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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 unattached to the formal labor force—are unusual by historical standards. As the population historian Steven Ruggles has written, throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, a majority of American households were “corporate families” wherein all 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.
The role of homemaking shifted as America industrialized and urbanized, and the dominant household model became one with a single male earner. (According to Ruggles’s analysis, this setup never exceeded 57 percent of married households, even at its peak in 1940. Many mothers, especially those who were low-income or immigrants, have always worked or been forced to work.) Stay-at-home parents were still performing vital work domestically, but that work started to be left out of the popular economic conception of “labor.” As Ivana Greco, a stay-at-home mother who writes extensively on these issues, has noted:
In 1934, Simon Kuznets presented Congress with the research that would become today’s GDP calculation. However, he cautioned that it omitted the “services of housewives and other members of the family.” This omission had significant and lasting impacts on how American policymakers view homemaking. There is an aphorism in business that “what gets measured gets managed,” with the corollary that “what gets measured, matters.” The value of homemaking was not measured in the GDP, and so—in the eyes of many economists and politicians—it did not matter.
The decision to exclude stay-at-home parents from traditional economic metrics has largely walled them off from society’s attention and inclusion in social policies. Even the language around these parents is fraught, as distinguishing them from “working parents” implies that the labor done at home is less than. The right-leaning think tank American Compass has noted that “American entitlement programs are designed to support workers and provide only limited coverage for spouses who are not full-time workers themselves.” Stay-at-home parents do not receive their own Social Security benefits; unlike in other countries, there’s no mechanism for them to independently contribute or gain credit toward the program (and, if they rejoined the labor force, they may get lower payments because their caregiving years are excluded). They have uneven access to health insurance without their spouse and, depending on their work history, could be ineligible for the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program despite the impact that their becoming disabled may have on their family. Recent proposals to expand access to child care, such as the Child Care for Working Families Act, are unhelpfully silent on stay-at-home parents.
While stay-at-home parents tend to be left out of public benefits, they are frequently used as a wedge in policy debates. For instance, opponents of large-scale public child-care funding are quick to point out surveys that find many parents prefer the idea of a stay-at-home parent. Future Senator J. D. Vance claimed in a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed that major public investment in child care would be bad for children, who would be better cared for by a parent at home. A lot of Democratic rhetoric, meanwhile, focuses on the needs of parents working outside the home without mentioning stay-at-home parents. When Vice President Kamala Harris announced in 2023 a series of executive actions on child-care affordability, she explained, “As we know, for millions of parents, childcare makes it possible to go to work and to be productive during the course of their day. Childcare helps these Americans stay in the workforce, go to job training, or secure a paid job and earn money for college or retirement.”
Both of these approaches ignore that homemakers need support too. Many stay-at-home parents are isolated in an age when they are the minority. In 2023, the organization Mother Untitled commissioned a study that included a survey of 1,200 college-educated stay-at-home mothers and women actively considering becoming one. Although most of the mothers surveyed were glad that they had the chance to be home with their children, half said leaving the workforce shrunk the size of their mom-friend circle; a similar number reported that making friends as a stay-at-home parent was hard. The all-consuming nature of stay-at-home parenting makes outside child care an important resource for them too—sometimes, they simply need a break. Research has linked child-care availability to parental mental health (for both working and stay-at-home parents), and also to better parenting practices.
But though stay-at-home and working parents are frequently pitted against each other, in reality it’s perfectly possible to create a system that supports both cohorts. Norway and Finland are among the countries that provide the most robust aid to stay-at-home parents: home-care stipends of several hundred dollars a month for those with children under 3, caregiver credits that count toward retirement pensions, low-cost open services such as child-care centers where parents can drop in for a few hours. They are also among the best at using public dollars to provide substantial paid family leave for working parents and affordable external child-care options.
American stay-at-home parents, for now, receive more rhetorical than material support, but hints of bipartisan potential have appeared in proposals that have been advanced from across the political spectrum. Vance is the sponsor of the Fairness for Stay-at-Home Parents Act, which would close a loophole in the Family and Medical Leave Act whereby employees who elect not to return to work after having a child may be forced to pay back their health-care benefits from the leave period. Other ideas that have been floated include providing stay-at-home parents caregiving credits toward Social Security, making them eligible for SSDI, and creating more generous family-focused retirement plans.
One of the simplest ways to ensure that parents who want to stay home can do so is also one of the boldest: Pay them. This idea has come up before, as in the 1970s Wages for Housework movement; it argued that paying for domestic labor would acknowledge that housework is, in fact, labor. The U.S. has actually experimented with a limited version of this. As a recent report from the Niskanen Center think tank noted, a few states—beginning with Minnesota and Montana—have over the years offered low-income parents an at-home infant-care option, “where new parents who would otherwise be eligible for state child care subsidies while they work could instead opt to receive cash assistance to stay home with their infant child.”
Really supporting stay-at-home parents also means building infrastructure that allows them to build community, get breaks, and not feel so isolated. The U.S. has a smattering of offerings—New Orleans’s free We PLAY Center is one such example—but they are hardly widespread and receive little public funding.
It helps no one to keep stay-at-home parents so cloistered. The solution to the stay-at-home-parent paradox lies in addressing both sides of it: Creating policies and programs that give stay-at-home parents dignity and agency without using them as a reason to deny working parents the same.
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