More Thoughts on the Stay-At-Home-Mom Discussion
The pendulum perpetually swings toward overcorrection.
I’m not entirely sure what can be done about this, but the American right and left have become the Hatfields and McCoys of political discourse, every clickbait headline an inflammatory response to the prevailing hot button ideal of the other side. It’s all very reactionary.
I think this is especially true when it comes to crafting the narrative on family. As the left increasingly peddles population control, anti-natalism, and polyamorous attacks on traditional marriage, the right counters the messaging with what initially feels like very pro-family charges. Consider these missives:
Ben Shapiro: “Every man can have children and a wife. And every man must.”
Matt Walsh: To save our civilization, get married and have lots of babies.”
Tucker Carlson: “Get married too young. Have more babies than you can afford.”
The message is clear: Be fruitful and multiply. Get married and procreate. Some of this rhetoric is a bit hyperbolic and unhelpful. Getting married “too young” often ends in disaster. Having “more kids than you can afford” isn’t wisdom. And no, not every man can have a wife or children. (Holy slap in the face to singles and people struggling with infertility, Batman!) But if we’re talking in generalities, the bottom line idea isn’t totally terrible.
The truth is that birthrates across the globe are, in fact, declining. According to a study in The Lancet, women in 1950 were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetimes. Today the average has fallen to around 2.4, and it’s anticipated to fall below 1.7 by the year 2100. There an infinite number of contributing factors here, some of them legitimately linked to the postponement of childbearing and marriage, which leads some to place all the blame squarely at the feet of feminism and women’s involvement in the workforce, but I think that’s a very shallow, superficial analysis of the issue.
As the Cato Institute notes, “a significant portion of the recent decline in fertility is a result of a decline in teen births, which peaked in the ‘90s and fell 75 percent from 1991 until 2020.” Most people should agree that it’s a good thing fewer teens are becoming parents in today’s culture. But panic still ensues, and it seems, for a lot of people, it’s just easier to decide the obvious solution is to encourage a return to the 1950s lifestyle and corresponding gender roles to try to instigate another baby boom. And that’s the mentality that seems to be surfacing in a lot of the conservative Christian discourse around these topics—a naive attempt to return to the good old days of yesteryear when the men brought home the bacon and the women happily cooked it, wearing an apron, stilettos, and an ever-present smile, no less. It’s why tradwives are trending, and sourdough has its own hashtag on Instagram.
But I think this line of thinking is short-sighted in ways that, predictably, end up placing a heavy burden on the shoulders of women. Let’s face it; the “have lots of babies” mentality generally goes hand in hand with the “women belong in the home” mentality. Don’t tell me this isn’t true. It absolutely is. You just have to connect a few dots to see it.
Everyone wants to tell women to pop out babies, but no one really seems to consider how we are supposed to keep these babies fed and clothed once they’re here. Life is expensive. Inflation is real. Pioneer prairie cosplaying (all the new rage on the conservative right) costs a lot of stinking money. Do you know the average annual cost of maintaining free range chickens? It’s not cheap!
Data show that in the U.S., dual-income households have been a majority for at least the last two decades. That’s before inflation hit. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2022 Consumer Expenditure Survey, the average American household spends $72,967 per year on essentials like housing, transportation, and food, but not childcare. Where I live in Idaho, the average annual salary is $50,760. A family of four is going to have a heck of a time making ends meet on one income. And that’s just with two kids. Remember now, we’re supposed to be having tons of babies—”more kids than we can afford!”
Setting hopes, dreams, aspirations, and talents aside, the baseline financial picture for many Americans is this: Regardless of your personal ideals, in order to keep your family afloat, both parents are going to have to work. There are outliers, of course, like The Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry, who dismounted from his high horse long enough the other day to arbitrarily decide from on high via tweet that 97% of women want to be stay-at-home-moms. (Yes, he actually said this.) When women pushed back, arguing financial need, Joel dug his heels in, called them harpies, and blamed their husbands as though blue collar workers who do hard labor to support their families are just failed men. Guys like Joel are the people who shape the conservative narrative, folks. Is this really the direction we want to take things? Is this how we want to treat poor people? Is this what God calls justice or mercy?
Most parents have to work, Joel. We don’t all make millions off our smartass social media contributions.
So what is to be done with these quivers full of children while their parents are at the office? Surely not childcare, right? There’s a LOT of shaming that goes on around this topic, almost all of it aimed directly at the mothers. The most popular line seems to be, “How can you stand to let someone else raise your kids?” There’s also been a recent resurgence of scare tactics utilizing horrible headlines of crimes that take place in daycare centers. “Children deserve to be home with their parents,” they remind us, as if to say, “What kind of a mother are you? How could you possibly do this to your baby?”
And shudder the thought that your children could ever utilize the public school system. It’s a guaranteed pipeline to teenage pregnancy and indoctrination into the gender cult. That’s what they keep telling us anyway. As Voddie Baucham put it, “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”
That’s a big old punch to the gut if you’re a dedicated parent who’s committed to helping your child navigate life with his brain, faith, and sanity in tact.
Now don’t hear me dismissing the myriad dangers of blind faith in the public education system. I’ve personally spent hours poring over popular sex-ed curriculum, and there’s some jaw-droppingly awful stuff in there. Parents can absolutely not afford to be uninvolved or unaware. Vigilance is essential wherever your kids receive their education.
The point I’m making, though, is that, in many conservative circles, to admit that your kids attend public school is to wear a cone of shame announcing your abject failure as a parent. It’s not really an option that’s left open to you if you want to remain in good standing as a card carrying Republican, let alone a Christian. The pressure is real. I should know this. My kids attend public school. (They’re thriving, by the way. Not to brag, but they’re about 20 steps ahead of the average bear in knowing how to politely resist indoctrination efforts, and I’m really stinking proud of them.)
The only other alternative for families where both parents work outside the home is Christian school, which costs an average of $9k per child per year. Remember now, lots and lots of babies. More babies than you can afford. How is a family going to make this happen? Lots of overtime shifts keeping the parents away from the children even longer?
No. That won’t do! Of course the only proposed solution that these people really want to entertain is that the mom will stay home and homeschool her kids, whether or not she’s got any skills as an educator. For some reason, the fact that moms are the ones who breastfeed is interpreted as proof positive that the Good Lord wants the moms to stay home with the children until they fly the coop. Families will just scrape by, and everyone will be happy somehow even if they can’t afford basic necessities and even if the mom’s skillset is not suited to this arrangement. Here’s just one sample comment of the kind of rhetoric that’s bandied about to guilt moms into compliance here.
Notice the framing? If you work outside the home, ladies, you’re not only selfish, you’re a slave to corporations. You’re failing your family. You are the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the world.
They’ll guilt women into these arrangements and then flood them with copious amounts of praise for their sacrifice, pretending to esteem the stay-at-home mom above all else, and presenting it as the gold standard of godly womanhood. Just read this God-awful gaslighty article Joe Rigney wrote called “The Beautiful Roots of Courageous Submission.” It’s a masterclass in puppeteering. Ladies, if you want to be seen as virtuous and courageous, then boldly submit to your (largely silent role) in the home. That’s your pathway to power! That’s the way to gain approval and good standing.
None of this feels motivated by a commitment to righteousness or a Spirit-led obedience to God’s unique calling for each individual life. What it feels like is a commitment to submitting to authoritarian control.
And here’s the other part we aren’t allowed to talk about when we’re so caught up in our romanticized view of the traditional American family. I’m trying to be careful about the way I say this because I want to be measured and fair, but I’ve seen too much to keep quiet about this.
A woman’s choice to live solely off her husband’s income is only as safe as her husband is good.
A man who holds the purse strings is a man who has all the power. And it’s precisely these types of arrangements gone wrong that necessitated feminism in the first place—women caught in abuse with no means of escaping it, women who never cultivated any marketable skills who find themselves suddenly single and penniless when their husbands run off with their secretaries. These aren’t fringe situations. They happen every day, but idealogues love to gloss right over them while touting their enthusiastic opposition to the very no-fault divorce legislation that saves women caught in these webs. How is an unemployed 45-year-old housewife going to afford an attorney to prove she’s been abused if her abusive husband locks the bank account?
I earned more money than my (now) ex husband when we got divorced. In the seven years we were married, he had at least six different business cards for “jobs” ranging from golf pro to talent scout. The problem is these jobs didn’t generate much income. We had mouths to feed and bills to pay, and someone had to keep a roof over our heads. That someone was me.
We can go ahead and blame successful working women for ruining civilization with divorces and public schooled children if we want. We can call them selfish and tell them they’ve been sold “diabolical lies” and insist that if they’d only cram themselves into rigid gender cages and choose to be happy about it that everything would magically turn out right.
I’m more inclined to blame porn addictions, infidelity, emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, toxic, degrading interactions, and a suffocatingly tough economy that stretches people so thin that they buckle beneath the pressure, but that’s just me.
I shudder to think where I would be without my college education or gainful employment— probably still stuck in a codependent cycle of terror wondering if the next time he snapped would be the time he put me in the hospital. I really wish the people informing the public opinion on these topics would spend a little more time talking to the people who’ve lived through them. I wish they’d talk to the children of moms who had no business trying to homeschool them. I wish they’d talk to the kids who lived in abject poverty just so their moms could say they stayed at home.
And I really wish the people preaching procreation as the solution to all the world’s ills would be a little more realistic about the implications of “more kids than you can afford” for families that live on average incomes.
At risk of sounding like a leftist, check your privilege, people.
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You nail it every time.