I worked until this year - mine are 8th and 9th grade now. But I phrase it as “it turns out my kids needed me home a lot more as teenagers than they ever did as toddlers.” And honestly, I think that is true - at least for my kids. There is so much trouble they can get into as teenagers. As little kids, they grabbed your values so easily - as teenagers - they’ll throw you under a bus to impress their friends. And most people smile and say “yeah, I get that.”
Agree 100%. I worked until the summer before my son started Kindergarten. I had planned to keep working until he was through 3rd grade, but things didn’t work out quite as planned and I quit sooner. I believe that kids need their parents more when they are older than younger. Like you said, there’s just so much more they can get into as teenagers than as toddlers.
I’ve been a stay at home mom the majority of the time since my oldest was born in 2003. I think I’ve worked maybe a total of 3-4 years in that time. I work from home now which is a complete bitch some days and sometimes I wish I had an outside job.
I don’t think anybody in my life really looks down on me. I have a toddler and a baby on the way and I contribute to the household, too. In addition to that, I’m not the stay at home mom who doesn’t cook and clean; the stereotypical “bon bon eater”, or whatever.
I know it’s an old thread and maybe people won’t come back to engage anymore, but re: working parents still being “on call” and people having to leave work to tend to children, or skip out on lunch to go to dentist appts, etc: literally every working mother I know has called me at one time or another to accommodate them in some way because they were too busy working. Two recent examples, one from today and one from tomorrow. Today: head start teacher friend calls me and says the daycare she works at is closing due to a power outage and the kids are being sent home. She can’t leave though so can I drive 60 miles (one way) to pick up her kids and watch them for the rest of the day. Tomorrow: my sister asked me to pick my nephew up at school, bring him to the clinic for an appointment, and then drop him back off at school. Total trip: 100 miles. Time out of my day: hours. I don’t even know. Today would have taken a minimum of 2.5 hours just with drive time and the act of picking the kids up, plus 5-6 hours of babysitting.
Their perception, of course, is that I’m not busy so I must be able to help. They don’t know that I have a mountain of paperwork to process plus dishes to do plus laundry to put away and the toddler wants to do a puzzle and the 10 year old needs homework help and I still need to switch the laundry over to the dryer and I have to call the electrician for one of the tenants and my phone hasn’t stopped ringing for an hour. I don’t know how many times I’ve picked up kids who are not mine at school because a parent got stuck in a meeting or traffic or whatever and that’s usually okay but “just a quick little favor” for a parent too busy working can fuck up my whole life for, like, a week.
So I never did wind up picking up the head start teacher’s kids. You know why? Because I told her flat out I would have to bring the kids to my house, not hers, and, even though her expectation was for me to drop everything with no notice and drive two hours to babysit her kids for the entire business day and that was just totally acceptable, she didn’t want to take the time to drive the extra 20 minutes to pick her kids up from my house. Somehow that was unreasonable. :rolleyes:
Silver Fire, those inquiries merit a one-word response: “No.” You are under NO obligation to care for anyone’s kids other than your own.
Do any of those women have husbands, or at least a father or other relatives who are in the picture and live in town? That’s their responsibility too.
In all the years I had kids - I had my mother pick up kids, I had my husband get kids, I got kids - NONE of my stay at home neighbor friends EVER picked up my kids (unless they were also picking up their kids and we were carpooling). I can’t imagine imposing on someone like that.
There were a few times when it snowed and we were late to daycare. I called daycare and expected to be billed (they never billed me - those were rare exceptions in Minnesota snowstorms).
I can think of ONE situation where I would go pick up a neighbor’s or friend’s kids on short notice, and that is where I would be going there anyway to pick up my own kids, and they would come along too.
I wonder if SAHPs would consider asking a WOHM if she would buy something for her own kids, because after all, she has a job and is just rolling in money. 
p.s. I might do free babysitting once, or in a true emergency (had to go to the ER, that kind of thing) but otherwise, I’d charge. This was what my parents did; yes, I said “parents”. My dad did pick-up duties sometimes, because he had days off during the week and would do it if he was available.
My little anecdote may provide some insight as to why they’re looked down on - not that this is typical, but everyone knows ONE like this, and it probably taints their perception.
If it weren’t for the “M” part of SAHM, then my wife would be signing divorce papers.
She’s utterly useless around the house, but she’s a hell of a mother to our daughter. Gives her plenty of love, attention, and care. That little angel will never have to doubt that her parents love her very much, and will be here to support her as she grows.
The mess around the house though - it’s inexcusable. This woman’s never had to work a job ( I make enough for us both ) but she still tosses her trash alongside the couch she’s sitting at, leaves piles of dirty plates/cups on tables for days, and basically lives out of laundry baskets for lack of motivation to put the stuff away. And it’s got nothing to do with the baby…it’s been this way since day 1. I can’t keep up with the mess she generates - after working 10-12 hours a day, I’m just not going to spend my evening cleaning up the mess she made throughout the day. I’m just not…on pure principle. If I had no option, because my wife had no legs, or no arms, then sure. But just “I’m tired…” doesn’t cut the mustard. I already spend my saturday and sunday mornings cleaning up the house. So I WISH I had a legitimate “stay-at-home-mom” who contributed her fair share. I don’t, so I don’t typically give her complaints any validity when she “just didn’t have time to pick up the house today”. Well ya lazy yatch, there’s always plenty of time to make a mess, but never any time to clean it up huh? Try taking a dirty plate with you when you WALK RIGHT PAST THE KITCHEN to get to the bathroom…
I’ve even told her I’m going to start paying a cleaning service, and that it’s going to come out of the money we would otherwise be saving for vacation, because I don’t want our daughter growing up in such a messy house. I told her I would do all the dinner cooking and cleaning up afterwards - all she had to do was buy the groceries and set out what she wanted cooked. (I’m a restaurant trained cook - not a chef, but good enough) Didn’t happen beyond the first time…I thought it was a good deal!
For an anecdote in the opposite direction:
Her mother is the penultimate example of a “housewife” and has chosen to take her job very seriously. Her home is spotless, her husband has never once had to cook for himself (though he does on occasion, he just doesn’t have to), and she even does the majority of the “home maintenance” because her husband has bum knees. She did all this for the 20+ years that were spent raising their 3 kids. She knows full well that she chose to stay at home, and enjoys it, and doesn’t begrudge other women who have jobs outside the home. This is a woman I look UP to, sincerely, as does everyone in the family.
Maybe she’s rebelling against her childhood environment? Maybe she just needs to grow up a little…meh, who knows, that’s a separate thread.
Get enough stories like this floating around in your headspace - and it’s no wonder “stay at home mom” might get looked down on.
OMG, I want to do this so bad.
My sister (and almost everybody who has asked for favors) is married. Her husband is a school teacher though and doesn’t have any more time during the weekday than she does. Her biggest reason for why she was asking about this particular appointment is that they both just started new jobs and don’t want to start asking for half days or whatever already. I’ll give her that, I guess.
I did take my nephew to the clinic today. Three hours out of my day for, literally, a 2 minute appointment. Plus I had the toddler out during lunch and nap time so he slept for maybe the last 15-20 minutes in the car and is going to be an absolute dickhead for the rest of the day now because no way am I going to get him to nap again.
Yesterday when I called her to confirm I would do it, she offered me $10 for gas.
It’s ONE HUNDRED MILES. I drive a damn MINIVAN. Are you shitting me?! Maybe if this was 2003 and I still drove a little Chevy…
Anyway. Ranting done. I’m sad for you, Uber. That’s a total bummer. Maybe she’s depressed? Depressed people don’t do a fucking thing. I know, I was super depressed for quite a while a couple years ago and didn’t do anything that was harder than making my kids not die and some days I felt I should get a pat on the back just for that much effort. Still, reasons aside, that’s a bitch. 
I’m pretty much of the opinion that the working parent doesn’t have to do much of anything at all when there’s a home parent.
I do expect my husband to just about take over toddler duty when he gets home right now just because I’m almost 34 weeks pregnant and have zero patience and there have been days when he’s come home to find me sitting in the middle of the floor bawling my eyes out in frustration, so I think it’s best if he just takes over as soon as possible on some days. I don’t have a lot of other expectations of him. He’ll step up and make dinner if I’ve had a particularly long day and he washes dishes because I’m short enough and now round enough that reaching into the sink is very, very uncomfortable. Other than that, I pretty much run the show here. I don’t think it should be any other way.
Hey Hey Dangerosa - I’m in from the gloom to say Hi 
I hope all is well with you & yours!
Can I stick my spoon in and stir the pot a little? Yes? Great thanks!
I’ve been a SAHD, it was awesome, I loved it, but it was weird too. In my part of the country, I would either get creepy approving vibes (yeah man, you got a sugar mama, way to go) or weird disapproving vibes (you lazy pos, go get a job and support your woman like a real man)
From my perspective, both sides are right, it’s just too individual a thing.
Now I get to learn about being a single dad, I think it will be awesome
May I interject here given a small farmstead being the predominant ‘family establishment’ through most of non-hunter/gatherer history … call it mom, dad, 4 surviving kids [ 2 boys, 2 girls at 2 years, 5 years, 9 years and 12 years, the 12 and 2 being the boys] the possibility of a grandmother also living in home …
The father and the older boy do the majority of the farm work - plowing and actual swinging of the scythe … the children start at a fairly young age with small light chores, feeding chickens, gathering eggs, light housework [bring in water and wood, sweep the hearth for ashes and haul a bucket of ashes out, learning more complex chores a step at a time like watching and learning to milk a goat or comb wool and eventually to spin, hand sewing] not to mention older children tended smaller children, and at harvest time there was always something to do for kids and womenfolk - you don’t think gleaning and binding sheaves happen by themselves? washing and prepping vegetables for drying, helping slaughter animals …
In period kids may not have gone to school, but they didn’t sit around playing most of the time either. Granted in an old style farm there was a fair amount of down time in the winter and some in the summer when you were not weeding the garden or doing small animal care … I knwo when I was growing up, my brother and I weeded the garden, helped pick the fruits and veggies, and I helped mom wash cut and can stuff, some stuff just got blanched and put in the freezer but I turn out a damned good batch of bread and butter pickles, or watermelon rind pickles, and my grandmother made sure I could do most forms of embroidery, repair pretty much any sort of thing from darning socks and woolens [sweaters] to sewing a good straight seam with 12 to 14 to the inch stiches. Helped me a lot when I got into historical recreation - I can make an entire Elizabethan gown by hand, including the black work embellishment on a partlet, and I learned to take a sheep, and the right tools to go and take the raw wool and spin weave and sew a garment … believe me, it takes around 300 hours to go from sheep to huldremose gown …
I’ve been a part-time SAHD since losing my job a few months ago. If we could live indefinitely off of my wife’s income, I probably wouldn’t mind it so much. Even when I was working, I had a lot of flexibility to work from home, so could take care of the kids in a pinch.
Honestly, it’s not super difficult (my kids are 2 and 4). AND I manage to find time to clean the apartment. My wife doesn’t clean shit. I don’t care because I don’t mind it. But let’s not pretend SAHP are splitting the freakin atom.
And I do know a number of SAHMs who actually have a nanny who does all the heavy lifting with the kids (as do we). So there is a perception of a certain class of SAHM who just sort of brunches and drinks white wine with her gal pals all day while the au pair takes care of the kids.