An almost forbidden opinion is now finding a voice in the halls of power and influence.
When the view is uttered above a whisper, it is derided by feminists, disdained among economists, and ignored by most of the media. But it’s what tens of millions of women believe: Stay-at-home mothers are a good thing.
To put a finer point on it: We would be better off if we had more stay-at-home mothers — and stay-at-home fathers, too.
Nobody’s talking about a mandate for stay-at-home parents. Special subsidies for stay-at-home mothers are not really on the table at the moment. But whereas the Biden administration had a policy goal of promoting the dual-income family with full-time formal daycare, some conservatives want to back off that push and welcome more families headed by a full-time homemaker and a single breadwinner.
“They do not just want more children, but a stronger family unit,” the New York Times’s Caroline Kitchener reported in her article on pro-family conservatives. “And stronger families are formed, they say, when a parent stays home.”
You can guess the reaction. “They want to turn back the clock on feminism,” barked Jeff Jarvis, a media critic.
Whenever someone even hints that stay-at-home mothers are good, there is a biting media blowback. Left-wing feminist Jill Filipovic called left-wing policy analyst Matt Bruenig “a sexist leftist” because he preferred that government support for child care be available also for those who care for their own child.
If you suggest that some mothers “are better off for cutting their (paid) work hours and downscaling their professional aspirations in favor of tending to family responsibilities,” Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen says you’re peddling “a lousy old myth about women, motherhood and work.” That anyone would even talk about mothers staying at home is a sign that “gender norms are backsliding,” she argued.
Maybe it really is “turning back the clock” or “backsliding,” and surely it counts as sexist in the left-most corners of the feminist internet, but it’s also true: Stay-at-home parents are good, and we need more of them.
A quick note on sex differences: A vast majority of stay-at-home parents are mothers, and if we got more of them, that would mean more women dropping out of the paid labor force. Why? You could blame the patriarchy, but these sex differences show up in even the most progressive cultures. The most likely explanation is nature: The average mother is more disposed to caring for a baby or a child than is the average father, and the physiological differences between the sexes are a good indicator of this.
That’s why it should matter that the average woman is far more open to staying at home than the average liberal columnist.
Gallup this Spring found that 22% of women would prefer to be at home full time, while another 38% said they ideally would have a part-time job, giving the rest of their time to the homefront. That means only a minority of U.S. women prefer full-time paid employment.
Two-thirds of mothers with minor children say that the best child care arrangement before children are in kindergarten involves one or both parents working less so as to care for their children themselves.
A 2015 poll by Gallup found that most mothers, 56%, would ideally stay at home, including 54% of currently employed mothers.
So, do we care what women want or not? As homemaker Nicole Ruiz put it, “Everyone’s for women making their own choices until you choose to be a housewife.”
There are plenty of other reasons to think families benefit from having a stay-at-home parent.
Consider at-home meals. Whether it’s a hot breakfast, a lazy summer lunch, or a family dinner, a homemade meal is more likely for a child who has a stay-at-home parent. And tons of research has shown that eating at home more and eating take-out less is good for children.
That’s one small example. There are plenty of reasons children thrive when their mother or father is around during the day.
“When parents spend high-quality time with their children, their children are more likely to succeed,” concluded Ariel Kalil, co-director of the University of Chicago’s Parenting Lab. Full-time working parents can spend plenty of high-quality time with their children, but it’s often harder.
Beyond the household, stay-at-home parents also provide benefits. If a neighborhood has more mothers on the front porch or fathers at the corner store during daytime hours, that neighborhood instantly has an informal and humane surveillance system that actually supports more childhood freedom.
Generation X parents talk all the time about how much more we wandered the neighborhood, unscheduled and unsupervised, in the old days. A common theme in these stories is the child who gets caught misbehaving or bailed out of some danger by someone else’s mother from a front porch or at the neighborhood park.
REPUBLICANS MUST HOLD THE LINE ON MEDICAID SPENDING
Then consider all the volunteer work done by parents who don’t have to work 40 hours and don’t have to commute an hour or two each day. And if you prefer or need child care, it’s often the stay-at-home mothers who provide local, informal, or irregular child care.
If you overcome your fear of sounding old-fashioned or anti-feminist, it’s hard to deny that America would be a bit better off if we had a few more stay-at-home parents.