The following post is by MPFJ staff writer, Melissa Batai. Melissa is a freelance writer who covers topics ranging from personal finance to business to organics to food. She blogs at Mom’s Plans where she shares her family’s journey to healthier living and paying down debt.
Before you have a child, you may think that you’ll continue your career through retirement with no stops. For some, that is the exact path that they take. For others, once the baby is born, decisions become much more complicated.
Often, parents find themselves asking, should I stay home with the baby, or should I return to work?
Unfortunately, the decision in almost every case is variable. There are so many individual circumstances to consider.
When Staying Home Makes Sense
Low salary
If you make a fairly low wage, you may find that once you pay for childcare, work clothes, and transportation, you’ll be bringing home very little. (Even worse, some people find that they would actually be paying to work!)
Dislike for the job
Do you like your job? Does it energize you? Do you look forward to the upcoming work week? If the answer is no, you may find it makes more sense to quit your job. After all, why spend money putting your child in daycare if you’re just going to be miserable at your job?
Desire to stay home with your child
Children are only young once, and as the saying goes, “The days are long, but the years are short.” If you have a strong desire to stay home with your child (or your spouse does) and you can financially afford it, staying home can be very rewarding. There is nothing like being home to watch your child say his first words, take his first step, etc.
Ability to make money at home
More and more people are finding that with some hard work and ingenuity, they can make a good living right from home. Is there a skill you have that would be a way to make money from home? Could you be a freelance writer? A virtual assistant? Could you create crafts and sell them on Etsy? Could you tutor or sell lesson plans online? There are so many ways to make money from home that often the only limitation is your imagination.
When Staying Home Doesn’t Make Sense
Fast-track career growth
Are you on the fast-track for career growth? Would staying home for a few years set you back several years on your career track? If so, you may want to consider staying in your career even if paying for daycare causes a financial hardship for a few years.
Love of your job
Do you enjoy your job and find personal satisfaction from it? Does it energize you? In that case, you may be better off continuing to work. Without your job and the enjoyment you gain from it, you may not be happy as a stay-at-home mom.
Need for social interaction
Of course, stay-at-home parents can get social interaction from play dates and other activities with other parents and their children, but for some, that isn’t enough. I met a woman who experimented this year with being a stay-at-home mom, and she was miserable. She needed time during the day for herself. She also needed adult interaction without her children, which she found at work. Without time to herself and with other adults, she found herself snapping at her children and feeling less and less like a good mother than she did when she worked.
Matching retirement savings
Does your employer match your retirement savings? If so, how much is the match? Are you able to save at that level on your own? When I was employed full-time, my employer automatically took 8% out of my gross pay to invest in retirement, and then the employer matched my savings, so I was able to save 16% of my gross salary per year in retirement. After I quit my job, this retirement savings and match was one of the perks of my job that I missed most, especially because I have not yet been able to save at that rate on my own.
How to Have the Best of Both Worlds
The good news is, you don’t have to exclusively choose to return to work or stay-at-home. Sure, you can do the financial calculations to determine which decision makes the most sense, but you also can’t rule out the emotional side of the decision. If you find that financially you need to work, but emotionally you need to stay home with your child, there are ways this can be done.
Work opposite shifts
If you’d like to stay home, you and your spouse can work opposite shifts. One person may work the night shift and the other works the day shift, or one may work during the weekdays and the other works nights and weekends. While this situation isn’t ideal for your marriage, many couples make it work until their child is in school. The benefit is that you still have two incomes, but you don’t have to pay for childcare.
Work part-time
If you don’t want to leave the workforce entirely, a nice option is to work part-time. You’re still brining in money, yet you get to spend quite a bit of time with your child. Even better news is that a recent study, conducted at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro that examined women who worked full-time, part-time and stayed at home, found “the part-timers were less depressed, had better health, were more sensitive to their children and were better able to provide them with learning opportunities. That may be a function of employment, which improves people’s social skills and increases awareness of what’s going on in the community. ‘Maybe that translates to the experience they bring to their children,’” says lead author Cheryl Buehler, a professor of human development and family studies (TIME).
Work from home
Thanks to the Internet, the possibilities for work-at-home moms are endless. There are plenty of bloggers who’ve make a full-time living or even make enough that their husbands can quit their jobs. But blogging isn’t the only career available. There are job opportunities for tutors, teachers, writers, virtual assistants, graphic designers, accountants. The list goes on and on. If you have a skill (and we all do), there is a way to funnel that into a work-at-home job.
My Experience
My husband and I decided after our third child that I should quit my job. At the time, we had two children under two, so quality daycare in our area was going to cost $1,600 a month. In addition, we had to pay after school care for our oldest child. We decided that I should work from home to recoup the difference I would have made in what I would have brought home if I had stayed at work and paid nearly $2,000 in care costs for daycare and after school care.
We haven’t looked back from this decision. While I still work from home part-time, when our children get older and more independent, probably in the next five years, I plan to ramp up the amount of work that I do.
Deciding whether to keep your job or leave it to care for your child is never an easy decision. However, there has never been a better time to make that decision thanks to the many alternative ways there are to juggle work and family life.
How about you all? What affected your decision to stay home or to return to work after having a child?
Share your experiences by commenting below!
***Photo courtesy https://www.flickr.com/photos/26923422@N07/4068093834
