According to Investopedia, the real income of a stay-at-home parent exceeds $200,000. But is that based on reality?
For context, my wife stays home full-time with our children. We are very pro-stay-at-home moms around here—that should already be well known.
However, I am very opposed to skewing the numbers to make a financial point. The Investopedia article does precisely that. I have two significant issues with it.
First, it’s simply dishonest (which I’ll explain in a moment) and therefore unhelpful for those trying to decide whether to have a parent stay home full-time.
The second issue is that the article is materialistic in nature, focusing primarily on a financial argument for a decision that is fundamentally human, formative, vocational, and, for many, spiritual. It prioritizes money over the two most valuable aspects of having a stay-at-home parent, both of which are priceless.
Let’s address the dishonesty first. As you can see in the screenshot below, the article accurately assigns national average costs to the general work done by a stay-at-home parent.
This part is true: that's what you'd pay individuals to do those tasks. The problem, though, is that only the top 1% of society actually hires people to do that work. My wife doesn’t save us money by doing our laundry, cooking our meals, cleaning the house, or driving the kids around.
Why? Because if we both worked, we wouldn’t pay anyone to do those things. In most dual-income households, people end up doing all that work ON TOP OF their full-time jobs. Full-time working and parenting is an absolute grind, there’s no doubt about it.
My wife does save us money on childcare, but it doesn’t come anywhere near $130k per year for two children, unless I were hiring private trilingual tutors at the highest end of the cost spectrum.
Some two-income households have family members watch their children or other arrangements that cost $1,000 a month or less, so the $130k price tag to cover 14 hours of childcare per day is just absurd.
Now, I understand why people do this. It’s an extreme reaction to society’s growing distaste for traditional family values. When the world rejects the value of motherhood, we try to amplify it using the one measure the world respects most: money.
But money isn’t the best way to measure the value of the stay-at-home parent lifestyle and their contribution to the family. My wife would be the first to tell you that the most valuable part is the extra time she gets to spend with our kids.
By the time our children are 5, Emily will have had almost an extra 10,000 hours with them that she'd otherwise have missed out on. That has a massive impact on their character formation, familial bond, and education.
What’s in it for me, the provider? Besides the satisfaction of those extra 10,000 hours for my wife and kids, it’s the massive increase in leisure time I get because someone is managing the home full-time.
No, this doesn't mean I never help out around the house. But I don’t have to split cooking meals, doing laundry, and many other chores because she handles the majority of them while I’m working.
Then, when I come home, I'm able to enjoy the meal she's prepared and take over the kids for a couple of hours before we tag-team bedtime. I get to play with the kids every evening instead of washing dishes or cleaning the house. It’s a win-win: she gets her much-needed break from the children, and I get my precious time with
them.
That said, becoming a one-income household is definitely a financial decision. The problem with Investopedia’s math is that it distorts the financial bar of entry.
Most approach the financial
aspect of one parent leaving their job
through a simple equation:
