[monoideism]

This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor, just among middle class and up women (and men), typically left-leaning.

Most poor mothers I've know would love to be stay-at-home moms because they're only working to survive and not for personal fulfillment, and because they love their kids.

[klyrs]

Stay-at-home parenting being unpaid work is not an "attitude," it's a fact of life. The leverage that abusive wage-earners have over their "non-employed" coparent is pretty strongly tied to their respective affluence. This isn't a "left leaning" problem. It's a problem of poverty, lack of education, and a lack of society's willingness to pay parents to stay home and work there.

I'm pretty sure that infrastructure to pay parents to stay home counts as "socialism" which is vilified by the right.

[tehjoker]

Different family configurations appeared in many societies throughout history. The nuclear family is encouraged by capitalist states because one parent (the mother) staying home allows maximum flexibility for the male to be at work making money for the bosses. Importantly, the work the stay-at-home parent does is free, meaning the ruling class can pay them as little as possible. Nuclear families take up more real estate too, earning more money for banks and landlords.

The liberal feminist movement in the 1970s changed this equation somewhat. Now two parents work constantly, can barely afford their lifestyle and no one cares for the kids (or the latent gender role of the mother requires her to effectively work two jobs at full capacity)! The ruling class again wins at (again) the expense of the future as the family configuration has become biologically insufficient to reproduce. The additional workers contributed by women also makes the labor market more flexible for employers, another win.

Basically, we should ALL be doing less work and getting more services. Some poorer people are again looking at alternative family configurations because the nuclear model isn't sufficient to sustain life under these conditions.

[geoduck14]

My wife worked for several years. She stopped working when we had our 4th and child care was too expensive.

Now that she is a stay-at-home mom, our quality of life has improved a lot. She has more energy in the evening to read with our kids, she follows up with friends and we are both more social, she makes better food than either of us could do before.

Having a stay-at-home parent is DEFINITELY a luxury and a good decision IF you can afford it.

[mschuster91]

The thing is, for those parents who can afford one parent to stay home, in 99% of cases it's the mothers who end up as stay-at-home parents, and their careers (and with it, their post-childraising perspectives) go down the drain.

The current world abuses schools as whole day care institutions so that both parents can be exploited and worked to the ground, and when parents and children are home they are so tired they lack the energy to do anything meaningful besides eating some kind of processed food, play a round of video games, and go to bed.

In an ideal world, a full working week with a living wage would have 20 hours so that both parents can work four hours a day and then enjoy life with their children in the afternoon.

[sharikone]

You claim correlation but that's not causation.

My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder.

Also, the stigma against stay at home moms is nothing, nothing, compared to stay at home dads.

[monoideism]

> My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder.

That was pretty much my point.

[zozbot234]

Many middle class women and up also do housekeeping and care work. People are just different, and not everyone finds fulfillment in working outside the home. In fact with the pandemic making it so much easier to work while staying at home, some of these women might choose to find such work.

[mschuster91]

> This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor

Any women's shelter will disagree with you here. The rate of women that go back to abusive partnerships is immensely high among those who don't have any other option to survive.

[monoideism]

I didn't downvote, but what does this have to do with what I wrote?