Yesterday, I asked my single guy friend Paul if he’d want to be a stay-at-home dad.
“Sure,” he replied.
“Are you serious?” I prodded.
“Absolutely,” Paul nodded.
“I’d do yoga. I’d get my nails done. I’d hang with my friends. Go for coffee. Cook dinner.”
My eyebrows went up.
“Cooking at home is a good way to save money,” he added, seriously. “And, at 4:30pm, I’d go and pick up the kids from school.”
“You’d be okay spending 4 hours every evening juggling crying children?” I asked him.
“Ah, but when they’re your own children, it’s alright,” Paul said.
Funnily enough, the routine he described is an exact description of the lives of my stay-at-home mom friends.
“It just doesn’t make sense for 2 in the couple to work like crazy, AND have children,” Paul said. “It’s not a workable model.
The harsh truth? He’s 150,000% right.
Last year, Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her research on women in the workplace. She showed that you can either be a high performer in your career or a good parent, but you can’t be both.*
Goldin shows that the majority of women, (even the most educated) choose to drop out of the workforce. They quit because they know they can’t be a good mother and also be good at their job.
The small percentage who continue includes me and you.
“What would you require in order to be a stay-home dad?” I asked my pal.
“She’d have to be a millionaire,” Paul quipped. “Then I’ll happily stay home.”
The definition of a ‘millionaire’, according to Oxford English Dictionary, is:
n. “a person whose assets are worth one million pounds or dollars or more.”
If we break it down, it’s not so complicted:
👉 Job paying $200k+ annual (gross)
👉 Home worth $800k (= 60-80 sqm., 2-3 bedroom apartment here in Paris)
👉 Savings, stocks, stock options, sometimes a car, other assets
To get to this level, without inherited wealth, you can work 60-80 hours (or more) every week for years, while staying single. Or you marry someone who runs the household, feeds and clothes the kids, and supports your social life, while you’re at work.
This someone – a man happy to be a stay-at-home dad – could be a guy like Paul. He’s happy drinking oat milk capuccinos, attending yoga classes, tidying his home.
If you want to continue being a high-performer at work, and have a happy marriage, you’ll need a man happy in the Nurturer role. This role is usually called a “stay-at-home dad”.
If you already have kids, you can find a partner who will help care for them – as men have done for centuries. If you don’t intend to have children, but want to keep working, you can look for a partner who’s fulfilled by a part-time job.
Either you’re the breadwinner, or you marry a breadwinner. The latter means you quit the work force to raise your kids. There’s rarely enough time for a part-time job, especially when the kids are very young.
But you’ll burn out trying to do both.
Comment below and let me know, which one would you pick?
Top Photo by Ketut Subiyanto. Claudia Goldin summary via Penelope Trunk. Middle Photo by Ksenia Chernaya. Bottom Photo by Karolina Grabowska.
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