The Paradox of Stay-at-Home Parents

In two-thirds of American families with children, all parents work outside the home. But American society is still largely built around the assumption that one parent does not. The lack of affordable child care and the laughable mismatch between school hours and work hours (including summer vacation, when parents are left to figure out who will care for their kids for three months), have beneath them the idea that a stay-at-home parent (read: mother) should be around to take care of things. Yet paradoxically—and much less remarked upon—American society also gives stay-at-home parents a raw deal, ignoring them in policy and providing little material or cultural support while using them as a political cudgel.

Stay-at-home parents as we think of them today—that is, one parent in a single-family household who is written, throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, a majority of American households were “corporate families” wherein members, including the children, supported the family business, most commonly a farm. In the country’s high proportion of multigenerational households, mothers and grandmothers frequently juggled child care with their work, and children themselves joined in the production as soon as they were able.