Research Project on Stay-At-Home Parents: Results!
Since early 2024, I have been co-directing a project on stay-at-home parents with my colleague, Elliot Haspel, through an organization called Capita. Among other things, we conducted a survey on almost 1,500 stay-at-home parents to ask them about who they were, what challenges they faced, and what help they wanted and needed. We also ran four focus groups: one with rural stay-at-home parents in North Carolina, one with Hispanic stay-at-home moms (conducted in Spanish with the help of a translator), and two groups with parents whose religion plays a foundational role in their lives.
(My other big project for 2024 is my pregnancy with our fourth child.1 We can’t wait to hold him in our arms - any day now! It was unclear whether this report or our youngest son would see the light of day first, but the report made it across the finish line this week.)
I wanted to send out a summary of the report, but also extend an invitation for readers to participate in evaluating the results. First, the summary, and then scroll down for the invitation.
The Results
Our results aren’t easily categorized or summarized, but here’s some of the top-level results:
Stay-at-home parents provide incredibly valuable services to their families, the U.S. economy, and the country at large. You can think of the U.S. childcare system as made up of a network of daycare chains, small in-home daycares, church nurseries, grandparents taking care of grandkids, etc. In this system, stay-at-home parents are one of the largest “providers” of childcare in the country. (Obviously stay-at-home moms and dads are much more than “childcare providers,” but one important role they play is—of course—watching over their own kids during the day). Our childcare system couldn’t work without them. To put it another way, if every parent currently at home went into the full-time paid workforce and put their child in daycare tomorrow, the daycare system would collapse. Plus these parents often provide tons of volunteer hours in their communities, build important social networks, help support the elderly…the list is endless! Stay-at-home parents are a very important resource for their families and wider communities. Still, the worth of what they do is often invisible to everyone except their immediate families.
To continue providing care to their families and communities, stay-at-home parents want and need government support. As every normal person knows, it is now really hard to support a family in this country on one income. Unless you have a ton of money, families that want to have a stay-at-home parent often make incredible sacrifices to achieve that goal. We talked to parents about struggles they had in finding affordable housing, good jobs for the family breadwinner, finding good and reasonably-priced healthcare, saving for retirement, and just making ends meet. For a lot of stay-at-home families, they really could use a hand from policymakers in facing these challenges.
Today’s stay-at-home parents are not who conventional wisdom says they are. If you watch the “Real Housewives” shows, you might think that stay-at-home parents are mainly rich moms who spend all their time wasting money and creating drama. But most families with a stay-at-home parent aren’t rich: instead they are hard-working families that still struggle to balance the family budget. Lots of them are people of color. And many family with a stay-at-home parent now have dad at home, instead of mom. Plus, many stay-at-home parents work! We talked to moms and dads who worked shiftwork jobs at nights or on weekends, who worked remotely, or did things like give music lessons.
Supporting stay-at-home parents represents a rare opportunity for bipartisan cooperation. The U.S. does commit a lot of funding to supporting daycares, especially to daycare for low-income families, but also through tax breaks for middle-income families that use daycare. It doesn’t do hardly anything for families that want to care for their kids at home. When policymakers think about funding, they shouldn’t only consider the daycare model: they should also help families make the choices that they want in how to take care of their kids. So for some families, that means daycare, but for others, they want mom or dad (or grandma or grandpa) to take care of their kids.
I strongly believe good family policy means empowering families to care for their kids how they want to: for a parent, there’s nothing more important than making sure their baby or toddler is being raised in a way the family feels comfortable with. This should be a bipartisan prority. First, it’s good policy. Second, the stay-at-home parents we surveyed were a pretty even mix of Democrats and Republicans (plus a bunch of Independents), so this isn’t a one-party issue. Elliot and I actually come from very different sides of the political spectrum, but we thought that made the report stronger: this is an area both “sides” should be able to come to an agreement on.
You can read the full report here, if you are interested: https://capita.org/publication/invisible-labor-visible-needs/.
The Invitation
We are going to host a Webinar on the results of this project next Friday, Oct. 25, from 2pm-3pm Eastern Standard Time. The link to register is here: https://capita.org/event/invisible-labor-visible-needs-making-family-policy-work-for-stay-at-home-and-all-parents/.
will be joining us (along with Raena Boston at the Chamber of Mothers and Ori Mellas from the Partnership for Community Action) to give her opinion on the results. I’m so glad a mom in the trenches (Haley has three young sons at home) will be there to provide her perspective on our findings.I invite you, even if you haven’t participated in public policy making - actually, ESPECIALLY if you haven’t participated in public policymaking - to either attend the webinar or read the report, and give us feedback. You can email me directly at ivana.d.greco@proton.me. If you feel moved, I would love to hear your reactions: critical, approving, what you thinks still needs to be done, whatever.
One of the things that most bothers me about a lot of policymaking is it’s very “top down,” meaning that policymakers often start with the goal, and don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what the people who are going to be affected by the policy think or want.2 We tried really hard to avoid that in this report, instead prioritizing speaking with and surveying stay-at-home moms and dads. I would love to keep that going by hearing from you what you think about the results and suggestions for the future.
As it turns out, with the fourth child, you really do say things like: “I guess we should probably buy some newborn diapers soon” and “Can you get the baby bouncer out of the storage unit sometime” when getting reasonably close to the due date.
This is also why I like to post full interviews with people on my Substack, rather than creating essays that put my own spin on their words. One frustration I have with a lot of mass media writing is it seems very disconnected from people, often reflecting more of the author’s view than anything else.
I read the whole thing. It was great!
It's interesting how you chose to focus on improving the welfare of parents who choose to stay at home regardless. A different angle from which to approach this topic would be to figure out how to tip the scales to help parents who say they want to stay at home, but don't currently find it feasible, achieve their ambition. Another angle would be to investigate what childcare arrangements are best for the welfare of children, both on average and in more specific circumstances. Those might be more challenging directions to explore, partly due to diverging opinions and partly due to limited research on such complex realities.
I do think the approach you chose was the lowest hanging fruit on this underrepresented topic, and the right sized scope for a report.
My main criticism is that the decisions and desires of parents, and the welfare of children, regarding parental care vs other childcare arrangements, are hugely and predictably different based on the age of their youngest child. The care needs of a child and the care arrangement desires of their parents are on average much different for a 5 month old than for a 5 year old. Yet they are all grouped together in your analysis of families with children under 12 years old. Only one sentence I can recall in your report alluded to this. I think your argument would be much stronger with numerical data showing how many parents of children under 6 months, under 12 months, and under kindergarten age would prefer to stay home. A sidebar on babies' special situation, and a sentence on paid maternity leave, would have been great additions.