This part is so important & so often overlooked: "stay-at-home parents may have significant positive externalities besides contributing to the tax base." How we raise kids/care for our elderly & communities MATTERS - & does indeed have downstream economic effects that may be difficult to quantify. The time and effort I put into raising my 4 kids and helping them develop their character & potential allows them to contribute in positive ways, and I'm convinced that we, broadly, can do a better job of that in smaller settings (like families, where we know one another deeply & are deeply committed) than in large institutional settings. I am not saying daycare is evil or that parents should not work; I'm saying there's value in care that is deeply individual and committed.
Yes, it should be obvious that the quality of human relationships matter deeply. Obviously you don’t have to stay at home with your kids to maintain these relationships, but they also just don’t spontaneously occur: they take time and effort.
Great piece. I remember reading that Oster piece and having my jaw on the floor the entire time. Frankly the argument seemed to be verging on bad faith, like she was looking for a econ 101 excuse to justify outcomes she really supported for social rather economic reasons (it was just such a bad argument). Either way though, I'm really glad you offered this analysis. Great read here.
I quit my job as a legal secretary for our state AG's office when our first son was born in 1985. I had a great job that I loved; cried all the way home after mailing my resignation letter.
However, my husband & I raised six terrific kids--all of whom worked their way through college (two have their master's degrees). When they were growing up, they volunteered with us at a nursing home, at church, & helping to care for elderly relatives. All of them have very well paying jobs & are paying thousands of dollars in taxes & Social Security! They are paying in more in SS than my husband & I collect in SS each year!! Given our family's outcome, society actually OWES my husband & me thousands of dollars for the sacrifices we made to raise great citizens who contribute to society in many ways!
Thank you for this piece! As a SAHM, I truly cannot wait for your book. The ways my work has been devalued by others has truly astounded me after becoming a mom.
Anecdotally, I volunteer in my daughter's class and the only other people I know who do so in the school are SAHMs. That role is so important in classrooms but my impression is not many parents do it (I'm assuming because most work FT?). I'd be curious if you've researched that at all for your book!
Yes, stay-at-home moms do lots of important volunteer work! I’ve done some research into volunteer work by women in the past, but haven’t yet interviewed people right now. If that’s something you’d like to talk about, please let me know! Ivana.d.greco@gmail.com.
I've noticed our family is much more efficient with our resources when I spend my time doing homemaker-type tasks as opposed to managing other things. I have mended so many textiles that otherwise would have been thrown out. We have a compost system, because I had the bandwidth to set one up. Someone, such as me, has to take glass halfway across the county to drop it in the special recycling dumpster, or else it gets thrown out. We use way less packaging when I cook fresh vegetables and stuff instead of doing premade freezer meals. And we have a garden with food and flowers instead of soulless landscaping or, you know, weeds. It's hard to know how to put a metric on this but I think it's pretty valuable work.
Yes, when I was working full-time, there was so much I wanted to do (cooking from scratch, gardening, etc.) that just didn’t get done because I didn’t have the time.
I remember being solidly unimpressed by Oster’s article when it was published. I have a degree in economics not being used in any conventional sense, as I passed on grad school to get married and start a family (my husband was military at the time so pursuing both was geographically not an option).
The articles that circulate occasionally, calculating the economic value of a stay at home mom, have always irked me as frankly stretched past the point of believability in order to put a high dollar value on a mother’s labor. My family would not be hiring a personal chef if I were in the labor force, for example; we would be relying on some combination of frozen Costco lasagnas and exhausting weekend meal-prep marathons. The work either gets done somehow, perhaps not to the same standard, or it gets dropped. Very little gets hired out to a professional in an average family, beyond perhaps weekly housecleaning or lawn service. The urge to put a high dollar value on homemaking and child rearing is both commendable and understandable, but the true value is the community contributions that can’t be measured in economic terms. Thank you for emphasizing this!
One thing that has always bothered me about those calculations is how in overselling the “value” of a homemaker, they contribute to underselling it. If I went back to FT employment, we would not hire a private chef or chauffeur (it’s unlikely we could hire a cleaner or sufficient childcare either, which is one reason I’m a homemaker). But I’ve seen other parents try to hire transportation help or after school care and it’s expensive on an hourly basis and difficult to find someone reliable. The lack of flexibility is not fully the cost of outsourcing this work FT, but it is *a* cost.
And of course, when it comes to childcare, *someone* has to be taking care of children who still need 24/7 supervision, whether that’s daycare or school + wraparound care, and overselling the work of a SAHP as being FT chauffeur + private chef elides how many SAHP are the FT childcare and would have to hour-by-hour substitute their work there because one can’t buy 4 hours of childcare at Costco or prep it in advance.
"The true value is the community contributions that can’t be measured in economic terms."
I've started contrasting GDP to GDC (Gross Domestic Care) to grapple with the fact that care in all it's forms is necessary but hidden by this system. The more human energy that's syphoned towards economic production, the more it's directed away from unpaid essential work, or simply forced onto caregivers (often women) after hours.
Emily Oster's take is making me see red. Women are not just men who happen to have wombs. The work of raising children and making a home is valuable and necessary. Anyone who chooses not to understand that is nothing short of a nihilist.
Excellent points here, Ivana. I’m also a SAHM. My mother spent years as a SAHM before going back to work; she’s now been a full-time homemaker, church and civic volunteer, and helpful grandmother for years (and still occasionally gets comments like “what do you do all day?!”). I received my master’s degree after having our first living child and worked part-time outside the home for a year before doing gig work for several more at home. My husband and I have eight living children now. Our oldest is 16 and has worked for over two years as a church organist in addition to working another food service job. Other kids have done paid work for friends and neighbors. I can’t even imagine how much our children, Lord willing, will contribute to the economy and—better yet!—society as a whole as they continue to grow.
Our parochial school could not function without the regular and dedicated volunteer work from me and other SAHMs (some of us have become part-time workers after years of volunteering; I’m now doing grant writing, for instance. Other moms have become aides and teachers.). Our churches couldn’t care for members without SAHMs and retired members. The value of these types and many other kinds of care is obvious to anyone who pays remote attention to local communities. It seems willfully ignorant to argue otherwise, but that still seems to be a prevalent practice (see Oster). Thank you, Ivana, for working to articulate the value of homemakers! I’m excited to read and share your book!
It makes me crazy, too. And yet. I wish I could say I didn’t know any bonbon eaters. But I think that’s just it: because there are some (hopefully few) that are—I’ll just say it—lazy, the generalization continues. So most SAHMs and/or homemakers get smeared with the same brush.
The prevailing trust in utilitarian and productivity metrics also compounds this error. Homemaking and home management, despite the business term, are crafts, not solely scientific valuations. Our roles are not just endless lists to be check marked and squeezed for further efficiency. Raising and teaching children definitely shouldn’t be understood this way, either. Yet here we are.
As mother who does not work in paid employment, I tire of "unemployed" being the only choice I have when it comes to completing all manner of surveys. There's no choice for "carer" or "homemaker" or anything not defined solely in terms of participation or not in the monetised workforce. Though I generally don't spend my energy actively fighting things like this (though push back when something is directed at me specifically). Modern Western society does not value motherhood at all. But at least there's enough space for me to pursue it wholeheartedly.
I read some of Emily Oster's book cribsheet. The main thing I remember is that she found that the evidence found that leaving a baby to "cry it out" did not harm them, but she was unable to execute this herself. She left it to her husband to do it and she went out. That is my recollection - but it could be wrong.
I've read a bunch of books on babies, children, childhood development and the like. But I no longer give them as much weight as I used to. I don't totally ignore them, but what has been discovered through academic research is far from the whole story. The human race survived for an incredibly long time before having access to such resources. There is something to be said for instinct.
I completely agree that it would be nice to see “homemaker” in forms! It’s dispiriting to have to report yourself as “unemployed” since I (and you) know the work we do at home is important.
Here's a quote that I think is apropos for the book you're working on: "...it was homemaking that mattered. Every home was a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected over and over again as a bulwark against the perpetual flooding in of evil. But women made the bricks, and the durableness of each civilization depended upon their quality, and it was no good weakening oneself for the brick-making by thinking too much about the flood." - Elizabeth Goudge (from The Pilgrim's Inn)
Yes, it has been our experience that our overall income is higher with one parent at home. When our oldest was born, I tried to continue working part time as a figure skating coach while my husband was building his career as a corporate pilot. He would have to turn down flights on weekends that I was busy at figure skating competitions. Of course, my hourly coaching wage was significantly less than my husband's pilot day rate. After 18 months of continuously losing money, I decided to officially "retire". Once my husband had more availability, higher paying jobs continued to present themselves.
It is really difficult on the whole family if both parents are building careers at the same time. I’ve seen families successfully “stagger” their careers, but two parents on the same track at once is very challenging.
I'm technically a working mom, as I am finishing up a PhD, but I'm contributing very little to the tax base. Both my mother and my mother-in-law are not currently in the workforce, but providing valuable and needed care--my mother cares for my son when I work and my disabled sister, and my mother-in-law cares for the elderly in her family. I find the notion that none of the three of us contribute positively to society absolutely ridiculous.
Thank you Ivana for this piece. Really wonderful. I agree with the sentiment that having one parent focused on economically remunerative work and one focused on the family allows each of them to give 110% to their respective tasks. In my family’s case, I have stayed at home with the baby for the time being, while my wife went back to work, and it’s probably the optimal situation for all involved, at least while our child is still young. I guess I’m also fortunate that leaving the workforce will (likely) not harm my career path in the future.
I’m so glad you liked it! It’s amazing all the different ways parents can organize their lives these days - and glad to hear you’ll be able to easily rejoin the work force when you are ready.
"Oster argues with regard to the first question that there is no evidence that children benefit from parental care, rather than institutional care."
I vaguely remember discussing this in graduate school - that for children whose home experience was unpredictable, the consistency of institutional care was helpful, but that the difference was less noticeable for children who experienced consistency across both environments. Unfortunately, I cannot cite a source for you. Maybe it's because there is such variability in experiences of parental care and institutional care that it all kind of "evens out" when all the data comes together?
Saying this with some humor - I've wondered if my kids would be better off not at home - mostly because I don't feel like I've got my own stuff together and am not very disciplined with a schedule, enriching activities, etc. I also do wonder if I need just a bit more intellectual engagement - which is why I spend a lot of time lurking on substack. I enjoy reading your work and would definitely buy a book with your working title!
You definitely need to put on your oxygen mask before you can care for your kids! I also think creating meaningful opportunities outside the home has been key for me and my kids to really enjoy it. I’m their mother, but I’m also cognizant that I can’t and shouldn’t be the only role model in their lives, and I really value our homeschool coop, wider church community activities, outside lessons, and just plain old friends that we have.
Thank you for this article. I'm a homemaker. My husband and I are in the middle of raising our 8 children (4 have graduated from our homeschool). I'll be looking for your book when it comes out!
This part is so important & so often overlooked: "stay-at-home parents may have significant positive externalities besides contributing to the tax base." How we raise kids/care for our elderly & communities MATTERS - & does indeed have downstream economic effects that may be difficult to quantify. The time and effort I put into raising my 4 kids and helping them develop their character & potential allows them to contribute in positive ways, and I'm convinced that we, broadly, can do a better job of that in smaller settings (like families, where we know one another deeply & are deeply committed) than in large institutional settings. I am not saying daycare is evil or that parents should not work; I'm saying there's value in care that is deeply individual and committed.
Yes, it should be obvious that the quality of human relationships matter deeply. Obviously you don’t have to stay at home with your kids to maintain these relationships, but they also just don’t spontaneously occur: they take time and effort.
Great piece. I remember reading that Oster piece and having my jaw on the floor the entire time. Frankly the argument seemed to be verging on bad faith, like she was looking for a econ 101 excuse to justify outcomes she really supported for social rather economic reasons (it was just such a bad argument). Either way though, I'm really glad you offered this analysis. Great read here.
Yes I mostly like Oster’s work, but feel she has a blind spot when it comes to stay-at-home parents (which I think I’ve heard her admit in a podcast!)
And thank you for the compliment btw! Highly valued from you as I really enjoy your work!!
I quit my job as a legal secretary for our state AG's office when our first son was born in 1985. I had a great job that I loved; cried all the way home after mailing my resignation letter.
However, my husband & I raised six terrific kids--all of whom worked their way through college (two have their master's degrees). When they were growing up, they volunteered with us at a nursing home, at church, & helping to care for elderly relatives. All of them have very well paying jobs & are paying thousands of dollars in taxes & Social Security! They are paying in more in SS than my husband & I collect in SS each year!! Given our family's outcome, society actually OWES my husband & me thousands of dollars for the sacrifices we made to raise great citizens who contribute to society in many ways!
I like that way of looking at it, Sue! I wish our society better valued the amazing work you did! What an incredible story.
Thank you for this piece! As a SAHM, I truly cannot wait for your book. The ways my work has been devalued by others has truly astounded me after becoming a mom.
Anecdotally, I volunteer in my daughter's class and the only other people I know who do so in the school are SAHMs. That role is so important in classrooms but my impression is not many parents do it (I'm assuming because most work FT?). I'd be curious if you've researched that at all for your book!
Yes, stay-at-home moms do lots of important volunteer work! I’ve done some research into volunteer work by women in the past, but haven’t yet interviewed people right now. If that’s something you’d like to talk about, please let me know! Ivana.d.greco@gmail.com.
I've noticed our family is much more efficient with our resources when I spend my time doing homemaker-type tasks as opposed to managing other things. I have mended so many textiles that otherwise would have been thrown out. We have a compost system, because I had the bandwidth to set one up. Someone, such as me, has to take glass halfway across the county to drop it in the special recycling dumpster, or else it gets thrown out. We use way less packaging when I cook fresh vegetables and stuff instead of doing premade freezer meals. And we have a garden with food and flowers instead of soulless landscaping or, you know, weeds. It's hard to know how to put a metric on this but I think it's pretty valuable work.
Yes, when I was working full-time, there was so much I wanted to do (cooking from scratch, gardening, etc.) that just didn’t get done because I didn’t have the time.
I remember being solidly unimpressed by Oster’s article when it was published. I have a degree in economics not being used in any conventional sense, as I passed on grad school to get married and start a family (my husband was military at the time so pursuing both was geographically not an option).
The articles that circulate occasionally, calculating the economic value of a stay at home mom, have always irked me as frankly stretched past the point of believability in order to put a high dollar value on a mother’s labor. My family would not be hiring a personal chef if I were in the labor force, for example; we would be relying on some combination of frozen Costco lasagnas and exhausting weekend meal-prep marathons. The work either gets done somehow, perhaps not to the same standard, or it gets dropped. Very little gets hired out to a professional in an average family, beyond perhaps weekly housecleaning or lawn service. The urge to put a high dollar value on homemaking and child rearing is both commendable and understandable, but the true value is the community contributions that can’t be measured in economic terms. Thank you for emphasizing this!
Yes, it seems trite to say, but some things really are priceless … but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value.
One thing that has always bothered me about those calculations is how in overselling the “value” of a homemaker, they contribute to underselling it. If I went back to FT employment, we would not hire a private chef or chauffeur (it’s unlikely we could hire a cleaner or sufficient childcare either, which is one reason I’m a homemaker). But I’ve seen other parents try to hire transportation help or after school care and it’s expensive on an hourly basis and difficult to find someone reliable. The lack of flexibility is not fully the cost of outsourcing this work FT, but it is *a* cost.
And of course, when it comes to childcare, *someone* has to be taking care of children who still need 24/7 supervision, whether that’s daycare or school + wraparound care, and overselling the work of a SAHP as being FT chauffeur + private chef elides how many SAHP are the FT childcare and would have to hour-by-hour substitute their work there because one can’t buy 4 hours of childcare at Costco or prep it in advance.
Thanks for this really insightful comment Claire. Really, really helpful!!
"The true value is the community contributions that can’t be measured in economic terms."
I've started contrasting GDP to GDC (Gross Domestic Care) to grapple with the fact that care in all it's forms is necessary but hidden by this system. The more human energy that's syphoned towards economic production, the more it's directed away from unpaid essential work, or simply forced onto caregivers (often women) after hours.
https://theuntethereddilemma.substack.com/p/lifters-leaners-and-social-glue
Emily Oster's take is making me see red. Women are not just men who happen to have wombs. The work of raising children and making a home is valuable and necessary. Anyone who chooses not to understand that is nothing short of a nihilist.
It is importance work Nandini!!
Excellent points here, Ivana. I’m also a SAHM. My mother spent years as a SAHM before going back to work; she’s now been a full-time homemaker, church and civic volunteer, and helpful grandmother for years (and still occasionally gets comments like “what do you do all day?!”). I received my master’s degree after having our first living child and worked part-time outside the home for a year before doing gig work for several more at home. My husband and I have eight living children now. Our oldest is 16 and has worked for over two years as a church organist in addition to working another food service job. Other kids have done paid work for friends and neighbors. I can’t even imagine how much our children, Lord willing, will contribute to the economy and—better yet!—society as a whole as they continue to grow.
Our parochial school could not function without the regular and dedicated volunteer work from me and other SAHMs (some of us have become part-time workers after years of volunteering; I’m now doing grant writing, for instance. Other moms have become aides and teachers.). Our churches couldn’t care for members without SAHMs and retired members. The value of these types and many other kinds of care is obvious to anyone who pays remote attention to local communities. It seems willfully ignorant to argue otherwise, but that still seems to be a prevalent practice (see Oster). Thank you, Ivana, for working to articulate the value of homemakers! I’m excited to read and share your book!
The “what do you do all day” comment always drives me crazy. I don’t know ANY moms or dads at home who are just hanging around watching soap operas.
It makes me crazy, too. And yet. I wish I could say I didn’t know any bonbon eaters. But I think that’s just it: because there are some (hopefully few) that are—I’ll just say it—lazy, the generalization continues. So most SAHMs and/or homemakers get smeared with the same brush.
The prevailing trust in utilitarian and productivity metrics also compounds this error. Homemaking and home management, despite the business term, are crafts, not solely scientific valuations. Our roles are not just endless lists to be check marked and squeezed for further efficiency. Raising and teaching children definitely shouldn’t be understood this way, either. Yet here we are.
I would love to read your book!
As mother who does not work in paid employment, I tire of "unemployed" being the only choice I have when it comes to completing all manner of surveys. There's no choice for "carer" or "homemaker" or anything not defined solely in terms of participation or not in the monetised workforce. Though I generally don't spend my energy actively fighting things like this (though push back when something is directed at me specifically). Modern Western society does not value motherhood at all. But at least there's enough space for me to pursue it wholeheartedly.
I read some of Emily Oster's book cribsheet. The main thing I remember is that she found that the evidence found that leaving a baby to "cry it out" did not harm them, but she was unable to execute this herself. She left it to her husband to do it and she went out. That is my recollection - but it could be wrong.
I've read a bunch of books on babies, children, childhood development and the like. But I no longer give them as much weight as I used to. I don't totally ignore them, but what has been discovered through academic research is far from the whole story. The human race survived for an incredibly long time before having access to such resources. There is something to be said for instinct.
I completely agree that it would be nice to see “homemaker” in forms! It’s dispiriting to have to report yourself as “unemployed” since I (and you) know the work we do at home is important.
Here's a quote that I think is apropos for the book you're working on: "...it was homemaking that mattered. Every home was a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected over and over again as a bulwark against the perpetual flooding in of evil. But women made the bricks, and the durableness of each civilization depended upon their quality, and it was no good weakening oneself for the brick-making by thinking too much about the flood." - Elizabeth Goudge (from The Pilgrim's Inn)
Thank you!
You're welcome.
I work for Baker Books. Let’s chat. Shoot me a message and I’ll give you my work email address.
Yes, it has been our experience that our overall income is higher with one parent at home. When our oldest was born, I tried to continue working part time as a figure skating coach while my husband was building his career as a corporate pilot. He would have to turn down flights on weekends that I was busy at figure skating competitions. Of course, my hourly coaching wage was significantly less than my husband's pilot day rate. After 18 months of continuously losing money, I decided to officially "retire". Once my husband had more availability, higher paying jobs continued to present themselves.
It is really difficult on the whole family if both parents are building careers at the same time. I’ve seen families successfully “stagger” their careers, but two parents on the same track at once is very challenging.
I'm technically a working mom, as I am finishing up a PhD, but I'm contributing very little to the tax base. Both my mother and my mother-in-law are not currently in the workforce, but providing valuable and needed care--my mother cares for my son when I work and my disabled sister, and my mother-in-law cares for the elderly in her family. I find the notion that none of the three of us contribute positively to society absolutely ridiculous.
Yes! It sounds like you, your mother, and your mother in law are all doing extremely important work.
Thank you Ivana for this piece. Really wonderful. I agree with the sentiment that having one parent focused on economically remunerative work and one focused on the family allows each of them to give 110% to their respective tasks. In my family’s case, I have stayed at home with the baby for the time being, while my wife went back to work, and it’s probably the optimal situation for all involved, at least while our child is still young. I guess I’m also fortunate that leaving the workforce will (likely) not harm my career path in the future.
I’m so glad you liked it! It’s amazing all the different ways parents can organize their lives these days - and glad to hear you’ll be able to easily rejoin the work force when you are ready.
"Oster argues with regard to the first question that there is no evidence that children benefit from parental care, rather than institutional care."
I vaguely remember discussing this in graduate school - that for children whose home experience was unpredictable, the consistency of institutional care was helpful, but that the difference was less noticeable for children who experienced consistency across both environments. Unfortunately, I cannot cite a source for you. Maybe it's because there is such variability in experiences of parental care and institutional care that it all kind of "evens out" when all the data comes together?
Saying this with some humor - I've wondered if my kids would be better off not at home - mostly because I don't feel like I've got my own stuff together and am not very disciplined with a schedule, enriching activities, etc. I also do wonder if I need just a bit more intellectual engagement - which is why I spend a lot of time lurking on substack. I enjoy reading your work and would definitely buy a book with your working title!
You definitely need to put on your oxygen mask before you can care for your kids! I also think creating meaningful opportunities outside the home has been key for me and my kids to really enjoy it. I’m their mother, but I’m also cognizant that I can’t and shouldn’t be the only role model in their lives, and I really value our homeschool coop, wider church community activities, outside lessons, and just plain old friends that we have.
Thank you for this article. I'm a homemaker. My husband and I are in the middle of raising our 8 children (4 have graduated from our homeschool). I'll be looking for your book when it comes out!
Eight children is an incredible blessing!
Thank you.