My wife actually grew up in this kind of situation. Her aunt, who was a nurse lived with them. Two breadwinners and one person, her mother, who stayed home. It actually worked very well.
My wife is a WAHS. (There are more possibilities than one might think.) She started freelance writing when the kids were little, and was able to increase the amount she did as they took less time. Now that they’re gone she can take as much work as she can get. Since I have good benefits, that’s not a problem. She has absolutely no desire to ever work in an office again.
However, how many people work outside but don’t make enough to support themselves (and kids) anyway? The NY Times articles on this subject always seem to think the choice is between being the VP of a big company and staying at home. We wish.
When you throw raising children into the mix, all bets are off. That can and should be a full time job if you do it correctly. Your MIL has earned hers after 25 years…no doubt.
I am referring to one half of a childless couple that expects the other to provide the same life style after the marriage ends. Sorry but I can’t get on board with the full time running errands entitles the SAH partner to get a pension for life. Especially since you can hire someone to do the same for 8 bucks and hour who doesn’t get to live in the nice house, drive the free car and take wonderful vacations.
Thank you for saying what I meant much better.
I mentioned it at length, but got some kind of pass because I also have kids. :rolleyes:
I know plenty of women who did not work BEFORE they had kids (that is, they worked until they got married then quit–to support the husband’s career at home. This means dinner parties, meeting clients and other executive couples at various business functions. Hell, I know of a man who was denied promotion because his wife wouldn’t go to a spousal interview. She was an idiot not to do so, btw). I know at least one woman who packs her husband’s suitcase and has a drink ready for him at 7pm when he rolls through the door. It’s not a life I want, but here’s the rub: it works for them. I do think these spouses deserve some support if the marriage ends because they have applied their skills privately. That doesn’t mean a free ride until death or remarriage, that means financial support for schooling to upgrade skills etc plus alimony for a stipulated period of time. Look at it this way: having your wife or husband stay at home is an opportunity cost.
My point was that after being out of the workforce for that long, she can’t provide for herself very well because she’s not going to be able to get any jobs that pay much better than minimum wage. The alimony is there to help support her while she gets back on her feet (It’s not in perpetuity for her, btw–it’s ten years or until she gets remarried).
Kids or no, ‘housewife’ on a resume doesn’t get you very far.
(Think of it as a severance package ;))
It seems an excellent reason to me. She doesn’t like to work, she can afford to do so. She doesn’t work. I like going to a restaurant, I can afford to do so. I go to the restaurant.
That’s great, then. She’s freeing a job, offering someone else an opportunity he wouldn’t have had otherwise. Everybody’s happy (except you).
Throwing away your chance at a pleasant life in favour of a successful career seems crazy to a lot of people.
How do you know her career would be successful, or even has the slightest chance to be successful, anyway? What are the great career prospects for a teacher (IIRC) who hates her job, in the USA?
Like everybody else I’m going to ask : why would you care?
I wish my wife wouldn’t have to work so she could stay home with the kids and we didn’t have to pay for expensive daycare.
Conversely, I wish my wife had a kick ass job so I didn’t have to work and I would happily assume the role of Mr. Mom.
Well, my point is raising children makes it reasonable for her to have time to “get back on her feet”. Not feeling like working or keeping up with ones skills while being childless entitles a person to nothing in my opinion. The free ride is over when the marriage is over. Alimony in those cases is totally unreasonable. It is like a bonus for being unemployed and supported by continuing to be unemployed and supported by the person who’s jockey shorts you no longer have to wash.
Luckily, QtM didn’t have to chose.
10 years ago (give or take), I would have agreed that a stay at home spouse is probably someone too lazy to work or not tough enough to make it. I know better now.
My best friend is a stay at home spouse. Her youngest child left for college about two years ago, and she considered going back to work. She was an orthopedic nurse (with her masters) who could likely find employment with a few courses to bring her up to date and get her license renewed. However, she and her husband decided they would be better served by her remaining home. It was very much a joint decision.
Her husband is a physician in private practice and she is now a full time doctor’s wife. She does everything not directly related to the day to day business of her husband’s practice.
[ul]She plans the office parties and business functions–everything from ordering and sending out the invitations to managing the caterers, entertainment, and location to “working the room” while the party is in process. I did event planning. It’s a heck of a lot of difficult work.[/ul]
[ul]When her husband’s business is recruiting a new employee or partner, she plans the dinners and other “meet and greets.” If that recruit takes the position and relocates, she sets them up with a realtor, shows them different neighborhoods, introduces them to various people in activities, clubs, and schools that may be of interest.[/ul]
[ul]Her husband’s business associates visit their house at least once a month for dinners, etc. She manages all the details for those get togethers and maintains the house so it’s in tip top shape and presentable should a partner stop by without notice.[/ul]
[ul]She serves on boards and committees that interest her and/or may help her husband professionally.[/ul]
[ul]She’s the one there to meet the plumber, electrician, etc. She schedules their dental, medical, etc. appointments. Likewise, she’s the one who does all the shopping and laundry, pays the bills and performs all other household chores. She makes arrangements for the few vacations they manage to take.[/ul]
[ul]Sadly, her husband’s father recently passed away. She made all the funeral arrangements (her mother in law was too distraught), got the estate in order, and spent a lot of time helping her mother in law through it. (It’s not like her husband wasn’t there for his own mother, but my friend was the one available when her mother in law would call at noon in tears not knowing what to do).[/ul]
That’s just what I can think of off hand. We don’t spend all our time discussing what she does to help her husband build his practice. 
Could her husband leave her in the lurch for some young thing? Maybe. I have a hard time imagining it because they’re so happy. However, as I mentioned earlier, she could go back to work with some effort to refresh her professional knowledge and get her license up to date.
It’s not what *I *would choose (spend all my time supporting someone else’s career? never–that’s so 1950’s), but it makes her and her husband happy. It works for them. She likes managing the house and putting together social functions. Her husband works long, grueling hours and gets to spend his scarce free time with his family or wife or playing tennis, looking through his telescope, etc. Who am I to judge their choices? They’re happy. They hurt no one.
I had to check very closely to make sure the OP wasn’t written by my wife, because those were mostly the same sentiments (some of them nearly verbatim) expressed to me after she read the article. Finally, in the last paragraph, it was clear that the OP was a man, or at least someone who likes chicks.
What my wife takes issue with is not the SAHWs themselves, but the ones who claim that keeping up with a childless house is a full-time job. As mentioned upthread, if it’s not a huge mansion, how long can it take to keep up with the daily messes made by just two adults, when one of those adults is gone all day? I tend to agree, because I’m fully aware of what it takes to keep up after two adults…and it’s somewhere far south of 40 hours a week.
In her view, the whining and entitlement makes women look weaker. And she gets really touchy about women who seem to actively perpetuate the weaker-sex stereotype, since she’s a professional in a male-dominated field (engineering). One major gripe she has now is about a coworker who was allowed to return from maternity leave as a part-time engineer. She thinks that’s bullshit because a man wouldn’t have been given the same consideration. Her worry is that it undermines her own career, since it gives the women engineers a bad name by causing resentment in her male peers.
To me, it’s a bit like saying “Oh, she’s just a secretary.” As if that position never did anything more important than stapling a few papers.
Years of washing jockey shorts is not a free ride. You are familiar with the concept of severance pay, no?
Keeping a house clean is not the only thing a stay-at-home spouse does (well, it might be, but I really doubt it). In my experience, what a stay-at-home spouse does is everything that the couple needs to have done to keep their lives running smoothly except earn money. Does that take exactly 40 hours a week? Maybe yes, maybe no. We as a society tend to get stuck on that 40 hours a week figure as a benchmark for a lot of measurements (perhaps more than we should).
Have any of them asked? I have a number of male co-workers and relatives (including my husband) who have gone part-time or taken a number of months off to be a SAHP.
If you (generic “you”) think that women are getting “too good” a deal compared to men - well, the solution is for men to step up and ask for the same deal. To gripe away “oh, these flighty chicks - they get to do all this stuff like work part time and men would NEVER be allowed to do something like that” without actually attempting to change the situation - well THAT is whiny if you like!
And getting closer to the OP - if a bloke wanted to be a childless Stay At Home Husband, that’s fine by me too. I suspect that a very large percentage of men wouldn’t want to do that because their identity is bound up too much in work - but then, the same is true for quite a few women too.
While she’s deciding what makes women look weak, she should take a moment to ponder whether any man alive has ever thought to himself, “Jesus, that one slacker over there makes all men everywhere look bad.”
Like **Aphidistra ** says, anyone, male or female, who wants that same deal should just *ask * for it. The company wouldn’t have agreed to it if they didn’t feel that they were better off to have that woman part time than not at all. Seems to me like a pretty good litmus test of who they think is worth accommodating.
I was with you until you got to this point…then you went all wrong. What you didn’t know is that we’re talking about the US Government here, so logic and sound decision-making have little to do with it. 
And that’s not just a joke, because it may well be true. Apparently, her workload was pretty easily (and maybe even better) handled by the rest of the staff in her absence. In other words, she wasn’t really missed at all, and her leave may have revealed that she was dead weight to begin with.
Don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m finished with this hijack.
Is there any specific reason that household chores are less valuable than paid employment? And why does anyone revere 9-5 drudgery? No one’s saying that couples who both work don’t have to also do housework, just that for some couples it works better for one to do all of it, and stay home.
I worked part-time before I had the kid. Mr. Lissar worked full-time and is training in the evenings for what we hope will be the family small business/ his career. He would be unable to do both if I weren’t home at least part-time. He doesn’t have time. I like housework more than he does.
We have an agreement thast both of us are working in different areas- me at home, and him at work and school. I don’t see how laziness plays into this. It gives me time to do all our cooking, laundry, shopping, general housework, entertaining our friends and his colleagues, and still see each other occasionally. I was only working about 20hrs a week. I could have easily done a lot more at home, and made it run even better, if I’d been home all the time. Now I’m trying to fit my at least three-quarters job of running our home in with the fulltime job of SAHMing, and it’s difficult enough that we’re talking seriously about me staying home permanently.
:goes to look for her bonbons: