Classically Abby - April 23, 2024


The REALITY Of Being A STAY-AT-HOME Mom in 2024.


Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

206.84677

Word count

3,009

Sentence count

121

Harmful content

Misogyny

30

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Abby talks about why it s so hard to be a stay-at-home mom in the modern day, and the practical problems that come with being a mom in today's society. She also talks about the benefits of homeschooling vs. going to work.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Let's talk about stay-at-home mom life and why it's gotten so hard.
00:00:07.620 If you are new to my channel, my name is Abby and here we talk about common sense commentary,
00:00:12.800 where I break down things that I think are obvious and clear but have somehow become
00:00:17.160 controversial in today's day and age. So for today, I want to talk about being a stay-at-home
00:00:22.880 mom and how it has become so difficult, why it's so hard nowadays to embrace this role. 0.53
00:00:30.320 For a whole host of reasons, I could break this down in a ton of different videos and I probably
00:00:35.040 will, but I kind of want to start off here, which is how did we get here? How did it become so kind
00:00:42.200 of off the beaten track to be a stay-at-home mom for a lot of women and how it feels so hard? Now
00:00:47.680 when I say it's hard to be a stay-at-home mom, I don't actually mean that the day-to-day of being
00:00:52.400 a stay-at-home mom is hard, although I think that it can be depending on your situation,
00:00:57.140 but I'm talking about the practical problems with being a stay-at-home mom in the modern day.
00:01:04.420 So I'm really excited to hop into today's video. As a stay-at-home mom myself and as someone who
00:01:08.820 never thought I would be a stay-at-home mom, I think it's really important to break this down
00:01:12.940 and to have a really good conversation about it because I know that there are times that I have
00:01:17.660 felt isolated. I'm sure if you are a stay-at-home mom, unless you are in a community of other stay-at-home
00:01:22.320 moms, you probably feel isolated too. So let's just hop right into today's video.
00:01:27.740 The concept of the nuclear family is one that I think has become really confusing for a lot of
00:01:32.080 people. Many people think that the nuclear family is a positive term because it means a family with
00:01:37.300 a mother and a father and children, but what it actually means is a family divested from the rest
00:01:43.740 of the extended family. And so the concept of the nuclear family, which kind of came around in the
00:01:47.080 1950s, was the idea of like a husband and a wife moving away from their families, raising their
00:01:52.280 kids on their own without any extra support. Well, as a stay-at-home mom, this is a really big problem,
00:01:59.260 right? Because you don't have extended familial support. You don't have grandmothers and aunts coming
00:02:04.200 over and helping. And if your kids go to school, then what is your job? You can take care of the
00:02:09.100 household and see your children in the morning and the evening, but for the most part, you don't really
00:02:17.080 mother feel productive. And I think that's one of the issues with the stay-at-home mom culture we 0.98
00:02:22.640 have today, which is women were put in a position when the nuclear family arose of being told to take 1.00
00:02:30.640 care of the family on their own. The husband would go to work. There was no other women around. 1.00
00:02:34.860 They would have to find a community of other women who are also stay-at-home moms. But over time, 1.00
00:02:41.920 as Betty Friedan released The Feminine Mystique, you had women going out of the homes. And so you 1.00
00:02:47.760 had not only women divested from their families and their support systems, now you had the women 1.00
00:02:54.080 that they may have hung out with in an afternoon with their kids on the block, everybody hanging
00:03:00.160 out together. Half of those women, 75% of those women, are now going off to work as well. So the
00:03:05.280 stay-at-home mom is even more secluded, even more isolated, because she doesn't have other stay-at-home 0.99
00:03:11.060 moms to spend her time with. Without help, without support, and completely lonely, being a stay-at-home 0.81
00:03:17.480 mom becomes a really unattractive proposition. The idea of, okay, you're doing this on your own. You're
00:03:23.520 not going to have any help. You're not going to have any friends. And on top of that, once your kids
00:03:27.100 start school, you're going to have nothing to do all day, because your role as a mom is really just
00:03:33.860 limited to the morning and the evening. And the rest of the day, okay, you're taking care of chores. Now,
00:03:37.360 don't get me wrong, that can take a while, especially with a big family, but you're not in
00:03:41.920 it with your kids all day, and you're doing it alone, and you're home by yourself. I think that
00:03:46.500 makes being a stay-at-home mom sound really difficult and doesn't give you the same sense of
00:03:51.320 importance that it would if you had a lot of other women doing the same thing, and if you had your 1.00
00:03:56.780 kids at home with you, homeschooling. Now, am I saying that everyone needs to homeschool their kids?
00:04:01.080 No. I would say almost everyone I know doesn't homeschool, but I think there is an element of
00:04:06.060 homeschooling and having your children at home with you that gives a stay-at-home mom a sense of
00:04:09.660 purpose. The truth is we weren't meant to mother in a vacuum, and I think that's what has made
00:04:15.700 being a stay-at-home mom so hard in our modern culture, is that women are completely divested 1.00
00:04:22.580 of all of the socialization that makes being a mother fun. We don't have our own mothers at home 1.00
00:04:28.140 because maybe they're still working. We don't have our sisters coming over because they're working. 1.00
00:04:32.600 We don't have our neighbors coming over because they're working. Mostly the women around you who 1.00
00:04:38.200 would also be in it with you, like in the trenches of motherhood with you, are working now. So you
00:04:44.700 have a lot of stay-at-home moms feeling really lonely. I know that I've felt that for sure. And I
00:04:49.520 want to note before I proceed that the term stay-at-home mom is also misleading because the truth is that
00:04:56.080 you don't have to stay in your house. Like I know for me, I go out and about all the time with my
00:05:01.200 kids. I spend not very much time home at all, and that helps because then I run into other moms when
00:05:07.360 we go to the park or mommy and me classes. But even with that, I would say that when I go to the park,
00:05:11.440 I would say about 75% of the kids there are with nannies. So I'm happy to hang out with their nannies.
00:05:17.080 They're wonderful women, and we have a good chat, but I'm not seeing other stay-at-home moms. 0.86
00:05:21.600 One of the things about being a stay-at-home mom that I think is tricky, and I think it would be
00:05:26.140 tricky, is if you didn't start off being a stay-at-home mom. I've been thinking a lot about
00:05:30.940 lately kind of how so many things have to start from the beginning to make sense and to make life
00:05:39.420 easier. If you've ever seen someone try to discipline their 12-year-old child and they didn't
00:05:43.940 really implement discipline when they were younger or they didn't have kind of rules in place for that
00:05:49.560 child, then it's going to be a lot harder to discipline them when they're 12 than if you have
00:05:53.600 always had systems in place. And when they are now 12 and doing something disrespectful,
00:05:58.020 you can kind of refer to how they've been raised to get them to do the right thing. I think the same
00:06:03.740 idea principle applies when it comes to being a stay-at-home mom. I was thinking about this,
00:06:08.920 that if you start being a stay-at-home mom, start off being a stay-at-home mom, like I did,
00:06:14.420 then for me, I've never felt like being a stay-at-home mom is boring. I mean, yes, there are
00:06:21.100 times, right? Small here and there times. But I feel like there are so many women that I talk to
00:06:25.640 who did not stay at home, who worked, who when I say I'm home with my kids or that I'm interested
00:06:30.380 in homeschooling are like, oh, I could never spend all day with my kids. And I get it because if I
00:06:37.580 didn't do this from the beginning and didn't know what the day-to-day looks like and didn't know kind of
00:06:42.340 how things go, I might be bored and I might be like, what do I do with my kid? What do I,
00:06:47.560 what am I supposed to do with them all day? But if you've never known anything else, then this is
00:06:51.820 just what you do. And I think that's one aspect of modern female culture that puts women at a 1.00
00:07:00.620 disadvantage because if they want to stay at home with their kids, they have this fear of like,
00:07:05.260 I don't know what I would do with them. And there is so much to do with your kids, but if you've never
00:07:11.100 done it, then it's a lot more difficult. It's a lot more intimidating. One of the really complicated
00:07:17.240 elements of this whole conversation is that the more women work, the more women will work because 1.00
00:07:23.860 there's no community. If every mom was home with their kids, you would have a more communal living
00:07:29.860 situation where people would spend time at each other's houses, people would cook together, people
00:07:35.300 would clean together. I mean, that's what we envision when we think of like the village, right? The village of
00:07:40.180 mothers who are all coming to help you. But as women start to go out of the home and start to work 1.00
00:07:44.880 outside of the home full time, then what ends up happening is women who would have considered being 1.00
00:07:49.680 stay at home moms are now pressured into going back to work just because they want that social 1.00
00:07:55.620 aspect of their lives. I know that I felt that. I felt like, hey, maybe I should be going to work
00:08:01.220 because my friends go to work. And then maybe if I was at work, I would have more friends and I would
00:08:05.660 see people more often. And that would be good for me because I don't have a lot of stay-at-home
00:08:10.360 mom friends in my neighborhood. So I don't have somebody who can just pop over every afternoon
00:08:15.400 and chat while our kids play. We have some of that, but not a ton of it. And so I think there's a push
00:08:22.080 to go out of the home because other women are out of the home, as opposed to if more women were 1.00
00:08:27.360 staying at home, then you wouldn't need to go to work to be social. As well, as more mothers work, 1.00
00:08:34.160 the less present they can be as grandmothers, which their daughters need. So if you are working 0.83
00:08:39.500 into your mid-60s, into your 70s, you're not going to be a very present grandmother and your daughter
00:08:45.320 may need you. And that's an interesting thing too, because now we're, again, as women work,
00:08:50.400 we're removing the support systems that we get from each other. And I think that's a really sad reality
00:08:55.200 is that we're losing support from the women who should be our support systems as moms because we're all 1.00
00:09:01.980 really pressured to work. Unless you have to, right? Unless you need to get food on the table.
00:09:07.320 Now there is a different discussion to be had here of what does it mean need to work? I think that we
00:09:12.760 are accustomed to a certain level of living. And so a lot of women will say that they need to work 1.00
00:09:18.560 to maintain that level of living when scaling back is an option. But if you legitimately need to work
00:09:25.220 to get food on the table, then that is of course the priority. The last thing I think that makes being a
00:09:29.820 stay-at-home mom so hard in today's day and age is just that it has so little honor. I know it's,
00:09:36.940 you know, a big trend on reels, on TikTok, is this idea that women are complaining about being at home
00:09:43.740 like, oh my kids did this and did that and like I'm waiting for my husband to get home because my
00:09:48.220 kids are so hard and my days are so hard. And I remember when I was watching that content, I was
00:09:53.160 sort of starting to fall into that thought process and it was making me really like sad and down.
00:09:59.020 And I had to kind of sit down with myself and be like, hey, why are you doing this? Because there
00:10:06.700 are days, many days, where being a stay-at-home mom is so fun. Like it's not always easy, but there are
00:10:14.260 times that it is easy and there are times that it is fun. So why do I feel like I have to complain
00:10:19.720 about it all the time? And I realized that there was a part of me that felt like I needed to complain
00:10:23.980 to prove that it was a real job. That if I wanted people to take seriously, that being a stay-at-home
00:10:29.580 mom is not just mooching off your husband, I needed to complain to show that it was that difficult. 0.99
00:10:37.300 And that's a real mistake. And I think that's a productivity issue that we have, you know, in our
00:10:42.640 culture, honestly, is that like to show that you work hard, you have to complain a lot as opposed to
00:10:47.220 saying, well, I love my job and I don't have to work that hard and that I can still be absolutely
00:10:52.900 successful without it being so hard I have to complain about it. The same thing is true of
00:10:58.160 motherhood, that I don't have to complain to prove that being a mom is a worthwhile effort and use of 0.80
00:11:05.480 my time. I can just say that being a mother is fun and easy and lovely sometimes. And other days,
00:11:12.280 it's really difficult and it's a lot and I'm tired. And those two things can coexist and I don't have to
00:11:17.440 generally be complaining and looking at it through a negative perspective, a negative lens.
00:11:22.060 So with all of that in mind about stay at home mom culture in today's day and age,
00:11:27.320 how can we fix it? Number one, and I know that some of these are going to be unpopular. Okay,
00:11:31.720 so let's get that out there. But number one is encourage moms to stay home. Now, I'm not saying
00:11:37.080 that every mom can, but I think that if you can, we should be encouraging women to stay home with 1.00
00:11:42.020 their kids because then their kids have access to mom, especially in those first three years,
00:11:46.100 which need to be prioritized. And they have access to each other and the support that that
00:11:51.300 can create. And especially as we build communities and live in communities, living closer to family,
00:11:56.540 living closer to other stay at home moms, all of that makes being a stay at home mom a lot more
00:12:01.360 feasible and a lot more doable. Look, I know that the first three months after I had my second son,
00:12:07.360 I would not have been able to do what I did if my mom and my mother-in-law had not been there for me.
00:12:13.680 I had my 20 month old at home with me and I had my newborn. And those first three months,
00:12:18.780 you cannot do alone. I don't know what women do if they have both children at home. I know most women 0.98
00:12:23.660 put their older child in daycare, so they don't even have to deal with that question.
00:12:27.400 By moving closer to family, by being in a community that had a meal train for me for a few weeks,
00:12:32.240 that all made such a big difference to me being able to continue being a stay at home mom with both
00:12:37.260 children at home. Finding a real support system as a stay at home mom is just non-negotiable. And I 0.61
00:12:42.560 think that's what would make the stay at home mom movement grow more is if we felt like we had the
00:12:49.540 village we need. And that's why when people say, you know, there was that joke for a while, like,
00:12:54.080 where's my village after you have a baby? Where is my village? They always say it takes a village to
00:12:58.060 raise a child. Where's my village? You have to put those things in place. And maybe that's not only
00:13:02.960 true of individuals of like moving near family or moving near friends. Maybe it's true as a society.
00:13:08.280 Maybe as a society, we need to create villages by encouraging women to support other women by being 1.00
00:13:15.200 there, by being available. And if those women are at work nine to five, they're not available. If your mom 1.00
00:13:21.140 is at work nine to five, she isn't available. And from the most practical perspective, as a stay at home
00:13:26.460 mom currently living in the day and age that we are, creating schedules, setting up playdates, going out and
00:13:33.060 about and not being a stay at home mom sequestered by yourself without friends, but being a really
00:13:40.120 sociable, fun, present mom out and about, that's what's going to make being a stay at home mom a lot
00:13:47.140 more fun. So that is how we got here. These are my thoughts about how we can maybe address this stuff
00:13:53.040 nowadays. And I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Make sure to say what you're
00:13:58.220 thinking. I know that being a stay at home mom in today's day and age isn't always easy because of
00:14:03.440 the nuclear family and because we are removed from those support systems. But do you think that
00:14:07.820 there's any way that we can, we can fix that? I would also love if you watched till the very end
00:14:13.640 of today's video for you to leave a, just a face emoji, like your most used face emoji, whether that
00:14:20.360 be the like smiling face, the one with hearts. I want to see which one do you use the most? Because I
00:14:26.020 think mine is the one with the little hearts around the face. Thank you so much for watching.
00:14:30.160 I will see you guys in my next video. Bye.