That wasn’t very useful, was it? Just ignore me. I should have been in bed hours ago and my brain is already asleep.
Why on earth would I consider stay at home dads to be lazy freeloaders? I really don’t understand the question.
I’ve known a few stay at home dads.
My uncle got laid of in the 80s, they had 3 kids and decided with the cost of day care it was cheaper and easier if he stayed home with the kids. He cooked, he cleaned, he did everything around the house and took care of the kids. When the youngest started school he went found a job.
It worked for them.
Another stay at home dad, from the 70s, never finished high school and had trouble getting a job. He stayed home with the kid, cooked, cleaned and took on side jobs for extra money. Truth be told he was a much better father than she was mother, he had a lot more patience and a more easy going personality.
It worked for them.
However, I knew another couple where the guy was disabled and couldn’t work. His SO couldn’t stand that she had to work and he didn’t and she didn’t value his contribution to the relationship. He saved them quite a bit in daycare and he did get a disability check each month. He cooked and cleaned to the best of his abilities and was a great father. but it wasn’t enough for her. In her eyes she had to do everything, pay for everything, and he was worthless.
I thought she was stupid but to each their own. As a single working mom the idea of not having to pay for daycare and coming home to a clean house and a hot meal sounded like heaven,
the question wouldn’t come up if there wasn’t an assumption that raising children isn’t valuable/worthwhile.
because that’s what it comes down to: our society does not value taking care of other people, if they are children, the elderly, whatever.
My husband is a SAHD. Our son is 2, but we hope to home school until middle-schoolish, though he may start working part time in there somewhere.
I think there is more objection to having a stay-at-home parent at all than to having a dad, specifically, stay home. It’s viewed as an indulgence. In general, I haven’t had anyone say anything, but I also am not the sort of person people say stupid things to, if that makes sense.
For me, it really comes down to the reality that I love my job, I am ambitious toward my professional future, and I really, really want to be able to work 70 hours a week more often than not. If my husband were also working full time, even just 40 hours a week, the rest of our lives would be hell–no time to think, to talk, to screw around. It’d be fucking logistics all the time, and every time anything at all happened–a sick baby, say–it’d be like planning the invasion of Normandy to figure out how to juggle everything. I don’t want that lifestyle. I don’t want to be torn between work and family, and constantly feeling like I am failing both.
We are pretty frugal people by nature, and I just find it much easier to be poor than to be harried. But I think a lot of people interpret “I don’t want to be harried” as being lazy.
I would love to be a stay-at-home dad, but my kids are both in their 20s and live in different states; makes it difficult to justify.
I don’t know why you specifically would consider stay at home dads would be lazy freeloaders. I myself didn’t vote that way, last time I checked, 4 people voted that way (and I wish one of them would pipe up already before this thread starts getting stale), but I think a couple posters give a clue as to why one would vote that way. Eva Luna has one example of someone she knew IRL that fit the description:
Also, several others have discussed the negative cultural stigma and attitudes that they have seen. There also has been some mention of research supporting the existence of these negative attitudes.
I know several. Two of them are former PhD students of mine. One couldn’t teach at all (simply psychologically incapable of it). He actually had brilliant ideas but could not communicate them. His wife had a good job as a programmer and when she had a baby he naturally drifted into that role. The second was a more interesting case. As a grad student he bought the triplex (3 storey apartment building, one apartment on each floor) he was living in. I assume he borrowed the down payment from his parents. But they were relatively cheap in those days (before 1980) and if you did the maintenance yourself, the rent was enough to cover the mortgage and taxes and you got free rent. Then he got a job in upstate NY while his fiancee was finishing her PhD and he bought the small rental property he lived in there. His PhD was okay, not brilliant. When she got a tenure track job and had a baby, he became a house-husband while managing his real estate and, I bet, other investments.
A friend of my sons retired from Microsoft with his options in the late 90s and decided he never had to work again and hasn’t. His wife ran a small business selling her own handcrafts, probably not much more than breaking even. They have a daughter and they both stay home.
My son, cashed in his shares in 2000 and “retired” to help raise their four children and write a couple books (one on his experiences at Microsoft and one on debugging techniques), but after four years got his job back and has been back 10 years now and the kids are mostly grown (one at college, one going in a year, and the other two not far behind).
Finally, my son-in-law is (temporarily, we all hope) a house-husband since his employer insisted he choose which four of his six editors to fire while they offshored their jobs to India. He managed a small imprint inside a large (but shrinking) academic publisher. He has now signed up for a course in web design and meanwhile stays home. My daughter is a well-paid editor for a different academic publisher.
I think either a stay-at-home mom or SAH dad has the opportunity to really suck or be a huge asset, just like at any other job. And, you really can’t win either way with some people.
My mom thinks I’m a bad parent because I’m not a stay at home mom - both my husband and I have full-time jobs. She also thinks my brother in law is a bad father because he IS a stay at home dad. (That said, his son goes to daycare because he’s looking for a job - and has been unemployed for about 3 years, but that’s another story.)
If you have kids, people have preconceived notions about how and who should raise them. If you don’t have kids and you’re over the age of 30, you’re judged for not having them.
I think that’s got to be a regional thing; our friends in Virginia have that kind pressure, but we don’t at all.
Tell me straight, is this meant to be satire?
I don’t wait for someone to open a door for me unless my hands are full, and I’ve been known to open and/or hold doors for others, male or female.
If something’s too heavy for me, I ask for help, but if I can lift it, I’ll tote it. That includes lumber, cases of wine, and wet, dirty bags of mulch.
In our house, whoever sees a roach will dispatch it. Spiders are caught and released outside. Mice, so far, have had the decency not to come in the house.
And I have gone out at idiotic hours of the night to get pain meds for my husband or haul him to the ER. Neither of us would ask the other to fetch food in the middle of the night - we’re not that juvenile.
Yes, there are women who worry about breaking nails or getting their clothes mussed, but there are plenty who don’t play those games. As for the thread question, I don’t think SAHD are necessarily lazy or pioneers. I expect sometimes they’re just in families that decide Mom will go to a job and Dad will deal with the house and the kids. And I expect there are lazy underachieving dads just as there are lazy underachieving moms.
You may not hear comments from the peanut gallery, but that doesn’t mean the peanut gallery isn’t quietly judging you.
Oh totally forgot: my own papa was a stay at home dad when I was a baby, while he finished his dissertation. He loved it and he’s still proud of it.
My father was a SAHD and never went back into the workforce. It never made much sense to me as a kid as he was an old fashioned sort of guy - cooking and cleaning was woman’s work, and children should be seen and not heard. Didn’t seem like a good mindset for a SAHD (and he never did cook or clean). When I grew up they told me that they decided he’d retire early to take care of me since he was the older of the two. When I got a bit older than that and the doctors diagnosed him with anxiety and depression then it really clicked. He’s an introvert, and my mother is an extrovert. He found it difficult to deal with people and his workplace every day, while she makes friends at work. Not only did it make more sense monetarily, but it gave him an out from having to deal with other people all the time.
Of course, it meant he had to deal with a growing child all day instead so…y’know. It wasn’t the smoothest. But the social isolation was probably exactly what he was looking for. I’d say he was neither of the poll options. He was just doing what he thought most made sense. He may or may not have gotten flak from it, but I’ll never know.
Presumably wasn’t the smoothest for your mum either, as she would’ve essentially had two jobs: coming home from one to cooking and cleaning. Not the only person in the world having to do that by a long stretch, still, I suppose this sort of deal is what people are thinking of when they vote “lazy freeloaders”.
Well, they do live on a 6 acre property and as he grew up a farmer, he went back to working the land, mowing all the grass, and handling all the trees. They also tried to use a wood fireplace as much as possible so he would chop stacks and stacks of firewood and haul that all summer, fall, and winter long. They didn’t have garbage service so he’d haul the trash to the dump himself. I wouldn’t call him lazy, but household chores were not his thing and it probably was a bit rough on mom. I had hotdogs and spam for lunch quite a lot at 4 and 5 years old.
I suppose if mowing the lawn and handling the trees were just as high on your mum’s list of priorities then it was a good deal. I don’t think most people looking in on that would think that, but that isn’t what matters.
(I’m worried it sounds snarky, I don’t mean it that way. Here, have some smilies: 
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never give up on a dream!
I’m down with the idea of a stay-at-home dad. My fiance makes less than I do. He also has a physical disability that requires him to miss work on an unpredictable basis. We don’t have kids yet, but it would make more sense in our relationship for him to be the stay-at-home parent. Although my income alone would not do a very good job of providing everything I’d like to give my child and family, it would keep us fed and housed and clean. With his alone, we’d starve in the gutter.
I also realize that, although I hate work, I have pretty severe motivation issues when I’m stuck at home. So even temperamentally, he’d be a far and away better SAHD than me as a SAHM. I always thought I would love to be a stay-at-home mom, mostly because I could play online games all day while changing diapers every couple hours. In reality, this is not how (good) parenting works. 