Parents can only instruct their children “by the way” (Deut 6) if parents and children are in the same place at the same time, a lot of the time. This proximity is what our society is so eager to dissolve and what we easily surrender. Yet it is not just time at home that matters. “Children obey your parents in the Lord” is not a lone imperative. Paul gives that instruction in tandem with instructions to husbands and wives.

O, the Shame

Staying out of paid work to raise children is one of the great immoralities of our time. I’ve been one of those questionable, anachronistic women for almost twenty years. It would have been fewer years if I had fewer children. If I had lived my adulthood differently, I could be deep in postgraduate degrees, leadership positions and assets, with a reasonable superannuation portfolio accumulating. I have none of these, apart from assets which have come through my husband’s work. On paper, I am completely dependent and decidedly behind. Unlike my husband’s, my life, limbs and labour are very cheap to insure. While staying home to raise children is costly for my family (and myself), the relative costs of this choice are greater for families initiating that choice now.

For recent holiday reading, I opened the 2024-25 Women’s Budget Statement. My anomalous existence was confirmed. By the measures of that document, women like me are to be pitied, scolded and reformed. If you want a summary of what our representative government thinks of men, women and families, that document is instructive. It summarises the idea of marriage and family that our young women and men are steered toward. This is what’s said about the Stay-at-Home Mother:

Staying out of paid work to raise children is a compound betrayal. This mother sacrifices the advancement she might have gained had she continued in her career. She sacrifices her financial independence, both present and future, diminishing her lifetime earning potential. She sacrifices the security that attends financial independence.

The mother at home betrays not only herself, but the cause of all women. She subjects herself to the inequality which others have fought hard to undo. She’s consenting to and propagating harmful gender stereotypes. She lives within the confines of outdated norms, validating what is despicable.

The mum at home betrays the national economic good, removing her contribution to the formal economy. She betrays her infants, who are disadvantaged, out of the reach of infant peers, early childhood experts and their stimulating, simulated environments. She is choosing to model the opposite of what we want our children to be: she is mediocre, unambitious, invisible, small. Hers is a shameful, weak choice, the path one might stumble into if not competent enough to do something better. A pitiful waste.

To stay home is a betrayal of family prosperity. It means limited real estate options, a cheaper home. And modest holidays, measured spending, learning skills instead of paying experts. Going without. Waiting longer. Having less of what we’re conditioned to want.

For those who are conformed to thinking like the 2024-25 Women’s Budget Statement, staying home is an unconscionable choice. When the Apostle Paul writes for older women to “teach what is good,and so train the young women to love their husbands and children,to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled,“ (Titus 2:3-5), he forces us to deal with some embarrassment about the Word of God. Surely, if Paul knew how far we’d come, he wouldn’t place this expensive, treacherous choice at the heart of discipleship for women! The contrast forces us to ask if we’re more at home with the Women’s Budget Statement or the Bible.

A mother’s choice to stay out of paid work is a choice to be slower and simpler, to resist the mechanization of persons. The choice to raise children at home requires a home to be more: more than storage and shelter; more interesting, more nourishing than a daycare centre. If a mother and her children are to survive a home-based existence, she must learn to bring vitality where others only see boredom, to replace consumption with cultivation. She forms a cultural centre, a locus of relationships and community. A vitalized home brings life that spills out beyond its own members. If we risk the cost, we might find that Paul, along with the rest of Scripture, has a richer view of “working at home” than the Women’s Budget Statement does.

In most cases, a woman can only be free to be busy at home, actively raising her children, if she is married to a man who believes in the unseen value of her unseen work. This choice is the fruit of a marriage that believes in oneness, in being yoked together–in every way, even financially–to get something done in the world that neither of them could do alone, something that transcends them both. Such a marriage is one of mutual sacrifice, of mutual trust, of mutual respect – a marriage where two people are spending themselves in a common direction, while contributing in different ways. A marriage where neither is keeping a tally of who does what and how much. A husband and wife will only choose to limit their income in order to raise their children if they both believe that the value of life and work might not translate into budget data.

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