Stay-At-Home-Mom

When I was a university undergraduate, the notion of staying home with your children was unpopular. Why spend 3-8 expensive years preparing for your career going through college, degree, honours, masters...if you were not going to put the kids where God and feminism intended: in childcare?

So it has been fascinating to watch the pendulum swing the other way the last 15 years, as women of my generation and older faced the untold frustrations of trying to work full time and raise a family. Injuries to the number of women whose heads hit the glass ceiling soared. In her 1997 landmark book “The Second Shift,” Arlie Hochschild reported that most women who worked full time still did most of the housework. Many others found they were working to pay for child care, so they could keep working: to pay for child care.

No wonder more and more of us began to reconsider the stay-at-home option, or variations thereof (flextime, working from home, extended maternity leave, etc.). As Mary Snyder, co-author of “You Can Afford to Stay Home With Your Kids,” told me, “It's a total priority shift. Women don't want the Supermom Syndrome. It looked great from the outside, but once you were in it, you were miserable and you couldn't excel at anything.”

Making the most of naptime I have ridden the waves of maternal angst with the rest of my peers, and the stay-at-home option has always appealed. Plus, I am a tutor and adjunct lecturer, so I could always work (marking, preparing for assignments, night classes etc...)while the little ones nap. I would not even have to lose much professional ground.

So I was a prime candidate to get my butt kicked by Ann Crittenden's new book: “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued.”

A former economics reporter for The New York Times, Crittenden documents in painstaking and depressing detail all the ways in which government policy, the tax code and corporate culture penalize mothers who work and the parents who stay at home. The stats are such a downer, for example, working mothers earn 20% less than working women without kids.
But those who pay the highest “mommy tax,” as Crittenden calls it, are those who choose to stay home. Cost of giving up a career: $1 million She uses herself, a writer , as an example of what happens when women decide to leave the workforce. Most not only forfeit their income, but also retirement savings, pension and other benefits. All told, Crittenden says, she gave up about $700,000. Shocking? Yes. Unlikely? Nope. Economists say that the stay-at-home parent who relinquishes a career may lose about $1 million over the years.

Crittenden does not regret a minute of the time she spent with her son; nor do any of the mothers she interviewed. But the financial tradeoffs she lists are a stunning indictment of a mother's financial vulnerability. To combat these realities, Crittenden recommends a slew of smart policy changes that would reduce the financial penalty of having kids, especially for stay-at-home moms (or SAHMs, as they're increasingly abbreviated). But if you, like me, would like to consider staying home before the glacial pace of government acts on your behalf.

Figure out if you, personally, can afford this emotionally, never mind financially, we all have a lot invested in our careers. It is vital to spend time weighing what leaving the career track will mean. It is difficult to go from changing sales strategies to changing diapers full time, and many women take a hit in their self-esteem and sense of identity. Luckily, many, many women have done it, and they have either formed or joined organizations designed specifically to support your choice.