Stay at home parents

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Honestly, when I hear “stay at home parent,” I think the distinction is more that the family doesn’t use outsider child care, not whether either/both parents earn $ on/off site. The stay-home parent is parenting first & foremost - when the other parent is around, and/or when there’s a lull in the kids’ needs, the stay-home may do other things too…some people read, some people craft, and yes, some people do “stuff” for money. It doesn’t change the fact that they’re staying home to care for the kids, rather than leave the care to someone else.
 
This discussion makes me think of an equally burning question that I think could benefit from the same extended dialogue: Are zebras black animals with white stripes, or white animals with black stripes?
 
Hm. People are really sensitive around the semantics of this topic…
 
Life insurance, retirement, are other benefits that are kind of important too. I know lots of people who, due to the trend of having children later in life, have found themselves in the less-traditional situation of being near or at retirement age and still having minor children in the home, or technically-adult children who are still full time college students and depend on them for keeping a home for them to live in.
 
Allegra said:
Life insurance, retirement, are other benefits that are kind of important too. I know lots of people who, due to the trend of having children later in life, have found themselves in the less-traditional situation of being near or at retirement age and still having minor children in the home, or technically-adult children who are still full time college students and depend on them for keeping a home for them to live in.
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Right. Or you might have young working adults dependent on you for affordable health insurance…
 
In normal conversational English, I think Clementine14’s phrasing about being a SAHM who works part-time is completely clear and understandable.

I think where we do need a lot of clarity is when talking to people who are wanting to know if they personally can raise a family on a single income. In that case, we need to be crystal clear with regard to what kind of (name removed by moderator)uts are involved in our particular case. For example, we lived in the DC metro area on one moderate income for nearly the first 5 years of our lives as parents. But the fine print was that a) I did do babysitting and a little tutoring when I had the opportunity b) we had free rent and utilities and no commuting costs for 4 out of those 5 years (we had free rent in exchange for doing college student programming–which essentially added up to an extra part-time job for my husband and me, even though I was not technically on the college payroll–our free housing was probably worth $3k a month at the time) and lastly c) I was not a Dave Ramsey fan for most of that time, so I wasn’t paying any attention at all to the financial big picture and Mistakes Were Made.

So, there’s a lot of fine print, and you need to pay attention to the details. TPC is correct that we shouldn’t say, “Yes, you too can be a SAHP! Everybody can be a SAHP!” when what we actually mean is “You can be mostly home with your children–if you work part-time.”
 
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One of the more horrid examples of the collision between “gotta be a SAHM!” and financial reality was the story told by Christian Janeway (she tweets at @XianJaneway) about how in the early years of her marriage, her husband insisted that they not use childcare, but they needed her to bring in income, so his brilliant solution was that she would work customer service at home at night–and then SAHM all day. He actually thought that she was going to homeschool their four kids like that…

It’s really important when planning this stuff to have realistic ideas about what the basic human needs of the parents are. It shouldn’t require heroic virtue just to get through a normal day at the average house…
 
I work part time now but I was a full time stay at home mom off and on for several years. Even now I’m only gone at my job for about 15 hrs a week. My youngest will be in school next year so who knows what will happen then. I would love to get a different job (one that I like more) even if I had to take a pay cut and work more hrs. But deep down I’m a homebody and am happiest when I can tend to my home first…so I would probably never go over 25 hrs a week while I still had kids at home. Even when they are all gone I’ll probably never do that unless I have to…I just would rather take care of the house if possible.

We make this work b/c we live in an extremely affordable area of the country and don’t’ have a lot of fancy things. No new cars or latest smartphone, no huge house or vacations. We are working on paying off our student loans and our mortgage. We’re fortunate that my husband’s job has awesome benefits and is pretty secure. We waited a LONG time for that…he just got this job last year. We’ve grown a lot as a couple…been through a bankruptcy, having to use medicaid for the kids, food stamps while I was going back to school. It was always our goal to get off any form of public assistance ASAP…now, we do still apply for and use our state’s school choice voucher…but that’s not quite the same since it costs the state money to educate kids who go to public school; we’re just using our portion that we pay for with our taxes to send them to a school of our choice.
 
I actually know single mom’s who more or less do this. (Not the homeschool part.) They take turns working shifts with other single mom’s, who watch their kids while they work. As a result, they are almost always either working or taking care of five or six kids. Over conferences, I talked with a woman who was working two jobs this way maybe getting six hours of sleep every other day. Others, I suspect, probably leave the younger kids in charge of older ones and often use Big Bird as a babysitter so they can get an hour or two of rest. They ladies are younger than me, but I still have no idea how they manage.
 
Health Care and benefits are clearly a thing. Need for security also- not only for me as wife to sleep well, but for landlords, banks and insurance, too. At the moment, we are searching a new flat in a low cost of living city. As I work “only” as a freelancer ( and not even in a field associated with insecurity) our chances of getting a new flat are bad. The mainstream here are families with two full time jobs. Everything else is seen as weird. I can imagine that this is not a problem in other areas or countries, but in general, being able to not care about what others do is luxury.
 
It’s not uncommon to share childcare at all! I have a group of moms I know from school who switch off shifts with each other. One mom works weekends, one works 12 hrs, 3 days a week, and one works evenings. They have it worked out that one of the three always has the kids (total of 8 between them). They aren’t single but their husbands are drill sgts so they are gone a lot. Another teacher is married to a man that works evenings and weekends so one is always at home with their kids. I know a family from church that does something similar. They are in medical fields and work opposite days so one is always home. A group of moms I knew from a different area of the country set up a childcare co op where they each worked a few days and rotated homes. There were several moms involved so somebody was always available to watch kids while other people worked. My son says they have moms that trade kids in the parking lot of his job because one mom works second shift and the other mom works third shift.
 
Given the above discussion about what to call moms who are mostly home but may bring in a little money on the side, I thought it interesting there are other women in this situation who struggle with what to call themselves- SAHM, WAHM?

Personally, I think “I manage our home, raise my ‘x-number’ of children, and do such and such on the side.” is a perfectly valid answer to the question of “What do you do?” No need to label oneself with an acronym or phrase that really seeks to find out "What do you do for money,? as if that is the most important thing one can do to contribute to society and family.

 
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