Mothering and Recovery Eight
Partnered Stay-At-Home Moms
Financial security is important in societies where the basics of shelter and food can only be achieved through the selling of labour (either the labour itself, or the goods produced by the labour). Women by and large tend to feel much more anxiety and worry around money than men. [1] Social gender, rather than biological gender, determines money attitudes and behaviours:
“The results suggested that money attitudes can be better understood when seen from the lens of psychological gender and not biological gender. Further, androgyny individuals were found to exhibit more balance in their money attitude dimensions than masculine or feminine individuals.”
Assuming you are in an egalitarian partnership where these things can be discussed, then put in place contingency plans for any situation where your fulltime working partner is unable to work due to illness or injury. Maintaining a significant life insurance policy on the working partner is also critical for ensuring that you and your children are not facing an immediate crisis in trying to make ends meet should something happen to your partner.
If you are someone who had a work history prior to having children, then do a bit of a career review and assess whether the skills you amassed would need to be upgraded were you put in a position where you needed to return to work to support the family. Discuss those scenarios with your partner and decide whether it’s worth it to upgrade those skills periodically over the next few years to act as insurance should you need to take on earning responsibilities for the family.
If you started your family before having any work experience, then it’s a good idea to think on what further education and training might be worth undergoing now so that you are in a position to support yourself and the children should anything happen to the earning partner.
Is the family living to 100% of the partner’s take home pay for day-to-day living, or is there currently regular savings for children’s education, retirement, etc. embedded in the monthly budget?
Are there family or friends around to help with housing, childcare, financial propping up if either you or your partner faces a change in health status (or employment status in your partner’s case)?
If the family is living right to the edge of the income for day-to-day living and there are no family or friends nearby to swoop in and help if there is any change in health and fortune, then it’s probably time to have a discussion about what life changes should happen to either bump up one side or the other of this security equation.
Sometimes having discussions for planning for crisis, so that it’s less of a crisis should it occur, ends up creating an immediate crisis in the partnership. Get counselling support as partners if it’s too fraught to work through, as the alternative is ongoing unresolved stress.
If the partnership is such that your precarity and vulnerability as a stay-at-home mom cannot be discussed and compromises cannot be made to ease those external stressors, then your options are to bear the brunt of that unrelenting stressor and hope for the best, or to leave the partnership.
It might be that staying is unacceptable and leaving is unthinkable and, as such, you feel utterly trapped. The goal with all of this is pick away at the things you might be able to do. If you can’t afford a therapist, then get books out of the library, listen to podcasts, or watch videos on how to move yourself towards a decision that you can live with.
Breaks for a primary caregiver are critical for lowering the need for stress management tools. The partner who works has a break from child caring duties while working. When that partner ends their working day and then expects to have downtime from the stresses of work, that leaves the primary caregiver still in their job: childcare and housework. Both of you are working fulltime and both of you need time away from that job to destress. Yes, yes, the joys of children and all, but realistically, many stay-at-home-moms are pulling 14 to 18-hour days 7 days a week at their job. Even if the partner pulls 60-hour work weeks and you as the stay-at-home mom are somehow going from only 6:00 am to 8:00 pm working as a mother and homemaker, then your partner owes an additional 38 hours in the week to match your hours of work. What this means is a minimum of 2.5-3 hours each day should be provided by the partner (and not all loaded into weekends) to split that 38 hours down the middle. That’s the bare minimum. And by all means if there are alloparents encircling you both, find a way to have them pick up childcare hours to allow for both you and your partner to destress from your jobs.
If the children are in school fulltime, then that may give the stay-at-home mom an hour and a bit of time truly to herself. Usually, it just allows for more uninterrupted work in the home (cleaning, laundry, errands, food prep, etc.).
The closer you as a stay-at-home mom can get to having your job recognized by your partner as a job then the more likely you will have adequate time away from your job and the less likely it will be you will need other stress management tools that knock down your brain’s ability to register how stressed you are.
Partnered Working Moms
If you’re both working fulltime outside the home (even if it’s physically in the home), then there may still be financial stress that should be closely examined and teased apart for possible ways to resolve that.
There are over three and a half jobs for two people when kids are in the equation. As mentioned above, even if you both work 60-hour work weeks, parenting and homemaking is an additional 98 hours/week. Even when adequate daycare and child minding is outsourced, it’s still estimated there are 48 hours of child care and homemaking for the couple to manage. The most common split of that additional work is for the mother to have just over 2 fulltime jobs and the father to have his 1 job.
In fact, the financial costs of having to outsource childcare and homemaking support just to knock that load down from 1.5 to closer to 1 additional job, is often measured against the net income of the working mother. This is often why mothers consider dropping the hours of their waged labour as their net-net contribution seems lacklustre after the costs of outsourcing child and home support are included. Yet both parents benefit from that support.
Do your own math for what hours of homemaking and childcare are actually on your plate as a couple and split it down the middle.
It’s reasonable, and likely desirable, to renegotiate regularly. Maybe before you decided to start adding to your family, you were both a bit optimistic, things weren’t really hashed out and lots of assumptions were made on who might compromise their paid labour for the unpaid labour. Maybe there was already inequality in just handling housework as a couple without kids.
All paid labour demands more than clock-in/clock-out and that the needs of children must not encroach on the workday. But to this day, women tend to take the hit when children’s needs inevitably encroach on a work day. Working mothers are ten times more likely than fathers to take off work to care for a sick child.
“On nonworkdays, fathers engaged in leisure 47% and 35% of the time during which mothers performed childcare and routine housework, respectively. Mothers engaged in leisure only about 16% to 19% of the time that fathers performed childcare and routine housework. In sum, although our study challenges economic theories of specialization by suggesting that nonspecialization is the norm for new parents’ time among highly-educated, dual-earner couples, persistent gender inequalities continue to characterize family work and leisure time.”
I bring in the topic of leisure, because “downtime” is assumed to occur after work (i.e. beyond the paid labour hours you contribute). Unpaid labour is not distinct from leisure in our cultures and it adds to the inequality experienced by mothers. When you get asked on Monday “Hey, what did you do this weekend?” you likely don’t answer with “I covered off about 36 hours of unpaid labour and squeezed in an hour of absolute unassigned free time for me.”
Having fun outings as a family with young children on the weekend is unpaid labour. Not all unpaid labour is drudgery, but it is always responsibility. True leisure doesn’t include responsibility. It might be possible to define a family outing with teenagers as being more of a hybrid of labour and leisure in that the level of responsibility for them is easing, but it isn’t as purely leisure as a walk with just your partner, or a night out at the movies with friends, or reading a book with everyone out of the home and them not needing your attention.
This unpaid labour is an important point for all of us to get our heads around, because there is a lot of social stigma for mothers to refer to time spent with their children as unpaid labour. We are all taught that raising children is a joy, a privilege and a tremendous honour. It’s the most important thing you will do in your life and it defines your sense of fulfillment. Motherhood is a role that catapults any woman into greater levels of perceived acceptance in society even as the modern economic system generates tremendous ambivalence and stress when a mother actually enacts the role’s responsibilities.
This stigma for mothers defining their role as a job is somewhat akin to when healthcare practitioners are criticized and shamed when they demand appropriate boundaries on their labour. They are accused of being uncaring or crassly money-focused. We expect them to enact their profession as a calling and a privilege. Many do feel their practice is a calling, but that doesn’t give us the right to overstep appropriate boundaries, nor should we want them internalizing poor boundaries because they feel called to their work either.
It’s okay to absolutely love your unpaid labour of raising kids; it’s okay not to love it; or to find you sometimes do and sometimes don’t. It’s all unpaid labour.
Maybe we’re so used to paid labour being largely unfulfilling at best, and entirely too toxic at worst, we can’t conceive of a kind of labour that is at once a burden, a reward, a responsibility, a purpose, a trial and a joy.
Sesini G, Manzi C, Lozza E. Is psychology of money a gendered affair? A scoping review and research agenda. International Journal of Consumer Studies. 2023 Nov;47(6):2701-23.
Sahi SK. Understanding gender differences in money attitudes: biological and psychological gender perspective. International Journal of Bank Marketing. 2023 Apr 10;41(3):619-40.
Kamp Dush CM, Yavorsky JE, Schoppe-Sullivan SJ. What are men doing while women perform extra unpaid labor? Leisure and specialization at the transitions to parenthood. Sex roles. 2018 Jun;78(11):715-30.
