen from our relationship, I believe we would be fine.
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My husband was unemployed for a couple months earlier this year and it was kind of awesome. If he were interested in staying home full time I’d definitely consider it. We would have to make some substantial lifestyle changes to live on one income, but we could probably swing it.
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It’s pretty much what my wife and I are planning. It matches our respective temperaments and current pay scales.
I’ve done it. However Mrs. Guest was deployed to Iraq during that time, which is why I did it. Not having to worry about income or having enough of it to pay the bills and having Tricare Remote (100% no questions asked medical) made it TONS easier though.
I loved doing it. It was kind of weird and uncomfortable the first few months. Getting used to running errands and seeing a bunch of moms and being looked at with awe, or suspicion or disdain sometimes took some getting used to. Explaining to dudes I’d meet that no, I don’t work outside the home, I don’t telecommute, I’m a stay-at-home dad, that was hard to get used to. I loved things like sitting and watching and napping a football game on the couch with the guestling, sharing a double bowl of ramens, or chili-mac with corn, or a bowl of cereal with him, being the one to discover his very first tooth, all of that, I LOVED it. if I could have the same financial security I had at that time, I would do it again in a heart beat, specially since the guestling is a bit older now.
My husband was a SAHD starting when our first child was born. It worked great for us. His temperament was better suited to it than mine would have been.
We were perfectly happy living on one income, so that wasn’t a problem.
I know others have a difficult time accepting a man in that role, but I never felt that way. I appreciated and respected his parenting skills.
It reminds me of a Feminist movement
Not married, but
the biggest thing that saved me from marrying the bad boyfriend was that I saw him as someone completely unable to take care of children by himself, or of a sick wife. I simply could not visualize him feeding a baby correctly (the food goes inside, promise) while I was in the hospital having our second, or in bed with the flu of doom. He’d been asking pretty much from date one.
I don’t know how good I would have been at being the one earner while a hypothetical husband stayed at home, but many of the characteristics and abilities that one would need as a homemaker are things I see as completely necessary in a spouse; I hope I wouldn’t have turned into a harpy.
My brother Ed, first some back story:
when they got married, Judy had never lived outside of her parents’ house. She’d never learned to cook, had never looked at furniture (she didn’t so much buy their first furniture as have it sold to her by one of her uncles, who offloaded on them stuff from the corners of the warehouse), had never done any grocery shopping.
So, Ed taught her to cook, and to prepare a grocery list, and to shop for groceries, and how many bedsheets you need, and… a lot of basic homemaker things. The one task for which she was more inclined was cleaning: he’s happy to share the space with dust bunnies so long as they don’t bite, she’s a doctor so the one thing she’d been taught how to do (and not by her mother) was clean.
For their first 3 years together, he was the primary or only earner; she would teach a couple of hours of aerobics classes, if and when she had any, while preparing a big exam which would lead to a job (Spanish doctors have to do the equivalent of “passing the bar”). Then she hurt her ankle, couldn’t teach aerobics any more and finally passed the exam.
Fast forward to ten years, an inherited ruin and two children later. He loses the last job he’d had (he’d been a construction foreman at that point) and they decide he’s going to be a SAHD when his mother in law isn’t available, and working in making the ruin livable when said MiL can be around.
At one point there were indeed tensions because she was seeing him as “kept” and forgetting that they had made that decision together and that the ruin came from her side. We were very rude to her and pointed out “so were you, and nobody called you names!” “What? No I wasn’t!” “Oh? How much of your income did those two hours of classes represent? And how many times did you not have any? Would you have been able to pay your teacher for the exam from that income, or not without his? And when you were stuck in bed, who paid for your food, the Holy Ghost?”
It was a large, bitter pill to swallow, but she did and things went back to an equal partnership. Now the ruin is all rebuilt, he’s gotten a Masters in Education and starts a new job this same month, as the new Science teacher in our old High School (eventually, their kids’ future HS).
Don’t have kids myself, but one of my BIL’s lost his just something like two weeks before their second kid was born and my sister still had hers so after the maternity leave was over she went back to work and they decided he’d be the one to stay home with the kids. For them, it worked really, really great. But a lot depends on the people involved.
Agreed and its interesting just how many ostensibly “stay home dads” cases which seem to work out, have much more than that if you go deeper.
Of the people I know who are in such relationships;
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Both are lawyers. She is regional head of legal for a large multinational. He is a lawyer in private practice; he works mostly from home or an office right next door. I would estimate his work probably ends up being more lucrative for him then hers is.
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She works as an accountant. He owns several properties across New York state, including commercial and residential ones and collects rents…earns much more than she does
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Retired, late in life “surprise” (who is now a teen).
Besides that, everything else seems to be temporary; people in those situations seem to have expected to return to work soon.
Sounds like there are some misplaced pronoun identifiers in this post. If not, I’m sorry for the loss of your BIL’s kid.
I think it’s just BiL losing his job in more ways than one.
I know a few stay at home dads, though most of them have only done it for a while, switching roles after a year or so. That’s probably easier for those who find it psychologically difficult if it’s seen by both parties as only temporary thing. And lets be fair here, a lot of the mums have difficulties leaving work and spending all their time caring for babies. It can be pretty isolating, though, as baby groups are more geared towards mums and babies, not dads and babies, that’s probably even more true for guys.
Personally, as my Mum was brought up by a single dad, I don’t think I grew up with any real idea of child care being women’s work. It was always pretty well drummed into my that it’s far more a matter of personality than gender.
Yeah, my Mum stayed home to care for us but that was more to do with Dad having more of a stable career; if she’s been the one with the qualifications, or she’d been more into her job, it could easily have gone the other way.
My son-in-law did it for a couple of years after he quit his old job (he was in charge of a small imprint for a major publisher and when they asked him to designate 3 of his editors for firing so they could ship their jobs to India, he left). He retrained as a web designer and worked free-lance from home until one of his clients offered him a full-time job.
For the time they did it, it worked out well. He was always very sharing of housework and child raising. He has always done half the cooking (and is an excellent cook) so the experience was not much of a wrench.
My husband is a SAHD. It was a deliberate plan, planned well in advance of our son’s conception, let alone birth. He quit his job when the baby was born.
Overall, it’s worked really well. I really wanted a kid but I really, really love my job and want to be able to not just go to work, but to work really hard–long hours, lots of flexibility. His job was just a job.
It’s not all perfect, but it’s hard to tell which of that is just having a kid now, instead of his being the SAHP. Like, I feel like we are a little isolated from each other and I wish we had more alone time, but I suspect that’s true of all parents.
The only way in which I feel gender has played a role is that when I am home I feel like our son is my job in a way that I don’t think I would if I were a man. As soon as I walk in the door, I feel like the onus is on me to feed/entertain/manage our child, and he’s allowed to catch a break and play video games. This makes for very long days when I leave for work at 6:00 and come home over 12 hours later. And while it’s really me that has this idea, he’s pretty willing to let me. We work on it, and it’s gotten better, especially as our son had grown.
This is actually the only way I’d have chosen to have kids if one person was a SAHP. I wouldn’t handle being a SAHM very well. I’m not saying the father would have to be a SAHD - we could both work - but if one of us stayed home, it would be him.
That said, “him” in this context is my imaginary husband/SO, so it’s not like I have anyone else to bounce that concept off of. 
Change every instance of “most women” to “women I’ve chosen to partner with”, and you’ve got an interesting story there.
I don’t think my husband would have had the temperament for it. Don’t get me wrong - he adores our daughter and he was wonderful with her when she was a wee little thing. But his identity has always been tied to his career, and to him, it was important to be able to say “I’m and engineer” rather than “I’m a stay-at-home-dad.” Not that it was ever an option. The various choices we made over the years required that we both work.
I don’t know that I’d have enjoyed being a stay-at-home-mom. But who knows - it’s all speculation now. Our baby just turned 31 this week and the youngest at home is a 4-y/o pug. So we’ll never know, will we?
I’d love to be one except I’m not a dad