Any men that have stay at home wives… what are the pros and cons from your perspective? How did you get to a point where the benefits outweighed the negatives? Did you have an amazing career breakthrough or just make sacrifices?

I have a stay at home husband - does that count?

You really gotta set the understanding of what their responsibilities will be as a stay at home person. My wife stopped working and pretty much just plays tennis and has lunch with her friends. And shops a lot. It’s like you lose the income and then get the spending of being free all day :)

Not always women that stay home

My wife has been a stay at home Mom for 20 years and we have 5 kids. It was a sacrifice as she is a Duke grad brilliant, bright and beautiful. However, we wanted to have a family unattached to careers. I couldn’t move up the corporate ladder and be a father and husband with substantive relationships. I sacrificed also. We had a vision and a plan to have a life worth living rather than making a living thinking that would give us a life.

The gender references in the post are frustrating. I know just as many stay at home dads as I do stay at home moms. Take that feedback for what it is

Following - sounds like from the above, a partner is usually stay at home when their income would be less than the cost of childcare. Anyone with examples in which this was not the case i.e. partner had a high income + potential for significant growth, and still chose to be stay at home? If so, pls do share.

My wife is a stay at home mom. When I met her at 25 she was an au pair in my hometown making $200/wk. I had just graduated law school and was making $125k/yr at the time. When we got married she couldn’t work for the first year due to immigration laws and when she finally could she did some tutoring and nannying but it was more for her to have spending money, I paid rent and everything else. She has a masters level education from her home country in teaching and was a teacher but she’d need certifications to teach in public schools here.

Shortly thereafter we decided to start a family anyway so her staying home was an easy decision since I was already paying 100% of the bills. We ended up with twins. Now at 30 we’re going on kid three, I’ll make around $215k this year, and even if she wanted to work, the cost of daycare would surpass whatever income she brought in.

Pros: someone is always available for the children which we think provided them a lot of emotional stability (this was a goal of ours and an important factor in our decision), and a substantial amount of home chores and cooking are taken care of (not all, I still contribute).

Cons: being a single family income can be stressful on the breadwinner, it can be harder to survive a layoff, it can feel a bit lonely like nobody else understands what you’re going through (can be the same for a stay at home mom), it can sometimes feel like you bring in all the money and everyone else spends it (you’re too busy working). Make sure you’re in the same page about how money will be spent OR adopt a policy of “money is like pie, when it’s gone it’s gone so spend what you want but understand the reality and eventuality of retirement, etc”.

First of all, to avoid any build up of resentment, it absolutely has to be a mutual decision, the stay at home spouse has to feel good about sacrificing their career, and the working spouse has to feel good about being solely responsible for finances.

My wife is highly educated (has a PhD and was teaching at a university) but we came to the decision that she should be a SAHM for a few reasons:

1) This is absolutely the most important reason: we didn’t trust the institutions to raise our kids for us, and wanted to ensure that we are the biggest influence in their lives until they are old enough to think for themselves.

2) This may sound counterintuitive, but a single income family is actually more financially secure. A dual income family will absolutely expand their lifestyle to depend on both incomes, which means that if either spouse loses their job, it will be impossible to make ends meet, essentially doubling the risk of negative consequences due to one spouse losing their job.

3) Good child care is ludicrously expensive, and my wife’s potential income would be mostly consumed by childcare expenses, making little difference to our bottom line whether she worked or not.

4) Least important in our ultimate decision, but very important in our reconciliation of value and equality in the marriage, ( aka our ability to both be happy with our decision) my job has more upward mobility than my wife’s did. Two promotions in my role would net a greater bump than her entire salary. So financially speaking, it is better for both us to concentrate entirely on advancing my career than to split our attention on two. Obviously if we ever got divorced, she would have a solid claim for supporting my career growth, and I think that is entirely fair, because it’s true that I wouldn’t be where I am without the division of labor that we’ve agreed to.

So based on your comments, it sounds like you want to be a stay at home mom right now. If that’s what you want and you can afford it and feel like you have the network to get back into the workforce later on, go for it. Kids will only be little for a short while.
I’m pregnant with my second and we are debating having my husband stay home with both kids for a year or so. I am the higher earner and love my job. He doesn’t like his job. I “forced” him to take 3 months paternity leave with our first and he LOVED it. He’s an amazing dad. Born for it. I love the balance of career and being a mom. We would only be losing about $1k/month if he stopped working (bc of the exorbitant cost of childcare for 2 kids in my area).
So…do what is best for your family. As an M7 graduate, successful in my career and going places, I have classmates who want and wanted to be SAHMs. It’s ok! Things change when you have kids. Everyone is different. Moms and dads shouldn’t feel guilty for doing what feels right for them.
Good luck!

I have a SAHW. Cons are none really when compared to the pros. I don’t feel like we are making sacrifices?

Pros:
- You get a home cooked meal
- All the hanky panky you could ever want
- house is always clean

Cons:
- the home cooked meal might be frozen chicken nuggets
- sometimes the hanky panky is only in your head
- the house is only clean when you get in and help do the dishes and the like.

In all seriousness, It took us a long time to get to that place. We made a lot of sacrifices until my take home pay could float both of us. I had a lot of ideas of what it would be like. There are some benefits and downsides for sure. But mostly upside. I think the main thing I learned is because she stayed home, I had to find ways to give her a true break. (For example: she has all Saturday morning until 12 pm to do what she wants without the kids and I’ll take them)

When kid 3 was on the way, we decided it was silly for my wife to not spend the next 5-10 years being with the kids. She wanted to do it, I make enough money, and if we had to change our minds we could have.

I got a new job (this one) that paid more than we made together before, but because of the travel there was no way we could both keep working. She hated her job anyway and was excited to stay home with our 2 (at the time) young children. It has worked out pretty well for us for ~10 years now. Not to say it's been perfect, but generally we're both satisfied with the roles we fill in the family unit. It's a partnership.

As my income and hours went up there were practically three options:

(1) she work a similarly demanding job, make significant money, we'd rely heavily on pay for services to spackle over the significant gaps in our ability to mind the home. This was plan A out of college and would have been totally fine but she really didn't enjoy that lifestyle and i didnt like her working 70 hour weeks super miserably - that's a lot of misery!

(2) she work a normal job with much lower comp than mine. We tried this and it didnt make a ton of sense. Doing them for its own sake wasnt providing rich meaning for her, they didnt make much money in the scheme of things and if helping handle home stuff to help her make her job work adversely impacted my availability for mine it was just a really bad trade by the dollars. Which would have been fine for a passion or priority but that wasn't the case for her.

(3) she went SAH. This solved basically all home front problems - she's there and to the extent we hire staff can manage staff. We lose the income but unless she was going to do a super high income job it wasnt going to be enough income to really be felt. There were def questions about how to fill the time with purpose and meaning for her but having kids kicked in pretty immediately after that and tends to solve that problem. It just made the most sense.

It’s interesting you are asking men on this platform. The conversation is to be had with your wife whose life it directly impacts .

This is great advice. I definitely feel that we have used our combined income to expand our lifestyle without even realizing it. And we do pay for private school. I have a masters in curriculum design and used to teach. I feel strongly about the school system being an institution to indoctrinate kids with ideologies I may not align with. But private school does come at the cost of 25% of my income.

I stay at home A lot, but I only save money for my partner by doing the cooking, cleaning and thinking in many cases in a financial sense. It’s a hard job, and no credit at the end of the day.

We both wanted a more traditional division of labor like that. So when we got married I stopped working in HVAC, took a coding bootcamp, and upskilled into software engineering.

Two major cons:
(1) One income is a stressor for the provider. I reduced this by joining the Army Reserve so as to have an "emergency plan," and guaranteed medical insurance.

(2) There can be a temptation to view all childcare as the stay at home parents responsibility. This is emphatically NOT the case. Caring for little kids all day is far more exhausting than any job, and the SAHP will need the provider to step up outside of work time.

Other than that, we love our life. Our house feels like a home vice a barracks, and my wife is the anchor. For context, LCOL, 130k TC.

It's all about the kind of life you want. We choose presence in our kids lives over maximizing income.

All of these comments are great and so supportive. I’m tossing in a potential negative to staying home that has always scared me.

Personally, I don’t know that I could ever fully quit the workforce because I value my financial independence and wouldn’t be willing to depend on someone else financially. I love and trust my husband completely, but am watching a close friend go through the unthinkable as her husband just left her + 2 yo + NEWBORN for one of his employees. Not to be a Debbie, but just something else to factor in.