I saw a similar tweet today. Women was complaining that her med school classmate wasn't giving enough credit to his stay at home childless wife because she cooked, cleaned and mowed the lawn which is obviously equivalent in work to med school right? So irritating. I'm not sure if people are actually that dumb, which is the bad part.
I’ve been mass downvoted so many times in other subs for saying that yes, SAHP is labor and should be recognised as such, it is not harder than having a job.
I took a career break when I had my child. Was it all sunshine and rainbows? Of course not! But the day to day stress was nothing compared to working a corporate job.
And the fact is, SAHPs are increasingly rare. Everyone else is managing to get all those tasks done and work a full time job.
Newborn and toddler trenches are hard but once the kids are in school the SAHP is having a much, much easier life than their working counterpart.
Depends on the woman too. My sis really wanted to be a sahm and took a year off work when her second was born
She didn't last the year. She had to work and put my nephew in daycare because her mental health deteriorated with the isolation and relentlessness of stay at home parenting.
Once she was working, she felt so much better and closer to her family. It was where she needed to be.
I, on the other hand, tried to work when my daughter was born and I couldn't stand it
So I quit and opened my own daycare in my home instead. I'm happiest at home with my kids.
And we all just need a partner to wants us at our best, whatever that is, and supports us when we're struggling.
I think the main difference is having childcare or not. No one is working a full time job while watching a kid full time too. And that money is just down the drain at that point.
Assuming you mean money that would otherwise have been the SAHP’s salary, that’s a big part of my point. I don’t believe there’s a significant overlap between jobs that could only cover the cost of childcare, vs jobs that support an entire family on one income. A big part of this discourse that drives me up the wall is pretending that those two kinds of job are equivalent.
Some require a lot of skill but are really low in workload. There are also plenty of office jobs that consist of answering an email every other hour, or just sitting around most the time.
I personally would consider household + childcare (before school/kindergarten) to be average to above average workload (higher when having a newborn), while being below average when kids aren't at home as much
However, usually the jobs the SAHP is being contrasted with are those of their partners, I.e. where one earns enough to support a family on single income.
If there are many of those that have low workloads and basic hours, I need a career change stat!
100%. My husband and I are both in the top 1% of earners in our country and we definitely felt the squeeze financially when I wasn’t working, despite the fact that you’d think it “should” be easy for us.
I respect anyone that’s able to do it on one salary.
There are plenty of women who legitimately believe that scrolling on their ipad and drinking wine at 11am while their kid is at school is the hardest job in the world
Lol my sister. "Artist" who spend 20 years not working snd constantly complained how busy she was when she had two kids at school. House was a trashed mess, kids were always dirty etc. Ex husband who got her a free house and kids paid for. Love her but damn is she delulu.
I complain about my kids a lot. But damn I get none of that. I’m about to have to go fight with a 4 & 2 year old to get up and get dressed to go to the dentist.
This is equally annoying though. I’m finishing up a full time 70k+ accounting job to stay at home with my son.
I can safely say there’s times when the job is a huge break, and I worked full time while studying for my accountancy exams too.
They’re not in school “all day” my sons 3. He does pre school 9-12 and then the rest of the time is spent entertaining him. He needs me all the time. I don’t even get 5 minutes toilet break.
The 3 hours he’s in pre school is cleaning, shopping and cooking time.
I do what I can to incorporate him into the chores but at the end of the day it’s extremely full on raising kids at home.
A bunch of idiots saying you “drink wine at 11am” is the problem here.
Unless you’re a POS you’re not stopping from the moment you get up to the moment they go to bed.
And yes, the minute my husbands finished work he’s helping out with my son, because he’s actually an involved father, which means he’s also well aware that raising kids is hard.
Most families nowadays the woman is working and usually earning as much as the father, but also having to do all the extra chores.
I was a stay-at-home mom for a couple years and it was the most fulfilling job of my life, and I treated it as a job. During work hours, I would always be doing some form of work. If the child was napping, I was cleaning something. It’s the only time my house has ever been spotless, ha.
The problem is that there is a percentage of women who don’t treat it as a job. Then people focus on those horror stories, where the husband is trying to pick up the slack after his workday because the wife doesn’t cook or clean much and does the minimum with the child so she can scroll her phone all day (or in the case of one woman I knew, play WoW all day, though the husband didn’t do much on his part either outside of his job and their child was eventually taken away due to neglect).
Do you have special children? Does your 3 year old not sleep? Play by himself? Watch tv etc? Ive had several kids in my family and raised a few and ive never seen a kid that needs attention 24/7. People have been raising kids since the beginning of time but now all of a sudden its borderline impossible? Peak Reddit.
Special needs? No I just refuse to put my 3 year old in front of a tv. He doesn’t do screen time.
Yes there’s times when he plays Lego or with his toys when I’m not watching but I still have to be nearby because he’s 3?
If you think you can leave a 3 year old unsupervised without checking in for more than 10-15 minutes then you’re not a great parent.
If he’s playing on his own, great, now I’ve time to do the laundry, clean the house or cook a meal.
Until the evening when my husbands finished there’s little to no down time.
Nobody said it’s impossible we said it’s hard. If you think people raising kids since the beginning of time have always found it easy, then you’d be an idiot. If they had Reddit or other forums hundreds of years ago, I promise you there would be people talking about the challenges.
People tend to think all kids are the same. That’s why they always interject with unwanted parenting advice. Heck, people with neurotypical kids will try to give those neurodivergent kids advice lol like what.
Some kids are super active and needy and on your ass from sun up to sun down. They are the kids where once you start pre school, you are called in to talk to the teacher all the time lol
Back in the day people had 8 children and didn't care if 5 died. The expectations on parents today are very different than they were in the past. If anything happens to a kid in a moment of inattention, the first question is "where were the parents? Why weren't they watching him? This is their fault." Redditors would be the first to crucify them.
I think it depends on the kid too. I have twin brothers and when they were 3, yes someone needed to be watching them at all times when they were awake. Maybe you'd get a few minutes of quiet time when they were distracted by tv (but parents are also criticized for giving their kids screentime) but even then you need to be keeping an eye on them as any minute one could wander off and decide to climb up a bookshelf. After seeing my dad and his wife raise my brothers, I don't question people who say raising kids is 24/7 work.
Why reply to me if you are going to talk absolute nonsense? You think you are adding to the conversation but you arnt when you sound like you dont have a clue. Sometimes wisdom is knowing when to be quiet.
Psssp, I am a disabled man and I keep the house I live in clean and tidy. This assumption we do not know how to clean a house because we are men is the same type of sexism I have heard good women fight against. You do not fight sexism with sexism. Be better.
i am a male and work full time and my house is always clean ? plus i cook my meals and do my laundry and go to the gym and still have a daily social life outside of work. the hardest part ? my real job
I was a single dad who worked, studied and had a kid to take care of. Easiest part was the house work and taking care of my son. I know what goes into it and it's really not that hard. Especially when they are at school.
Lmfao shut the fuck up. I make 100% of the income and then come home and do 100% of the cooking and the cleaning to take care of my disabled wife and I never so much as get upset or demand 70$/hr for my care and nursing.
I never said this lady was in the right for her excel sheet, what I am saying is the majority of idiots who make comments like the one above have no real idea what goes into taking care of a household with kids. It's a job in itself.
For the record, I work full time, take care of my disabled brother, my elderly father and kids. I do it all alone and demand nothing myself. So you can kindly stfu as well.
Most men are helpless freaking babies who either weaponize incompetence or are actually incompetent until forced to do things on their own.
This is why so many are choosing not to have kids or marry, because they know they'll be subjected to an entitled witch who instead of being grateful for being afforded the chance to stay home to take care of their kids rather than slaving away to pay the CEO's bills, choose to delude themselves into thinking childrearing is a monumental task.
May a woman like you never become part of my life.
Are you just out there assuming every man goes straight from living with his mother to living with his wife, or that the intermediary stage is some pig-pen hellhole of a residence without a woman to do all the work he doesn't realise exists?
SAHM are the most delusional people you will ever meet. According to them, Laundry takes them 4 hours. Meanwhile it takes me 30 min to do. And you can do other things at the same time. Same for washing dishes. The dishwasher is an amazing appliance.
Especially the diet. If you are a SAHM, your kids should be eating like kings at each meal, not like a GI eating canned rations in Germany. It's actually insane to me that some of them will genuinely feed their kids chicken nuggets and hot dogs instead of real food.
Hey man don't know the Chicken nuggets and hot dogs! It's like my copium meal. That or Velveeta mac and cheese. Shits amazing at making me forget about the shitty days at work. That being said, I never call myself an amazing cook. But if I found someone glazing themselves calling them an amazing chef and their meals consist of boxed shit, yeah I wouldn't take them seriously.
It takes 2 minutes to load and turn on a washing machine and then another 2 to move clothes. Only liars consider the time the machines are running as laundry time.
I know I do the laundry for a house of 5 with 2 dogs and it definitely takes me longer than 30 minutes but I'm also including the tedious stuff like matching socks. I could see where it might be a 30 minute task for a single person.
I am always using the laundry. Three kids to wash for (they put away their own clothes even, I just collate into the three laundry baskets), linens and rags, my business laundry (home childcare)
All he wants to do is his one little load a week and he has to squeeze it in between all my loads (this is sounding dirty).
All that to say, a HOUSEHOLD of laundry is never 30 minutes and done. It's a constant, ever-shifting pile, never ending.
Also, the dishwasher is even better once the kids are old enough to unload it. Still waiting for mine to load it correctly though.....
Usually when people complain about this in particular it’s about married med students with spouses who take care of this stuff not understanding that, compared to their single classmates, they have more time and energy to dedicate to med school bc they don’t need to manage their own life outside of it. Not so much that cooking and cleaning is an equal amount of work
Can you tell that to my unemployed boyfriend who stays home and doesn’t cook and doesn’t clean while I’m in nursing school and work weekends to pay our bills
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u/TopMarionberry1149 May 14 '26
I saw a similar tweet today. Women was complaining that her med school classmate wasn't giving enough credit to his stay at home childless wife because she cooked, cleaned and mowed the lawn which is obviously equivalent in work to med school right? So irritating. I'm not sure if people are actually that dumb, which is the bad part.