Stay at Home Moms: Drain on the Economy?

Stay at home moms. Some see them as a picture of sacrifice, letting go of career goals and demands of modern life’s rat race to stay home with the children but for some they are a drain on the economy because they do not make money. Not true, stay at home moms are not drain on the economy and I can prove it.

Moms stay home with the children, they cook, clean, run errands, manage the household. Try hiring outside help for these services, you will spend hundreds every month just on child care and that is no guarantee that the child will be properly cared for. Quality and affordable child care is hard to find, especially in inner cities. Maid service for cleaning the house is not cheap either. Stay at home moms perform hundreds of dollars worth of services every month, this when you just count child care and maintaining the household. Wait till you hear what mothers do for the community.

Most stay at home moms are active in their child’s schools- running fundraisers, chaperoning field trips, and contribute to the PTA. If you hire professionals for these activities, it is quite costly. Moms do this for free, saving the community thousands of dollars every year.

So why is there this notion that moms who stay at home just stay, and don’t do anything “productive”? From what I have seen and experience, this comes from the traditional idea that child raising, keeping a home, contributing in the community are not “productive” and this because not many men do these jobs. If you look around, historically whatever jobs men took were paid and women’s hard work was free. In the modern world this has translated to relegating to women’s hard work at home and in the community as unproductive and men-even if they are bench warmers in the office-as productive.

Stay at home moms contribute to the economy, though their contribution is mostly ignored. We need see beyond the check to value their hard work.

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