Why Being a Stay At Home Mom Can Make Economical Sense
Some of the outer fringes of the feminist movement are telling other women that they should not be stay at home moms, and instead should go back to work because being a stay at home mom is nothing more than female servitude. They say that women should be able to work out of the home whenever and wherever possible. However staying at home is a choice that many mothers chose to make, and often times it does make a lot of financial sense to do so. Some people think that the mother working and putting the kids in daycare is the only way to go, but there are some creative ways that being a stay at home mom can make a lot of sense.
Daycare is the biggest added expense when you have children. The day care provider has to pay for all of their expenses, as well as for food for the children, toys, and the like. They also have to have insurance, licensing, activities, and other hidden costs that you might not necessarily think about. You should expect to pay at least $500 a month per child for daycare. If you have two or three children, it might make sense to stay home with that alone!
If the mother chooses to stay at home with the children, she also has much more time to be a home economist. She will have time to make food from scratch rather than expenses pre-made frozen food, she will have more time to do laundry, take care of the chores around the house rather than paying someone to do some of those things because the family is just so busy. She’ll have the time to look through circulars and find all sorts of savings that would have otherwise just sat on the table and gone unread.
The mother will also save a lot of money in work related expenses. She wont’ need to have a full set of dress clothes, will be able to make her own morning coffee and make her own lunch rather than going out to eat and stopping at Starbucks.
Many stay-at-home moms are also finding ways to provide an income while their children are there! Some moms do things such as transcription, freelance writing, or even baby-sit other people’s children during the day. The opportunities for stay-at-home moms are endless!
When you combine the decreased work costs, the lack of daycare costs, and add all of the additional money that stay at home mom’s save for the family on top of any money they can make at home, it easily becomes financially sensibly for the mother to stay at home should she choose to.
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Hi – I like your site, and many of your postings are really useful. And I know that this (child care choices) is a firestorm of an issue, but I did want to say a few things in response.
First, it’s not just a stay at home mom issue, it is a stay at home parent issue. Sometimes the mother makes more than the father, or sometime the personalities involved indicate that the father may be the better caregiver. It’s not as common, but to ignore it as an option is unfair.
Second, the extreme feminists that are advocating that everyone should work… yeah, some of them are very vehement, and make things an either/or situation. But others point out, correctly, I think, that women that stop working put themselves in a precarious financial position should their relationship end. Our culture and laws do not currently support/award anyone, man or woman, who stops working to take care of their family. Not for child care, not for elder care. That’s a larger problem with no obvious solution.
The decision to work at home (men or women) or pay for day care is not a purely financial decision.
Me too, I fully agree you shouldn’t say SAHM, because what would your response be if I said the woman makes more? Then obviously the man should stay at home right? But would that change your post that it’s better if one of the parents stay at home if it’s the man? I wonder if many people wouldn’t change their tunes/answers if it were the man who had to stay at home because financially he made less money?
For what it’s worth I probably will stay at home with kids for a bit, but I also work in a high earning field. More than a few women I know are in good/excellent paying positions, like my Sister. Makes more than 2x what her husband does, but he never wanted to stay at home unfortunately. And she was always the primary breadwinner so…daycare. But how do you force a man to stay at home? Is it more acceptable that both parents work because the woman brings home the real bacon in the relationship?
I also think that another considering is how much a of difference there is in earning power between the spouses. If you both make 50% of the income, it’s a lot harder to live on 50% of the income than say a couple making 75%/25% of the incomes. Losing 25% is not a big deal.