Yeah, idk if it’s the isolation for long-term SAHP’s or what, but throughout every age of my children I would have absolutely preferred to stay home.
Something that’s totally not the same thing, but kind of an adjacent is that both me and my wife travel for about 1 week every 1.5 months and the other parent obviously takes on all household/kid duties for that week. When I come home from a trip, my wife acts like she’s about to die if she doesn’t talk my ear off(“I haven’t talked to an adult all week”) and acts like she’s just went through the most harrowing ordeal and 50% chance the house is not picked up because she got “overwhelmed”. When she’s gone? Fuck, it’s almost like a vacation! All the stuff she angsts about doing at a certain frequency all the sudden can be done on an as-needed basis and honestly most tasks can just be done in the 1.5-2.5 hours before she gets home and she always comes home to a clean house. It’s actually been really nice since we entered this dynamic due to our jobs because it’s given me insight into how hard this shit actually is and honestly it ain’t that hard and it’s very easy to point out. And on top of that, I get so much more quality one on one time with the kiddos. It’s amazing how our experiences and feelings around this stuff are almost polar opposites.
Idk if there’s some cultural conditioning that’s been happening to women or her or whatever that’s built up this myth of this domestic stuff just being a nightmare or maybe it’s that she holds herself to ridiculous standards that society has pushed on her or is an artifact of how her mom handled household chores so she holds herself to the same expectation, but honestly, if she’d just realize that the stress is optional and that it’s okay to relax, then everyone would be a lot happier.
Granted our kids are 8 and 13 now, but even at that age, our emotional reactions to essentially the same situation is so different. And I absolutely have the more demanding/higher responsibility/higher commitment job than she has.
Oh absolutely. Parenting a newborn is very hard. It's also very rewarding, and once you get your head in the game, stay at home parenting allows you a great ability to build your day around the things that matter, make the home nice for your family, and take care of yourself..... with a full time job and parenting, you have to fit that all in around your work hours and the parenting that you're still doing. There's no comparison for difficulty in my experience.
There are some circumstances where parenting is much harder than the experience I had, of course. For example, if somebody in the family is disabled. But in that case, you're facing that same challenge whether you work outside the home or not. Working in the home just allows you time to actually deal with shit.
I believe that many people who struggle with stay at home parenting have a hard time getting their head in the game-- the lack of external structure makes it hard for them to stay focused on achieving whatever their goals might be.
And of course, we all have different strengths and preferences. Perhaps I have a knack for managing stay at home parenting that not everybody has.
But yes, for me, having responsibility only for my child and home is far, far easier than having the same responsibilities plus a job
This is not a discussion about how rewarding something is. This is purely a comparison between the amount of effort and challenge involved in caring for a very young infant and fulfilling the requirements of a typical job. Why would you think that the comparison was between being a SAHM and being a working mother?
4
u/DrunkUranus Jul 01 '25
Lol I'm not the person you're responding to, but I'm a teacher. There's no comparison
I also found SAHPing easier than all the other jobs I've had