Disclaimer: The decision to raise children with at least one parent being a stay at home parent is a personal choice. This post reflects the choice that my wife and I made and the reasons for doing so...
Many years ago, when my wife and I were first married and we were discussing the desire to have children, we both agreed that there would be immeasurable benefits for our future children and the happiness of our household if we could make the sacrifices necessary for one of us to be a stay a home parent. For me, this was an easy decision. When I grew up, my mother stayed home to take care of myself and my three other siblings. That is the way it was. I knew nothing else and I believed (and still do) that this is the way it is supposed to be (I have a theory on this that I will share in a later blog post). My wife is also a firm believer in there being a stay at home parent. When she was a child, her mom stayed at home as well, only returning to work when her children were all in school. Even then, she arranged her schedule where her children never had to be latch key kids, she was always home to greet her children when they got off the school bus.
In our case, we decided that Tiffany would become a stay a home mommy. There were several reasons that ultimately drove us to choose the more "traditional" roles, with the wife /mommy being the homemaker and stay at home parent while the husband / daddy went out into the workforce. Truthfully though, it can probably be boiled down to two main reasons...
1. As I have described in prior posts, my wife absolutely loves children and babies and is a born nurturer. With every fiber of her being, she believes that all children are a blessing, and it is an honor and a privilege to be the primary caregiver to help them grow, develop, and become independent, self reliant, responsible people. She believes that her most important job while on this earth, and certainly the most rewarding one, is to raise her children to the best of her abilities. She was meant to be a stay at home mommy...
2. We both, but especially Tiffany, have a deep seeded belief that if a couple decides to have children, part of the responsibility of starting a family is to make every accommodation so at least one parent can be the primary care giver. In our estimation, the decision to have children and the choice to have a parent home to raise them are NOT mutually exclusive. They must happen together.
I recognize that "every accommodation" is a pretty broad statement, but my intention is to point out that you exhaust every possibility to make sure that you, the ones deciding to have a child, are the ones that will ultimately raise your children. "Every accommodation" could mean potentially giving up a certain career path, downsizing to a different size home, living in a different area, driving older cars, foregoing completely or going on less extravagant vacations, cutting out cable or satellite, wearing clothing that you buy on consignment or even purchase at Goodwill, eating out less, making less trips to Starbucks, avoiding the temptation for the latest electronics, gadgets, fads, or trends, etc... Many of these can be very difficult decisions but bottom line, you make the sacrifices necessary to develop a lifestyle that will allow you to support a family with only one person working outside the home. If the sacrifices are too great, if you cannot "do without" to make the numbers work or if there are certain things that are of a high enough personal priority that you cannot see your way to giving them up, then it might mean that the timing is wrong or you are not ready to start a family.
Nothing baffles my wife and I more than couples who choose to have children, only to subsequently pay a daycare provider to raise their child while they are at work. Let's look at a quick example... assume that there is a theoretical two income household with two children. The children are three years old and one year old. The parents, assuming they work a stereotypical 9 to 5 work day have to leave the house at 8:30 and return home at 5:30, including the time to drop off and pick up their children from day care. Let's also assume that the children awake at 6:30 AM and go to bed at 7:00 PM. So, for five days a week, the parents will see their kids for a total of 3 1/2 hours a day, maybe 4 hours if you count the time in the car. That is roughly a total of 18 to 20 hours between Monday AM and Friday PM...20 hours out of a total of 60 awake hours and this does not include the time taken for eating, preparing meals, bathing, brushing teeth, dressing, etc...
Those are hours that as a parent, you can never get back. You cannot reverse the clock. For Tiffany and I, it was important for at least one of us to be there for as much of that time as is humanly possible. The first four years of a child's life are very formative years, your child's personality blooms, there are numerous milestones and rights of passage that occur. We chose to have one of us there to capture those moments, to personally experience the "firsts" in our children's lives as opposed to potentially hearing about those same events from a third party.
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