Reply to SAHM’s - anyone successfully convince DH to support their staying home long term?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My DH is very capable in household work - childcare, laundry to cooking - and will pitch in without asking.  But, he begged me to quit because our kids, home, marriage and life was suffering.  Mainly, it was hard with the kids because they were falling sick in the daycare and reliable childcare was frequently failing.  Anyways, when he begged me to quit I put forth certain conditions -
- I was never going back to work until I wanted to go back to work. I did not want him to expect that I could go back to work on his whim. First of all, the field I was in was not conducive to career breaks and secondly I was making a sacrifice that he had to respect.  
- I was not letting go of my cleaning woman, in fact, I wanted her to come twice a week instead of weekly.  I did not want to spend my time doing chores that I was already outsourcing before. I appreciated that my time was valuable (it was costing me my lost income) and so it had to be used wisely. 
- DH was completely responsible for kids college and our retirement.  I did not want us to be financially insolvent because that would be short-sighted. 
- He was still going to help at home. I did not want inequality in the family and I still needed help. Being at home was very exhausting even with help.

DH agreed with caveats. 
- He was not going to help with kids K-12 education planning.  He was willing to drive them to places on the weekend.  This was a big mental load off of him. He wanted the kids to do well in school and be happy, healthy and secure.  
- He was not going to pay for big fat weddings for the kids. We were only paying for their entire college. 
- We were going to live in a cheaper neighborhood, drive cheaper cars... We would not be able to swing for an expensive house, expensive cars etc on one salary and then also maintain a good standard of living, college/retirement saving etc.   
- He gives  me a set amount of money  to run the house. Out of that I pay for every single thing. He only pays the contribution to retirement fund, contribution to medical insurance and investments.  In the past 15 years the amount has not changed.

This has worked very well for us. Neither of us feel shortchanged and we feel that we are a good team.  What worked for us, may not work for others.

I will however say that I will always advice women to prioritize the finances of the family first.  The next priority is health and health coverage. The third priority is the need of the family. If you quit work and stay at home -  there are immense benefits, but you have to first make the finances work and also have health coverage.  Also, make sure that you have excellent insurance. [/quote]

This is all such excellent advice. My DH and I negotiate this stuff in a similar way, though in our case I'm the one who never wants to pay for stuff like cleaners because I prefer to do it myself and save the money for something else. But the approach is the same -- we have the same goals, we both have limited resources (time!), and we want to maximize everything we can for our kids. I work part time because I really value have secondary income in the family as a "just in case" and I view it as important protection for me if something were ever to happen to him -[b]- we have great life insurance but if he died I would definitely need/want to work and I would not want to have to start from scratch after years out of the workforce. Stuff like that keeps me up at night, [/b]so I have continued to work part time in my field and maintain contacts and skill sets so that I could return to full time work if needed.

But your underlying points about communication and prioritizing are really important and that's how families should make these decisions. There is no right way. For some, two working parents might make the most sense. But you have to make the decisions collectively based on family needs, not just based on individual whims. You have to talk everything through and discuss how it impacts the family. And that includes his job, too. Often we don't discuss how the DH's job can have a negative impact on family life, but if DH is traveling a lot, never home for dinner, or has a job with limited flexibility, all of those things impact DW and the children and in a situation where DH wants his wife to work, one thing that should be on the table is him changing jobs or scaling back in order to enable her to work. A DH who demands his wife return to work while maintaining a job that will never allow him to stay home with a sick kid or get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour needs to be brought down to earth about what it means to be a parent. Someone must do those things.[/quote]

Absolutely.  Your model (part time work for me) would have been my favored plan but my biggest two issues were  1) my DH job is pretty inflexible/work day pretty long and 2) my own field did not encourage part time work.  Some of the things you have mentioned are of real concern to moms  (layoffs, illness, death, divorce).    As a woman and a mom, my kids and I are financially vulnerable until we actively work to make sure that concerns you raised were addressed by taking concrete steps.

I would never question a mom's need to be at home with her children but the finances and their own life reality needs to be first accounted for. There cannot be one solution fits all for anyone. [/quote]

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