Stay-at-home parenting, Part 1

One of the great opportunities afforded me in this life is the chance to spend time in my child's earliest and formative years focused on helping develop his potential as a human being. Many people refer to this as being a stay-at-home parent. Some very wrongly assume that it's only women who fill this role (and are just flat out wrong; women merely dominant the group is all).

In ancient times, before we had running water and electricity and other things that we believe simplify our daily lives, tasks needed to be divided in order to keep our social groups alive and well. Because men are sadly not endowed with the capacity to provide nourishment to babies, women naturally filled the role as caregivers of babies and children. Men went off and did the other fiddling bits such as chasing down food and trying to sort out what makes good plants for eating grow. Somewhere along the line, women got stuck doing the cooking and the cleaning, since clearly they had so much time on their hands, sitting around trying to keep the children from maiming themselves. Then the Industrial Revolution changed things, as people became more interested and more capable of finding ways to make a job simpler and more automated. Suddenly clothes did not all need to be hand-washed. Electric sewing machines replaced the vast amount of time women spent with needle and thread in hand. And over time, more appliances came into being that were designed to lessen the work a woman had to do at home. Even baby formula was created, allowing many women complete freedom from their prior role as a housebound person.

Suddenly even women who previously would not have been financially well-off enough to avoid doing their own chores had time to follow many of their aspirations and indulge in the frolicking larks that many men enjoyed. They demonstrated that they were equally capable (or in some capacities, superior) to men in the workforce. And many of them liked it so much, they stayed there and encouraged other women to follow their lead.

One day, however, things had gone beyond the point of no return. Women were no longer really in a position to choose whether or not they wanted to work outside the home. To afford the rising cost of living (induced in part by the doubling of the workforce), women now formed a staple portion of the workforce market. Instead of being locked in a cage at home, they became locked in a cage at work. (To read more about this, I highly suggest this excellent work by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi: The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Parents are Going Broke.)

So, it's no great surprise that I grew up under the impression that women and men who "stayed at home" were lazy or insufficient contributors to their families. My own mother had a great deal to do with me developing this impression. She's a hardcore work-a-holic, checking in on work email regularly throughout the day even when on paid vacations. My father was also working, but for many years he ran his business out of the house. Being that his income varied seasonally, mom was the primary breadwinner for our household. She was a great role model, and my sister has followed in her tracks as much as possible--even to the point where she works at the same company which has claimed my mother for over 30 years.

Didn't he know that children are best raised in herds of their peers by total strangers?

My brother-out-of-law stayed home with the kids for several years. They were not a rich family by any means, so mentally I judged him negatively for not working full time and putting the kids in preschool to give them more "social interaction." Didn't he know that children are best raised in herds of their peers by total strangers? While he could have done more to help them socially in the early years, I've come to realize that he was taking on a far more challenging task than I could have possibly imagined at the time.

Our society is not set up for families to have daytime custody of their own children. As bizarre as this sounds, it's demonstrably true.

When I finally gave up the dream that I could work from home 20 hours a week and still watch my newborn, I felt like a failure. But I was nursing 12 hours a day, sleeping about 4 or 5, and the other time I spent trying not to be a complete and disgusting slob. Living in a college town, I have found many other parents like Andrew and myself who have no family or social support system in place to help us care for our child. Having been physically "disabled" from a car accident a few months before my surprise pregnancy, working for any duration is very painful, so a full time job is out of the question until I can find a way to stop hurting all the time. Working part time doesn't cover enough to make up the costs of outsourced childcare. So, all things considered, it's been the most ideal option for us for me to stay home with Jackson and drag him to nearly all my medical appointments. (Thankfully my physical therapy sessions are at my gym, so I can pawn him off on the gym's lovely day care girls while I get abused back into feeling human again.)

Many moms I know would have loved to spend more time at home with their children, but by the time they were considering getting pregnant with a second child, they needed to go back to work to make more money for the family in order to pay the bills. Jackson's first playgroup, formed in his first months of life, has been decimated by this effect. All but one of his friends from the original dozen members is now in the care of someone other than Mom or Dad during the day while both parents work. These children who enjoyed special time throughout the day with their mothers (as we all were) have been shunted into a classroom directed by a stranger whose attention is divided among many children with the same abilities and disabilities. Luckily, society has managed to convince these parents that this is the normal order of things, that it's somehow more natural for a child to be kept away from her family all day while surrounded by those who know almost nothing more about the world than herself.

Don't get me wrong: childcare availability outside the home is a great feature of modern society. My son regularly spends time playing in the daycare at my gym while I exercise. There are many single parents in this world who do not have the luxury of staying with their children all day. There are very good benefits to a preschool, such as the ability to teach children a foreign language or let them play with toys and materials that are not likely to be found in a traditional home setting. But I do not believe for a moment that foisting my child off into the world before he can fully communicate is really the natural modus operandi.

I believe in equality. I believe that men should be allowed to stay home with children just as well as women should. I believe that women should be allowed to work just as well as men should. But I will not suggest that a parent is doing a disservice to a child by spending quality time focused on the child himself. The emotional well-being of a family should not be sacrificed because of the selfishness or pig-headed ideology of any one of its members.

I stay at home for my health. I stay at home to focus on my child. I stay at home because my husband is overwhelmed with work and school and has very little free time--that I'd prefer was spent with us as a family, not doing chores. I stay at home because I enjoy the physical and emotional freedom. We don't spend much time at home, but I'm happy and proud to be a Stay at Home Parent.