Stay-at-home parents. Dual incomes. Small town. Big city. Everybody’s situation is different, of course, so it’s difficult to speak in absolute generalities. What we can say is that, broadly speaking, the cost of living is going up and middle class wages have been mostly stagnant. For a lot of families, particularly those who live in expensive urban centers, dual incomes can feel like a necessity.
It can be hard enough to make ends meet as it is. Throw a kid (or three) into the mix and you’ve really got to ask yourself some tough questions. For some families, this means taking a serious look at the financial circumstances of stay-at-home parents compared to having two working parents. When does it make sense for one parent to stay home full-time? When should both parents go work outside the home? Well… it’s complicated.
Crunching the Numbers
According to a report published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), infant care in Vancouver is around $1,400 a month. Preschooler spaces are in the $1,000 range. I know parents who pay $1,800 or more for (close to) full-time care for a single child. For a lot of people, especially if you have more than one child, you could find yourself working only to pay for daycare. If that’s the case, you may as well stay home, right?
And then you’ve got to figure out how to make things work on a single income, assuming you’re in a more typical kind of two-parent situation.
I just started listening to the new Parenting 101 podcast with Dale Allen Berg and Jessi Mandoli over the weekend. Dale is a stay-at-home dad (remember him from #5DadsGoWild?) and Jessi is a full-time working mom. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts or directly on the Parenting 101 website if you prefer. In the first episode, they discuss their respective situations, tackling the challenges of rising childcare costs and making ends meet.
More specifically, Dale said that when he crunched the numbers with his wife, they found that it would cost about $50,000 a year for full-time care for three kids under 20 months. Remember that these are after-tax dollars; so just to break even, you’d need to earn about $65,000 a year. Yikes. His wife wanted to go back to work, so Dale became a full-time, stay-at-home dad. It just made sense from a financial perspective.
In chatting with the other preschool parents, I found several of them faced similar circumstances. To make things work in Metro Vancouver, they had to make some conscious decisions. For the stay-at-home parents, this sometimes meant choosing to live in a smaller condo rather than a larger house. Or it meant that the working parents had to work even more, or they leaned heavily on grandparents and family to help out. Or the parents staggered their work schedules.
As a work-at-home dad with a flexible schedule, on some level, I identify with both the working parents and stay-at-home parents. I’m there at pickup and drop-off most days, for instance, but I’ve also got work to do. It’s a constant juggling act, but it also means that we’ve never paid for daycare or a nanny. My mom helps a lot too.
Salary of Stay-at-Home Parents?
But how much are stay-at-home parents “worth” in monetary terms? (Of course, the value of stay-at-home parents extends far beyond dollars and cents. Even so, this should offer some quantitative perspective.) Funky Pigeon has a parent salary calculator; it only works for US cities, but at least you can ballpark it by finding a roughly equivalent US location. I asked for some Canadian data and I was told:
In Montreal, a stay-at-home parent could make a yearly salary of $368,793.60, whereas in Vancouver this salary is $340,320.00.
The estimated annual salary figures in other major Canadian cities — from Toronto to Calgary, Saskatoon to Princeton — are similar, well over $300,000. All sorts of assumptions go into these hypothetical calculations. Most assuredly, all stay-at-home parents will tell you that their “work week” is much longer than 40 hours too, which definitely factors into the yearly salary projections.
(UPDATE: Here is the parent salary calculator for Canada.)
The parent salary calculator looks at eight “jobs” in particular, breaking down the typical wage and salary data accordingly. The example hourly rates below are for Seattle, Washington (in US dollars), which I figure is roughly comparable to that of Metro Vancouver.
Some of these are a bit of a stretch — it takes a lot of education and training to earn a career as a nurse ($31.37/hour) or psychologist ($44.46/hour) — but you mustn’t overlook the day-to-day of cooking ($18.97/hour) and cleaning ($17.16/hour) and errand-running ($18.80/hour). These all have tremendous value, value for which you’d otherwise have to pay someone else to handle.
Figuring It Out
So, what makes the most financial sense? I know this isn’t the fully satisfying answer you were hoping to find, but the truth is that it depends. And any one solution is not inherently any better than any other. You’ve just got to figure out what works for your family.
I do have to mention two more quick takeaways. First, I know a lot of mothers can feel incredible “mom guilt” if they choose to go back to work full-time. Don’t. You’re doing what’s best for you and your family. It’s not fair that many fathers don’t experience the same of “dad guilt” if they go back to work. Societal pressure and traditional gender norms are powerful forces.
Second, if anything, this post serves as a reminder that stay-at-home parents provide tremendous value. Their contributions are oftentimes overlooked or undervalued. The working parent who brings home the paycheck shouldn’t hold that over the parent who stays home. It’s not “his” money or “her” money; it belongs to both of you, because one would not work without the other.
How do you make things work in your family?
I’ve always been a stay-at-home mom, making a small amount of money from some little things on the side (photography, blogging). We’ve always done a lot to save money (we shave down our expenses and make a lot of sacrifices) but it has definitely been worthwhile for us, all things considered!
Since day 1 I have been a SAHM as this too made financial sense. I feel like we’re lucky in a sense that we CAN do this as I know some, many that have no choice but to go to work to make ends meet while paying for daycare.