Benefit of one parent staying home

Parent Cafe
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<p>Bay,
With several of the top 20 schools offering such incredible generous FA packages to lower income families, I have to wonder if this wouldn’t skew the data, with perhaps a lot of kids coming from single parent homes, homes from parents who are home due to the economy and not by choice, etc. </p>

<p>Speaking of questions posed and not answered, a long time ago you promised to tell us what car you bought, DadII. You received a lot of help from many posters on that and many other threads. My DH is looking into a new car, as his was totaled last winter and he has been driving s’s old beater car. Its time for him to look into another car. He doesn’t need a fancy car and we don’t want to spend a fortune with one s still in college. What did you get, DadII?</p>

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<p>Dad II and Pug ma K</p>

<pre><code>It’s certainly an area worth studying, but the mind reels at the variables involved in who is minding the little prospies while Moms work.
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<p>mathmom, good answer (#94). Thank you. But most importantly, I agree with your observations. I’m also not a fan of phony Mommy Wars, and believe they profit no one and nothing. It would seem that mine also ‘got the best of both worlds,’ but I won’t deny that there is no perfect solution, and there were certainly financial ways that mine had to sacrifice. Many others would legitimately find my choices unacceptable in their situations.
:)</p>

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I actually spent a few hours running numbers on this for my family.</p>

<p>It turns out that, for my DW, taxes + double SS (she is self-employed) + increase in EFC due to her job, added up to around 90% of what she was making. So we seriously talked about her taking a few years off - what is the point of working for 10 cents on the dollar?</p>

<p>The big problem of course is that a lower EFC does not guarantee more in FA. Well, plus she would have gone nuts not working.</p>

<p>She has shifted over the years from full time to SAHM to full time to part time back to full time. She switched careers along the way to something that offered a lot more scheduling flexibility. Just more anecdotal data, but our kids seem to be happy and well-adjusted.</p>

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Use Firefox, it has one built in.</p>

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<p>Hello Dad II-- Are you gone again or are you still here?? Will you kindly return the favor and answer the question?? What car did you get?</p>

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<p>I agree with the following statements:</p>

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<p>Yes, staying at home is a privileged life. Some parents just cannot afford staying at home, unless they want to stay on the street.</p>

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<p>So true. We parents tend to overestimate our influence.</p>

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<p>Such an interesting thread - I’ve really enjoyed reading about the many different family configurations in which you’ve raised great kids. Can it be that the Mommy Wars are over? I’d like to think so. </p>

<p>As a SAHM for 16 years who’s spent the last decade in a kind of meh job, not a career, I’ll admit that it’s sometimes hard not to second-guess our decision so many years ago to have me at home as the primary caregiver. It was the right thing for us to do at the time, and I think I’ll always remember it as an especially rewarding period in my life. I don’t think I’d do it differently even if I could. Though it would certainly be nice to be able to contribute more financially at this point.</p>

<p>I was b<em>tch</em>ng to my husband recently about the unlikelihood of getting much farther along professionally, and he surprised me by saying “one of us needed to make a professional sacrifice and I’m really grateful to you for everything you did for our family.” I actually cried! It meant a lot to hear him say he valued what I’d contributed even if it wasn’t much in terms of money. </p>

<p>I don’t think, though, that having me at home made a stitch of difference in my kids’ academic success. We’d all like to think that our children will be happy and fulfilled as adults. And while admission to a selective school can contribute to eventual happiness, it’s one of many possible steps along the way to that goal, not the goal itself.</p>

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<p>By having one spouse stay at home makes it easier for the other spouse. In my opinion it is not as much for the kids. For some careers, it takes 2 to make it work.</p>

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<p>You have a good H and a H should be. Some H would say/think that now we two are not at the same level anymore, the young lady I just met is.</p>

<p>With the attitude you have in your house, of course your kids will be fine.</p>

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<p>Thanks for the kind words, lake! I’m just thinking that I have a secret weapon - most young ladies like to have money spent on them, while I have long since grown accustomed to husband’s, um, frugality. :smiley: OT, I know!</p>

<p>It will be interesting to watch this generation become parents and see what choices they make. All my girls are ambitious and hard-working, and all expect to have kids. The oldest will almost certainly always earn more than her fiance, who is a very sweet, laid-back guy, who will probably make a great full (or fuller, in comparison to mom) time dad. As the thread shows, there’s no one way to raise successful kids, just as there’s no one definition of success. (And certainly admission to selective schools is only one small part of that definition - and not for every child, either.)</p>

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<p>Really? Thats all it takes to be a good H? Geez, it is so so much easier to show gratitude than to actually be the one to sacrifice your career. I would surely HOPE at a bare minimum any spouse is thankful of the other. But expressing gratitude is not exactly a big whoop or remotely comparable to giving up one’s career. This isn’t a judgment on Frazzled’s spouse- I’m sure he’s a great guy and does many many amazing things far beyond this. But this kind of comment on frazzled’s point suggests it sure doesn’t take much nowadays for a guy to get a pat on the back and be a good H, lol. Reminds of when dads ‘babysit’ the kids and everyone coos over wow, what great dads they must be! They actually take the kids to the park! Moms in contrast, if they aren’t giving up their whole careers, are often only considered adequate. </p>

<p>It’s no ones business how couples choose to divide up labor and I do not judge individuals. But it galls me that - at the broader level - men get credit for so little in this department and women seem unable to do enough. And that so often men think and say ‘someone has to make the sacrifice…’ but they ain’t the ones putting their hand up to volunteer.</p>

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<p>Now I feel as if I mis-communicated what I wanted to say - oops. I hoped to make the point that being the primary caretaker of young kids, which I LOVED doing at the time, can indeed carry with it the downside of less career satisfaction in the long run. But, looking at my husband’s choices, while he may have had more career satisfaction, he definitely did not enjoy the same level of emotional satisfaction I did when our children were young. So we both made sacrifices. </p>

<p>And I don’t mean to give the impression that it would be sufficient for me to hear him say once in 32 years “Hey,thanks.” (And I know that’s not what you meant about my situation, starbright. :)) My husband’s comment meant so much to me because it reminded me that no one gets everything he or she wants (he is often very frustrated as a physician); but over a lifetime, you can find a balance. I do feel as if we worked it out fairly, in our case. Although I would love to earn some really big bucks someday!</p>

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<p>Well, his comment that “someone needed to make a professional sacrifice” does tend to suggest that one of the two “must” stay home or take a leser job to be there for the kids so of course it’s going to fly in the face of those of us who don’t necessarily think kids are harmed by having two career parents. Perhaps that is what struck a discord…I know it caused my eyebrows to go up a notch, but I don’t know that poster or her husband, what sounded patronizing to me on paper may not have been patronizing at all and clearly at some point decisions got made for whatever reason.</p>

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<p>Oops again - I really shouldn’t have responded to the thread, I guess, because I’m not making myself clear. Certainly we both could have made a professional sacrifice in order to share childcare 50-50; several friends and colleagues have done so. He’d have done what was best for our family, as I would have, and as anyone would have. He wasn’t saying “one of us had to go down the tubes and I’m glad it was you.” The thread shows us that there is no One True Way. He was acknowledging that I’d made a sacrifice and that he appreciated what it meant. And I acknowledge that he sacrificed time and satisfaction on the home front, and I appreciate what that means. No offense intended.</p>

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<p>It will be interesting to see if the study one of the kids from one here is doing shows any tangible results. As others point out, there are so many variables it is going to be hard to find correlations without some sort of loading; for example, is a kid with both parents at home (because neither is working, bad economic times, or whatever) going to do better then a kid with two parents working? </p>

<p>The question itself is loaded with all kinds of factors that make people want to see what they do. For those who see a stay at home mom as the be all, traditional values, whatever, they are going to try and find stuff that proves there is harm with working parents, while those looking to show that kids thrive with working moms may look to other things…so it is something that is going to take a lot of filtering.</p>

<p>As others have said, my opinion is it depends on the parents, the circumstances. For example, well off kids where they have live in nannies, if the nanny is competent, interacts with the kids, and the parents are able to make the time to spend what they used to call ‘quality time’ with the kids, they will probably be fine, other parents have to rely on day care to fill the gaps, and those kids often do fine, too. What I tend to believe after watching a lot of kids grow up and go on it depends more on the quality of their home environment then anything else, and I am not talking necessarily economics (though that obviously plays a role). Success seems to come from parents who spend what time they have with the kids wisely, who also are not afraid to guide the kids yet at the same time give them their own space to grow, too. With kids, I like to think of the famous (or infamous) case they give in organizational behavior, I believe it was called the hawthorn gas works, where after doing all these things like making it brighter in the work place, making it dimmer, changing break times, lengthening break times, etc, they found that performance improved with each change…with the upshot being that they figured out that the key to performance was when workers figured out someone cared enough about what they were doing to observe them, make changes, etc…I think with kids, one of the biggest elements is where parents are involved in the kids lives (though hopefully not helicopter parents)…and that can happen no matter what.</p>

<p>I can also tell you about a group of kids I have had contact with who I wonder how well they will do or are doing. Our child attended a private school for several years where most of the moms were stay at home moms (given the tuition at the place, kind of indicates their level of income, school didn’t give scholarships). Despite that, I would be very surprised if the kids I routinely saw would amount to much in this survey, the teachers in the school were amazed at how bad a lot of these kids were, acting up, not doing their school work, you name it…and these were kids from very well off families with stay at home moms and so forth…on the other hand, the parents, well, better not get into that…</p>

<p>The way I look at it the advantages and disadvantages of working parents or stay at home parents vary with the family situation, and I suspect it is more about how the parents work around the advantages and disadvantages that makes a difference. In our son’s case, I believe the sacrifices my wife and I made by having her at home, especially with his path towards music, has made a huge difference and though it hasn’t been easy, we don’t exactly live high on the hog, do vacations or drive high end cars and have some work to do in terms of our savings, but that also is our path,not indicative except what we chose to do. </p>

<p>As far as the success of the child, first of all make sure what you envision as success is what the kid sees it as (you might think it is getting 2400 on the SAT’s, being class president and getting in Harvard, kid might think it is learning woodworking and building furniture), and then ,whatever the circumstances,support your kid in his/her search for what they see as a successful life, do what you can to help, show you care, and I think that does a lot. One other point, I wouldn’t agonize too much that if you decide to be SAH or not, the fact that you agonize over it indicates to me the kid will be fine no matter what you do. A therapist friend of mine once commented that she could always tell the kids who would later be sitting in her office figuring out what went wrong, it was usually the kids of parents who thought they were the worlds greatest parents…and that the best parents were those who worried about being a good parent:).</p>

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<p>Wouldn’t having both parents work and send their kids to one of the top boarding prep schools really give them the best chance of getting into elite colleges? Of course, you’d miss spending time with them growing up, but that seems like a small price to pay for such an important end result.</p>

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<p>Frazzled, I know exactly what you meant. Same boat here. I took the alternate route for the kids, too, and while I loved every minute of it, there are some twinges of regret when I look at my current paycheck.</p>

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<p>I think our generation was pretty fortunate. We were raised with the understanding that we could have choice and we for the most part graduated with no loans or small loans. Some of us were raised my those strong women who set the trend of working moms in place. I remember when I married my H he had $50 a month college loan payments and he was just months from paying the loans off when we married. Hand wringing about what could have been career-wise after the fact is more philosophical than financial for our generation. I worry for this generation. I can’t imagine a couple with large loans etc. from college to pay off being able to justifying one staying home. I know intellectually that college is about enriching the mind, but…I’m being brave here, but I’d have a hard time biting my tongue if one of the boys married a young lady with a degree or multiple degrees and big loans who decides to stay home if they had children. It would take much duct tape…but then again, maybe staying at home isn’t even on the minds of young women these days after growing up with “us” as mothers and two generations removed from our fearless mothers LOL.</p>

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<p>OP - I do find your friend’s thought process odd. But you probably should remind him that even having his wife stay at home did increase chances of getting into a top school… he might not have enough savings to be able to afford it. </p>

<p>The CC parents all know that the top schools cost over $50K/year and don’t give merit $, but I don’t think that it is common knowledge.</p>

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<p>musicprnt,
Well said!</p>