The phrase “stay-at-home mom” evokes a wide range of images and emotions. For some, it’s an aspiration. For a few, it’s a happy reality. But for most, it’s neither, because it’s either not an option at all, or even if it is, it’s far from an optimal economic choice. Conservative media have responded to that lack of choice in a variety of ways, including by trying to glamorize the role as a “lifestyle.”
For the few who have full control over their economic lives, “lifestyle” might be the appropriate term: we leave the “tradwife” branding, and the consumption and assumptions that branding entails, to them. In this commentary, we’re concerned with not the few, but the many; and the reality is that many families with stay-at-home moms are more economically insecure, which in turn means greater anxiety and stress, further compounding the lower quality of life that comes with increased precarity. The high cost of living makes it nearly impossible for most two-parent families with children to make life work on only one salary. Most households in the United States need all parents working—whether it’s a solo parent or a two-parent family—to support one child, let alone families with two or more children.
Preferences aside, a more robust care and economic infrastructure, one that maximizes affordability and family choices, will benefit all of us. In this commentary, we’ll take a look at why.
The Cost of Maintaining a Family
Staying afloat is a challenge for most in America, as the affordability crisis has raised costs while wages have not kept up. This problem is especially acute for families with children, even families in states with a comparatively low cost of living. Let’s take as an example a family of three, with one child and one adult working, in Alabama, one of the states with the lowest cost of living. According to the MIT living wage calculator, which measures the income level needed to meet a minimum standard of living within a community, this family would need an income of $35 an hour. Yet the median hourly wage in the state is $22 an hour. Only the top 20 percent of Alabamians are paid a sufficient wage to support a family with two adults and one child on one salary.
Similarly, in Arizona, a state with a higher cost of living than Alabama, the living wage for a single-earner household with two adults and one child is $40 an hour, a wage that less than the top 20 percent of Arizonans are paid. As we can see, a daily face-off with precarity is the lot of most families with only one source of income.
A daily face-off with precarity is the lot of most families with only one source of income.
Recent policymaking trends would make such precarity all but inescapable. Some conservatives are advocating for a rollback of decades of progress for women’s rights, with some even calling for the erasure of women’s right to vote. Included in this backwards agenda are overt advocacy and policy measures that would eliminate women’s hard-won choices, and push women to leave the workforce to have and raise children, whether they want or can afford to do so. These attacks on abortion rights, birth control, and protections against discrimination on the basis of sex are already negatively impacting women and families.
The worldview driving these trends ignores that the challenges faced by working and stay-at-home parents alike are largely caused by stagnating wages, and by the lack of public investment in policies and programs that make it easier for Americans to have both a work life and a family life that suits them. Stay-at-home parents do challenging and important work that is undervalued, similar to those in the care workforce, which is underpaid despite the complex and important work they do.
All care work is vitally important for the collective well-being of our society, and all parents should have a choice in making the decisions that are best for their families. This includes considering long-term economic security, managing time, and ensuring the health and safety of their kids. Prescribing one lifestyle for mothers by using policy to sever them from other options disregards this right.
Who Are Stay-at-Home-Moms?
Today, moms who stay home with their children (SAHMs) are more likely than those working for pay to be Hispanic, under the age of 34, have younger children, and be married. The vast majority of SAHMs are home only temporarily: the share of moms staying at home declines drastically as children reach school age, when many moms return to or enter the workforce. Families with stay-at-home moms are also less economically secure, with higher rates of poverty and lower household income than families with working moms.
The most important and obvious difference between SAHMs and employed mothers is that most SAHMs have very young children, with the median age of the youngest child in families with stay-at-home-moms at 6.6 years old. This is not surprising, given that being a stay-at-home-mom is a temporary status for many women. As children get older, mother’s labor force participation rates increase. For example, 31 percent of moms with a youngest child aged 1 or younger are stay-at-home. Yet, only 20 percent of moms with a youngest child that is 10 years old are at home full-time. This suggests that for many families, moms stay home to raise their children until they start school. But we mustn’t assume that all moms want it this way. Surveys suggest that for some moms that is their first choice, while for others it is because of the lack of affordable child care that meets their needs. In fact, research shows that lower child care prices increase maternal labor force participation. Furthermore, recent research finds that 70 percent of stay-at-home-parents would want to find paid work or increase their hours of paid work if affordable nonparental care options were available.
Income and Poverty
Across the country, families are struggling with high costs from inflation and tariffs, which have raised the price of groceries, utilities, health care, and child care. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated, despite growing productivity. This means that having all parents working is an economic necessity for most families. Research has shown that mothers are not only participating in the workforce, but also that 70 percent of U.S. mothers are either the primary or co-breadwinner. This phenomenon persists despite a gender pay gap and motherhood wage penalties that keep mothers paid significantly less than fathers. For this reason, closing wage gaps and pay disparities by increasing mothers’ wages is one crucial vehicle for improving family economic security.
Looking at stay-at-home mothers, the general need for two incomes to sustain a family is also apparent. According to our analysis of American Community Survey data, the median family income for families with SAHMs is $76,500, which is over $60,000 less per year than families with working moms. Clearly, this isn’t only a matter of high-income families having relatively less income than other high-income families. In fact, SAHMs are three times more likely to fall below the supplemental poverty line. This means families with SAHMs are more likely to struggle affording basic needs, let alone have the means to thrive. Economic stability is vital for a wide range of outcomes, including the safe and healthy development of young children.
Assuming many moms go back to work when their child enters kindergarten, that income gap produces a five-year difference of $200,000 on average. For parents with multiple children, this could become a ten year difference of $400,000. Those dollars could have been spent instead on food, housing, and college savings. And this doesn’t even account for losses from forgone opportunities for career advancement, retirement savings, and the other benefits associated with employment. As a result, households with SAHMs lose earnings, and SAHMs themselves risk economic precarity in the event of divorce or in the event a husband loses his job.
Higher rates of poverty persist for households with SAHMs across race and ethnicity. Nearly one in seven white SAHM households, one in two Black SAHM households, and one in three Hispanic/Latino SAHM households have incomes that are below the supplemental poverty line. For all groups, this is twice the rate of their employed counterparts. To wit, for many mothers, working is not only something they prefer, but also an economic necessity. As a result, SAHMs are also more likely to be using public benefits like Medicaid for themselves or their children, or SNAP to lower food costs for themselves and their families. Recent Medicaid and SNAP rollbacks will have a disproportionately negative impact on these families.
Figure 1
Other Noteworthy Differences
Stay-at-home moms are also more likely to be married than working moms (75 percent versus 65 percent). This leaves them especially vulnerable to the financial risk and precarity posed by divorce. SAHMS are also less likely to have a college degree (63 percent versus 44 percent). This gap is striking because workers with a college degree continue to experience higher incomes in the workforce than their non-degree-holding counterparts, although gender-based pay disparities exist across the income spectrum. And SAHMs are more than twice as likely to have a disability (13 percent versus 6 percent).
It also bears noting that regardless of employment status, parents today spend more time with their children than in years prior. However, a gender gap persists there too, with mothers—even employed mothers—spending more time providing child care than fathers.
How Public Investment Gives Moms the Choices They Deserve
Policymakers can expand and support equitable and meaningful choices for women as they seek to balance their economic and domestic lives. Public investments in the care economy—child care, paid leave, care for older and disabled people, and good care jobs—help make life more affordable for families. Workplace policies can be updated, and wages increased, to meet today’s realities. When families have access to high quality affordable care, paid family leave, flexible and predictable scheduling practices, and high-quality aging and disability care, they are able to make choices rooted in their needs.
When families have access to high quality affordable care, paid family leave, flexible and predictable scheduling practices, and high-quality aging and disability care, they are able to make choices rooted in their needs.
These choices allow families to prioritize their preferences and have greater calm and less stress. Too many families today have to leave their jobs or reduce their work, lowering their earnings and threatening their long-term economic security, while holding back economic growth because of the lack of care policies in the United States.
Parents need true freedom to choose care and work arrangements that fit their desires and their families’ needs, all of which can change over time. Parents should be able to make these decisions thinking about both the short- and long-term well-being of their families. In order to truly engage in a conversation about what families need, let’s start from a shared understanding of the sacrifices most stay-at-home moms face.
A care economy with paid leave would help moms take care of their newborns with sufficient wage replacement and health care, and help them stay attached to the labor force, ensuring they’re not losing job opportunities, earnings, and retirement security in the long run. And affordable child care would help moms work without spending an entire paycheck on child care, or being forced to leave the workforce entirely. A robust care economy would help moms take care of their families, while also ensuring they have the economic security families need to thrive.
Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank Dr. Katherine Gallagher Robbins and Dr. Jennifer Glass for their insightful feedback.
Tags: child care costs, affordability, stay-at-home-moms
Who Are America’s Stay-at-Home Moms?
The phrase “stay-at-home mom” evokes a wide range of images and emotions. For some, it’s an aspiration. For a few, it’s a happy reality. But for most, it’s neither, because it’s either not an option at all, or even if it is, it’s far from an optimal economic choice. Conservative media have responded to that lack of choice in a variety of ways, including by trying to glamorize the role as a “lifestyle.”
For the few who have full control over their economic lives, “lifestyle” might be the appropriate term: we leave the “tradwife” branding, and the consumption and assumptions that branding entails, to them. In this commentary, we’re concerned with not the few, but the many; and the reality is that many families with stay-at-home moms are more economically insecure, which in turn means greater anxiety and stress, further compounding the lower quality of life that comes with increased precarity. The high cost of living makes it nearly impossible for most two-parent families with children to make life work on only one salary. Most households in the United States need all parents working—whether it’s a solo parent or a two-parent family—to support one child, let alone families with two or more children.
Preferences aside, a more robust care and economic infrastructure, one that maximizes affordability and family choices, will benefit all of us. In this commentary, we’ll take a look at why.
The Cost of Maintaining a Family
Staying afloat is a challenge for most in America, as the affordability crisis has raised costs while wages have not kept up. This problem is especially acute for families with children, even families in states with a comparatively low cost of living. Let’s take as an example a family of three, with one child and one adult working, in Alabama, one of the states with the lowest cost of living. According to the MIT living wage calculator, which measures the income level needed to meet a minimum standard of living within a community, this family would need an income of $35 an hour. Yet the median hourly wage in the state is $22 an hour. Only the top 20 percent of Alabamians are paid a sufficient wage to support a family with two adults and one child on one salary.
Similarly, in Arizona, a state with a higher cost of living than Alabama, the living wage for a single-earner household with two adults and one child is $40 an hour, a wage that less than the top 20 percent of Arizonans are paid. As we can see, a daily face-off with precarity is the lot of most families with only one source of income.
Recent policymaking trends would make such precarity all but inescapable. Some conservatives are advocating for a rollback of decades of progress for women’s rights, with some even calling for the erasure of women’s right to vote. Included in this backwards agenda are overt advocacy and policy measures that would eliminate women’s hard-won choices, and push women to leave the workforce to have and raise children, whether they want or can afford to do so. These attacks on abortion rights, birth control, and protections against discrimination on the basis of sex are already negatively impacting women and families.
The worldview driving these trends ignores that the challenges faced by working and stay-at-home parents alike are largely caused by stagnating wages, and by the lack of public investment in policies and programs that make it easier for Americans to have both a work life and a family life that suits them. Stay-at-home parents do challenging and important work that is undervalued, similar to those in the care workforce, which is underpaid despite the complex and important work they do.
All care work is vitally important for the collective well-being of our society, and all parents should have a choice in making the decisions that are best for their families. This includes considering long-term economic security, managing time, and ensuring the health and safety of their kids. Prescribing one lifestyle for mothers by using policy to sever them from other options disregards this right.
Who Are Stay-at-Home-Moms?
Today, moms who stay home with their children (SAHMs) are more likely than those working for pay to be Hispanic, under the age of 34, have younger children, and be married. The vast majority of SAHMs are home only temporarily: the share of moms staying at home declines drastically as children reach school age, when many moms return to or enter the workforce. Families with stay-at-home moms are also less economically secure, with higher rates of poverty and lower household income than families with working moms.
The most important and obvious difference between SAHMs and employed mothers is that most SAHMs have very young children, with the median age of the youngest child in families with stay-at-home-moms at 6.6 years old. This is not surprising, given that being a stay-at-home-mom is a temporary status for many women. As children get older, mother’s labor force participation rates increase. For example, 31 percent of moms with a youngest child aged 1 or younger are stay-at-home. Yet, only 20 percent of moms with a youngest child that is 10 years old are at home full-time.1 This suggests that for many families, moms stay home to raise their children until they start school. But we mustn’t assume that all moms want it this way. Surveys suggest that for some moms that is their first choice, while for others it is because of the lack of affordable child care that meets their needs. In fact, research shows that lower child care prices increase maternal labor force participation. Furthermore, recent research finds that 70 percent of stay-at-home-parents would want to find paid work or increase their hours of paid work if affordable nonparental care options were available.
Income and Poverty
Across the country, families are struggling with high costs from inflation and tariffs, which have raised the price of groceries, utilities, health care, and child care. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated, despite growing productivity. This means that having all parents working is an economic necessity for most families. Research has shown that mothers are not only participating in the workforce, but also that 70 percent of U.S. mothers are either the primary or co-breadwinner. This phenomenon persists despite a gender pay gap and motherhood wage penalties that keep mothers paid significantly less than fathers. For this reason, closing wage gaps and pay disparities by increasing mothers’ wages is one crucial vehicle for improving family economic security.
Looking at stay-at-home mothers, the general need for two incomes to sustain a family is also apparent. According to our analysis of American Community Survey data, the median family income for families with SAHMs is $76,500, which is over $60,000 less per year than families with working moms.2 Clearly, this isn’t only a matter of high-income families having relatively less income than other high-income families. In fact, SAHMs are three times more likely to fall below the supplemental poverty line. This means families with SAHMs are more likely to struggle affording basic needs, let alone have the means to thrive. Economic stability is vital for a wide range of outcomes, including the safe and healthy development of young children.
Assuming many moms go back to work when their child enters kindergarten, that income gap produces a five-year difference of $200,000 on average. For parents with multiple children, this could become a ten year difference of $400,000. Those dollars could have been spent instead on food, housing, and college savings. And this doesn’t even account for losses from forgone opportunities for career advancement, retirement savings, and the other benefits associated with employment. As a result, households with SAHMs lose earnings, and SAHMs themselves risk economic precarity in the event of divorce or in the event a husband loses his job.
Higher rates of poverty persist for households with SAHMs across race and ethnicity. Nearly one in seven white SAHM households, one in two Black SAHM households, and one in three Hispanic/Latino SAHM households have incomes that are below the supplemental poverty line. For all groups, this is twice the rate of their employed counterparts. To wit, for many mothers, working is not only something they prefer, but also an economic necessity. As a result, SAHMs are also more likely to be using public benefits like Medicaid for themselves or their children, or SNAP to lower food costs for themselves and their families. Recent Medicaid and SNAP rollbacks will have a disproportionately negative impact on these families.
Figure 1
Other Noteworthy Differences
Stay-at-home moms are also more likely to be married than working moms (75 percent versus 65 percent). This leaves them especially vulnerable to the financial risk and precarity posed by divorce. SAHMS are also less likely to have a college degree (63 percent versus 44 percent). This gap is striking because workers with a college degree continue to experience higher incomes in the workforce than their non-degree-holding counterparts, although gender-based pay disparities exist across the income spectrum. And SAHMs are more than twice as likely to have a disability (13 percent versus 6 percent).
It also bears noting that regardless of employment status, parents today spend more time with their children than in years prior. However, a gender gap persists there too, with mothers—even employed mothers—spending more time providing child care than fathers.
How Public Investment Gives Moms the Choices They Deserve
Policymakers can expand and support equitable and meaningful choices for women as they seek to balance their economic and domestic lives. Public investments in the care economy—child care, paid leave, care for older and disabled people, and good care jobs—help make life more affordable for families. Workplace policies can be updated, and wages increased, to meet today’s realities. When families have access to high quality affordable care, paid family leave, flexible and predictable scheduling practices, and high-quality aging and disability care, they are able to make choices rooted in their needs.
These choices allow families to prioritize their preferences and have greater calm and less stress. Too many families today have to leave their jobs or reduce their work, lowering their earnings and threatening their long-term economic security, while holding back economic growth because of the lack of care policies in the United States.
Parents need true freedom to choose care and work arrangements that fit their desires and their families’ needs, all of which can change over time. Parents should be able to make these decisions thinking about both the short- and long-term well-being of their families. In order to truly engage in a conversation about what families need, let’s start from a shared understanding of the sacrifices most stay-at-home moms face.
A care economy with paid leave would help moms take care of their newborns with sufficient wage replacement and health care, and help them stay attached to the labor force, ensuring they’re not losing job opportunities, earnings, and retirement security in the long run. And affordable child care would help moms work without spending an entire paycheck on child care, or being forced to leave the workforce entirely. A robust care economy would help moms take care of their families, while also ensuring they have the economic security families need to thrive.
Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank Dr. Katherine Gallagher Robbins and Dr. Jennifer Glass for their insightful feedback.
Notes
Tags: child care costs, affordability, stay-at-home-moms