Highlights
Parents who stay home to raise their kids are often told they have “the most important job in the world.” But who are these stay-at-home parents? For the past two years, on behalf of the think tank Capita, we have been talking to and conducting research on moms and dads at home who take care of small children. As part of this research, we have conducted focus groups and interviews and solicited surveys. Recently, we released a new report on our findings. And what we’ve discovered is that there is no simple answer to that question.
Sometimes, a stay-at-home parent is a married mother with six kids who is keeping a small family budget on track, dinner on the table, and getting all the kids to school, dentist appointments, and baseball practice. Or a military spouse who has chosen to step back from her career to support her family through moves and deployments. Or a mom of three trying to balance caring for all her children, one of whom has profound autism and is non-verbal, requiring round-the-clock care, numerous weekly and monthly medical appointments, and all the associated paperwork. Or a dad, who is taking care of little kids while his wife tackles a demanding full-time job outside the home. As one proud stay-at-home dad told us, he and his wife sat on the porch one evening coming to the realization that they wanted their kids to have a parent at home when they got back from school—“not me!” his police officer wife laughed.
Contrary to what one might think, it’s also common for a stay-at-home parent to work for pay. In conducting our research, we defined a stay-at-home parent as someone who cares full-time (at least 5 hours) for a child under 12 during the day, regardless of whether they earn income. Many of our respondents had creative, out-of-the-box solutions for combining care of their children and contributing to the family bank account, including homeschooling during the day and teaching music lessons in the evenings, or working part-time remotely after their children are in bed.
Stay-at-Home Parents Are Struggling
While the life circumstances of stay-at-home parents differ, we heard a common theme from many of them: they are struggling. In particular, many families with a parent at home face serious financial difficulties. We conducted a national survey of 1,000 parents who met our definition of being a stay-at-home parent. In response to the question, “What are the largest sources of stress in your life?” 55% responded: “monthly income.” Furthermore, 70% said they would want to do more paid work if they had access to affordable child care options. On a follow-up question, most of these parents said the top reason they wanted to work more was to help their family meet basic needs.
There is no 'one-size-fits all' solution for the problems facing America’s stay-at-home parents: their needs and circumstances differ but their contributions to society are priceless.
We also talked to parents who were choosing between gas and groceries. We foud that their struggles are not just financial: they are also struggling emotionally and having trouble caring for themselves. Some parents shared that they were dealing with isolation. One stay-at-home dad shared: “There was probably a two-year period where I would go weeks and months, talking to no other adult other than my wife or my parents.” They also frequently mentioned feeling like they weren’t respected by society: “Stay-at-home parents are so integral,” one mother told us, “but the people running the country don’t really do anything to recognize it.”
A Political Flashpoint
Stay-at-home parents have long been a political flashpoint. On the left-of-center, some argue that being a stay-at-home mother is bad for women, and so should not be politically supported. Moira Donegan, a columnist at The Guardian, has argued against policies that push “American women out of the workforce, out of public life, out of full participation in society – and into a narrow domestic role of confinement, dependence and isolation.” The right-of-center has traditionally been more hospitable to supporting stay-at-home parents. For example, the Republican Study Committee recently proposed decreasing taxes on stay-at-home parents through allowing families with a breadwinner/homemaker division of labor to contribute more to 401(k) plans and allowing such families to claim the Child and Dependent Care Credit on their taxes by eliminating a requirement that both parents have earned income.
Still, opposition to supporting stay-at-home parents is common on the right as well. For example, Kevin Corinth at AEI wrote in opposition to allowing parents with a stay-at-home parent to claim the Child and Dependent Care Credit. In part, his reasoning was that stay-at-home parents do not have child care expenses, noting that in his hypothetical example of a family where only one parent works, the child care cost is “$0.”
We imagine this would be surprising to many of the families with whom we spoke. Child care costs actually loom large for most families with a stay-at-home parent. For those who do not have the free help of grandparents or others, they struggle to find the external child care they sometimes need. We spoke to mothers who had serious difficulty going to OB appointments when they were pregnant because they couldn’t find anyone to care for their older children. We talked to others who need regular, recurring child care for some of their children so that they can take a child with serious medical problems to the many required appointments and therapies. Many families told us they still struggle under the burden of child care costs even though one spouse does not work a traditional job.
Policymakers often assume that because the work stay-at-home parents do is unpaid, it’s also unimportant—and unlike regular paid work. Nothing could be further from the truth. A stay-at-home mom who needs to take her elderly father with dementia to multiple doctor appointments every month and handle all his finances is doing real and important work—work that our social services systems would probably need to do (and foot the bill for) otherwise. Often, that means she needs to hire a babysitter to take care of her toddler and pay for preschool for her four-year-old, so she can take dad to the neurologist. Other times, it may mean she’s given up paid work opportunities to care for family. Policymakers should think hard about how they can support this mother and the many others like her, whose work—although unpaid and often unseen—forms a load-bearing pillar of society.
Priceless Contributions
There is no “one-size-fits all” solution for the problems facing America’s stay-at-home parents: their needs and circumstances differ but their contributions to society are priceless. We’ve outlined several potential options for policymakers in our report. Among the possibilities: federal and state officials should make every effort to support and encourage businesses to hire moms and dads at home who wish to return to the paid workforce, including through telework, part-time, or per diem jobs. Politicians should also do their best to surge support for child care offered by friends, families, and neighbors, also called “FFN” care, which our surveyed parents prefer (on average) to center-based care. Any such support should include robust fraud protections. For policymakers and others who wish to help stay-at-home parents, don’t just tell them their job is important. Offer them real help.
Ivana Greco and Elliot Haspel are senior fellows at Capita’s Family Policy Lab. Elise Anderson is the manager of Capita’s Family Policy Lab.
*Photo credit: Shutterstock
