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Evening Bees :)
I am working full time now and won't be having kids for another couple of years yet but I am just curious how many of you are or are planning on being stay-at-home mothers or homemakers in the future?
I'm planning on being a S/WAHM eventually.. I don't know if right away I will. I'm becoming a mom somewhat unexpectedly near the end of November, and I'll probably stay out of a job for a good bit after the baby is born because infant childcare is so expensive and can be such a pain in the butt (ugh, pumping...) but maybe during the toddler years I'll go back for a while, especially if we are living with my in-laws.
Eventually, though, the dream is to be a full time stay-at-home, homeschooling, huge home gardening hippie-mom. I'd love to have a hobby farm, but I don't know if that will ever happen. :-)
For sure when that time comes I will stay at home with them. We've decided if for some reason it's not possible for me to stay at home with them, then we won't be having any kids.
We're thinking that my husband might be a stay at home dad, at least for the first few years. We'll see!
I plan to work part-time but be a mostly stay at home mom when I have kids. I think we can swing it.
I would love to stay home with my children. We will have to see if that is possible when it happens.
I'm planning to be at home full-time for a year. Then either I will go back part-time, we will both go part-time, or I will go full-time and he will be a stay at home dad. I think he would cope better being at home all the time, and I have greater earning potential right now. I have friends planning to stay home full-time until the children are in school, but I think I would go crazy. Crazy mum = no good for anyone :) I don't want to put my children in full-time childcare though - we are lucky to have both sets of parents in the same town so hopefully we will have other options available.
Does anyone's other half stay home (i.e. stay at home dad)? We've talked about this as the FI really wants to and I tend to get bored more easily but I am just not sure I would go through with it (I kind of want to have the time with the child(ren)). Just wondering if some one is in that situation now.
I will for sure :) Until at least they're ready to go to school - have thought about homeschooling but I might be ready to get out of the house by the time the third one (think we'll have 3, maybe 4) is 5! I can't wait, I love kids, and he should be earning enough that it wouldn't be too much of a financial strain.
As of right now, I'm a stay-at-home fiance. I'm unemployed but I hope to find full-time work for at least one more year until my car is paid off. Then if it's possible, I'd like to be a stay-at-home mom. If anything, I'll work part-time if needed.
I only work 2 or 3 days a week. I already have two daughters, and I did the stay at home mom thing for a year and a half with my older daughter, and then when my younger daughter was born I was home for probably three years with them. It has it's upsides and downsides. I personally felt like I totally lost myself (although I have to say my situation was much more stressful, having a special needs child, and my then boyfriend was only home for a short time every other month bc of his job). When you are a stay at home mom, people tend to think that you don't need a break, bc, hey, it's not like you have a job or anything. Anyway, I ended up taking a bartending job just to have a good reason to leave the house, and I was able do it while my kids were sleeping.
I kind of knew that I didn't want to be in this relationship anymore, so when a really good job popped up in my chosen field, I jumped at it. So, then I was doing the single mom working two jobs thing, and that was killing me, but I did it for three years, during which time the husband and I got together. I loved my full time job, but it was a whole lotta' chaos all day every day. So, when we eventually moved in together this past February, we decided it would be best for me and the girls if I only worked a few days a week. And while I feel like I am wasting my potential in my current job, it's a nice trade off. I could absolutely never do the full time stay at home mom thing again!!! I really respect a mom who can, but I need something to remove me from the stresses of being home.
My advice to anyone planning to be a SAHM are to make sure you have a good support system and network, people who understand that motherhood can be more stressful than a full time job, especially if you have more than one. Also, I really advise people to have a class or attend a book club, or go do something for yourself at least once a week. Even going for cocktails with your best friends every other weekend. This will keep you connected to the world and pull you out of your bubble. Have a back up plan: Whoo watches the baby if you get the flu or if you both get the flu? What happens if you break your foot? Pass out,etc. Give yourself a reason to dress up and get sexy a few times a month. Trust me, it's easy to be the flip flop wearing sweatpants mom. Have an at home hobby that doesn't include ironing (I went through a phase where I ironed evry peice of laundry in the house) or vacuumming. Last but not least...babies are easy, it's when they get to be toddlers that all hell breaks loose. Toddlers are jerks, but very lovable jerks!!
Sorry, this was longer than I intended. I really only meant to say, been there, done that, and I prefer working part time! 
Like jhphi, Hubbers and I have been talking about him being a SAHD (with him working part-time for sanity purposes 
). I'm the main finanical provider at the moment so it wouldn't make sense for me to quit my job and the Hubby's pay is equal to child support. It's kind of pointless for him to work 40 hours a week just so our kid is in day care. We'll crunch more numbers when the time comes to see what would be best.
Miss Starlet: thanks for the excellent advice and things to consider!
I think I am the odd one out on this. I do not plan to be nor want to be a stay at home mother. Both FI and I earn equal good pay so if he wants to stay at home I won't stop him. For me though I would get so bored and depressed staying at home all the time. I don't even like to take more than a few days off from work to 'relax', it stresses me out. lol I also grew up in a two parent working household and loved it (daycare included). So that might be why I don't think day cares are bad and wouldn't want to be a stay at home mom.
I plan to be a STHM for at least a year once we start having children. I would hate to miss any "firsts" and have heard a lot of mothers who did not take off for whatever reason, about how much they regretted it. That said, I get bored at home really easy, and am not thinking I'll be someone whose whole life is about being a mommy. I like doing my own things and working, and would probably go insane if I had to be home for too long. Hopefully I'll never have to work more than part-time after children, though. I feel so bad for the mothers who work with me who never get to see their kids come home from school.
I come from a household where both my parents worked full time, and my husband came from a household where his mother was a SAHM (and still is). It seems that me and all of my sibilings and I are quite a bit more independent than him and his siblings. I always just figured out how to do things on my own, and his younger sibilings (18 & 22) still seem pretty dependent. Just wondering if anyone else has a similar situation?
I plan on working until we start a family. I want to stay home with them until they start school. We planned on 2 kids at the least, 4 at the most. (I would love having a big family) After the first two children are into school, I want to work part time, that way I can be home when they get home from school. When the first two children are close to the age of 10, we talked about maybe starting with the last two children. Then I would be back to phase one. lol.
Who knows, I might be the stay at home mom that is also the friendly neighborhood "Avon Lady", LOL!
I plan on working part-time after we have kids, but that may or may not happen depending on what the childcare situation is. If my daycare is going to cost more than my salary, then it won't make a lot of sense to do that. We both had stay at home moms, so it's important to both of us that I be there most of the time if possible!
The ultimate goal is for me to work for a few years, either at a museum or some other type of history related job, then when we start to have kids, I'll stay at home with them for most of the day but maybe tutor or something part time until they are in school then try to get a teaching job so that I'll have similar hours to the kids and am able to be home with them. That's just in a perfect world tho, we'll see how it works out.
I think I would like staying home. When my sister and I were little, my mom stayed at home and did things like babysitting, crafting, and decorating cakes for extra money. I LOVED having the mom who always brought the best treats to school and could be the room-mother and plan the parties. She was always able to take care of us when we were sick and drive us and our friends to the sleepover host's house so we didn't have to take the bus and waste an hour of our time. When my brother started school, she went back to school and earned herself another degree. She works full time now, and enjoys staying busy, but she says she liked being able to do all of that while we were little. I have some options with my career, so I could probably work something out so that I could work from home or pick up some evening/weekend hours. It probably wouldn't pay as much as I would get from working full time, but it may be worth it. My husband has also expressed interest in staying home, but we've had many discussions about how visiting the golf course every day isn't the childcare I have in mind...
@mssushi, that's a very good point. Salary-wise, child-care can run up to 20K a year, and if you don't make some serious bucks, it's like you're throwing your entire paycheck away. That's how it was with my mom, anyways. She'd lose money working. With my husband and I, we're both engineers. Quite frankly, it'd be hard for me to get back INTO the field if I took too long of a break. I might take 6 months off for the first one, but we'll see. I dont want to walk away from my job and struggle to get one 5 or 10 years later. This isn't always the case, but for some fields it is. My technological knowledge would be far behind anyone elses.
My mom said she loved being home for us, but after 13 years, she couldn't take it anymore and needed to be around adults more and feel valued by people other than her children.We were also school-aged, obviously, and she got tired of cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the house. I plan on hiring a maid to come in once a week or once every other week so I don't spend all day at work, then spend all evening cleaning. I think it'll be worth the money for my sanity so i can spend my evenings with my husband and children.
Also, I think daycare is good for your kid. It socializes them. My brother and I didn't get to hang around other kids until we were school-aged, and I think it desocialized us on some level. It's good if you can get together for play groups so your children dont' get to be snotty little brats like my brother and i were! Man, we were awful. I didn't know what sharing meant until kindergarten. But, I also didn't have cousins or neighborhood kids our age also.
I totally agree that daycare or some other socializing activity is very important.
I agree a lot with what Miss Starlet said. Make sure you don't lose yourself if you plan to stay home! I found out when I was 18 that I was pregnant with my first child (19 when I had him). At that time, I cut off ALL of my friends. I knew they lived a party lifestyle and that would no longer be anything I wanted to be involved with. So during my entire pregnancy, I had no social life whatsoever. I also had no babysitting support group as my family wanted to make sure I learned to care for him myself (they still won't babysit and he is 6 now!) I lost myself when I had him. I wasn't me, I was his mom, 24/7. I stayed home for 6 months with my first, then went to school (pretty much like working a small part time job) He was a very shy child but when he was 2 I went to work full time and put him in a preschool. The preschool did wonders for his socializing and learning. It also wasn't until he was 2 that I even went out for a night. After that I started to reclaim my own personality, just as a mom now.
Fast forward to a year ago I had my second child with my fiance. When I was around 5 months pregnant I learned my company was closing down. As soon as my maternity leave was up, we all got laid off. I look for jobs, but to be honest.. there is nothing. I live in california.. I am sure you have all heard we are having a hard time with unemployment! Anyways, besides the lack of jobs available, if I DID work daycare would cost more than any job I could get right now. So for now I am a SAHM, I love it though. It is never boring.. if anyone thinks hanging out with a 6 year old and a 1 year old is boring.. HA.. I don't think it is possible. They have such a high energy level that I wish they would be boring sometimes.
I've also heard that having a parent stay at home for the first year is a great thing for the child's mental development. My opinion is also that so much happens in that first year and I don't want some one else "molding" my child.. I understand not every person has the option to stay home. But I think if you can stay home for the first year, DO IT. You won't regret taking a year to spend with your baby. Also, like I said with my first, socialization comes pretty easily once you put them in a daycare/school setting. So delaying the socialization for a year won't hurt. There are also plenty of mom groups to join and to help with the socialization if you are worried.
Also, since I am now a SAHM I do not get breaks. I know there are people who think those who stay at home are lazy. I am anything but lazy. I work harder now then I did when I had my paying job. My fiance works really hard and when he comes home he is too tired to take over the boys full time for me to get a break.. and honestly, I miss him so much that I don't even want to leave the house with out him when he is home. He has an occupation similiar to a trucker (gone for a month, home for a week.. schedules like that). Another reason we think I should stay home.. it would be really hard on the kids to have both parents be gone a lot.
But sometimes I feel a bit lost being mom 24/7 again. My fiance has WONDERFUL parents, they take the boys for me some times.. and not to babysit, just to hang out with them and spend time with them. But it's not really much of a break because I usually end up grocery shopping or cleaning for the hour or so that they have them.. then I end up visiting with them and hanging out with them too since I love my future in laws!
Anyways, the point of this overly long post is that being a stay at home mom is not boring to me, it does suffocate me some times, but I love it.
When we decide it is time to have children one of us will stay at home with them, at least until they are in school. It will probably be me, but that is mainly because he is more likely to be making the bigger bucks.
@tessabella -- me too! I'm a stay at home fiance because I'm unemployed. I actually hate it because I function better when I am working full time. I'm doing part time in retail but right now I am a "home maker" for lack of a better term. My FI has been very good o me since our move, I only wish I could contribute more to the household!
I can't imagine not staying at home with my kids when the time comes. I will likely always be making more than my husband because of the line of work he is in, but we are willing to make the sacrifices for me to be a SAHM
We plan to have quite a few, so I'm not sure that I can foresee myself going back to work for a while, but I would like to work on my MBA when the kids get a little older and then potentially start working again.
@ december: that sounds just like what I'd like to do. I'm still trying to convince my hubs that homeschooling is a good option (maybe not for every child), but I'd like to have the option to raise and educate each of my children in the way that best suits them.
I think a lot depends on your circumstances when you have kids and on their individual personalities. I spent a lot of time with a nanny, and I think I came out fine. Frankly, my mom is not at all "maternal" in any traditional sense of the word. My dad is the more nurturing one, though they are both too traditional for the concept of SAHD to have ever entered their minds. But in the end, it was probably better to have nurturing caretakers than if my mom had stayed at home when she really wanted to be working. And honestly, she's a doctor and at the hospital is where she's happiest. I don't think I'm like my mom, but it was great to have her as somewhat of a career role model...and to grow up being able to see her in her element.
I don't know what we'll do. We've talked about his being a SAHD should the fellowship I have next year (which will keep us LD) extend a little longer and he quits his job to be near me. We're getting older so we probably will want to have kids in a year or two. I know for sure that taking 2-3 years off would pretty much end my career...I'd maybe be able to start over from scratch, but that would be a lot harder with a toddler running around. Having a parent be at home is more important to my FI than it is to me, so he knows that if he feels strongly about it, it will probably be him. I may change my mind though.
What I've learned from my sister and friends is that you can guess but you absolutely can't know how you'll feel. My sister wanted to be a SAHM. Her work circumstances made it difficult (they own their company), but after about 1.5 mos of being at home full time she was bouncing off walls and excited to get back to work. She's pretty much part time, but she said she finds she really needs to get out a couple days. Another friend (attorney) just quit her job after having her second baby. She had never really considered being a SAHM before, and she probably will be looking for something less stressful in a few months, but after 3 years of working and raising her first she decided that she wants more time with her kids.
It seems to me that the people who have the most trouble are those that don't allow themselves to reevaluate their choices. A lot of things can be made to work, but you have to be very happy with the decision you've made b/c raising kids is just plain hard no matter how you do it.
bree72, I was just re-reading your post about being more independent. I think it's true. Though what I've mostly noticed it in is household chores. FI's mom stayed at home when they were younger (back at work now). And he swears up and down that his family is not particularly neat...though their home is always immaculate when I've been there. He says they just do it to impress me, but I really doubt it. His mom's personality just wouldn't stand for a messy space. Though he really appreciates the sacrifices his mother made for him (seriously, he gets all misty eyed when he talks about it), I think part of him doesn't really understand everything that she did. It's a really big difference from the amount of responsibility I had from a very young age.
Ultimately, my plan is to leave my career in Public Accounting and do consulting work from home so that I can be with my kids and still work. Kids aren't in the plans anytime soon though, so my plans might change.
@LatteLove --
I was homeschooled kindergarten through highschool graduation and I LOVED it. I ended up marrying another homeschool graduate, so we're just going to go with what we know. I have seen it not work out for some kids (both of my brothers could have gotten a lot out of more structure, one for learning/behavioral problems, one for sports), but I was a really self-motivated learner who LOVED to have all the time I wanted to read anything I could get my hands on... and socialization is not that big a deal if you're a regularly attending member of a church or other religious community. I grew up with about 20-30 kids spanning the age groups of my brothers and I, and most were also homeschooled. We went on field trips together, we did science stuff together with moms who had been nurses, or literature stuff together with moms who had been English majors, we did mission trips together and organized our own variety shows and productions of Shakespeare plays as fundraisers -- it was a blast. We still try to have parties and cookouts and such whenever we're all home either during the summer or for Christmas.
Sorry, I'm probably thread-jacking a little, but I just wanted to give a shout-out to my mom for the awesome experience she was able to give me as a SAHM and a homeschool teacher.
I think that I would go a little insane if I were to be at home all day with no grown-up contact. Also, I'm going into my last year of medical school and I sure as hell didn't go to school without a break until the age of 26 and rack up six figures worth of debt so that I could stay at home. It's kind of a touchy subject because SO MANY people just assume that in the end, that's what I really should plan to do. That despite the fact that I will have a very extensive education and training, I really shouldn't aspire to be an equal partner in our marriage. Friends have even said to me "you can be co-breadwinners... but you shouldn't have to be a primary breadwinner", or that it's fine for me to have a career, as long as my future husband makes more money than I will.
I grew up in a household where sometimes my mom was the primary breadwinner, and sometimes my dad was. And there were times when my dad was in between jobs that my mom really pulled the family through for a while. I always expected that when I started a family we would both work and we would both do chores. I feel so lucky that I have a man who likes to cook with me, helps me clean, and helps around the house. I don't really care who is the primary breadwinner/who spends more time with the children as long as there is enough money to go around and the babies are taken care of.
That being said, I definitely will need contact with adults with whom I have more in common than that we both have children and can thus talk about them together.
I'm a stay at home fiancee. I became ill and unemployed right around our engagement and we decided that I could take a break and do some wedding plan. The idea is to hopefully go back to work a couple of months after the wedding. We've talked about how we would like to raise our kiddos some day...we decided that by that time (hopefully) we can afford for me to be a stay at home.
I would loooove to be a stay at home mom, but with the money we make and what it looks like we will make in the future, it doesn't seem possible. Plus, my benefits are much better than my husband's, so that would hit us hard if I left work. My husband jokes that he could stay home, but I don't know if he's serious and I think I would be very jealous if he stayed home and I didn't.
I am a SAHM/wahm [on no living in sin! 
] at the moment. the FI and I are a little backward though. After we get married we'll be diving into the baby conversation more seriously, but so far, what we've discussed is that in the event of more spawn he wants to be a STAHD/WAHD [he hates not being home now].
So basically we'll be doing a role reversal in the future, which I am totally fine with.
I am a stay at home wife right now but I really don't like it. I'm so bored and having nothing to do most the time even though I'm going to school.
I would love to be a SAHM but I doubt moneywise we will be able to.. We are having our 1st child in October and I am already looking foward to the time off I will get with the baby... Some close friends of ours own a daycare so we will be getting a very generous break so I can go back to work. Maybe one day...
I want to be a WAHM when the time comes someday, and possibly do a couple hours of day care a day to socialize the kids. but if i am still making what i'm making now and working outside of the home, it doesn't make much financial sense to get day care anyway. Might as well spend time with the kids instead of working to put them through with no extra!
I wish I had the opportunity to be a SAHM at least for a little while but it just isn't feasible right now with me making a lot more than my hubby. It would be incredibly hard to support the two of us, the baby and my FIL on his salary. Struggling wouldn't even be the word. If anything, the hubs would probably be a SAHD but again, this wouldn't work for us right now.
Like ejs - the hubs and I are in a field (IT) where taking long breaks from actively working in the field can hurt our career. IT is a fast paced moving field with new things to learn and having to be up to date on things just to do your daily job. Staying up-to-date with technology wouldn't be entirely too complicated but it will when I am paying attention to my baby. It isn't impossible to get back into the field after a break but it would be pretty damn hard. Being in a male dominated field also works against me. Luckily for me, my company is fairly family oriented. I will get to work from home the first two months after the baby is born so I will get to be with her for a while.
Who knows, maybe in the future...
I really hope I can be a SAHM when the time comes, but that time will have to be a bit off in the future. I have a crapload of debt that I need to pay off, get the hubs through school, and get a nice nest egg in the bank. So, if I were to get preggers anytime soon, I'd definitely have to work...because of necessity not what I would want though.
I would love to have it all! The ideal situation would a flexible job where I could work in the office sometimes and work at home sometimes. On the 2-3 days a week I go to work, we would have a babysitter come to the house when our children are really small, and send them to preschool when they are older. If it was a super perfect world, we'd live close enough to my mom where she could watch them! Those kinds of jobs are definitely not dime a dozen, but working in media/communications, its pretty easy to work from home compared to a lot of other jobs, and with technological advances it will just get easier and easier. I would still want to go to work some of the time to get out of my sweatpants and have some adult interaction, though!
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