I had the enormous privilege of being able to afford staying home with my kids.

And I fully recognize it was a privilege that many don’t have. My mother didn’t even have it! 

I had two Master’s Degrees, and could have had a well-paying, professional job. But I wanted to be home with my children, and my husband had a job that demanded so much time away from home that I felt like ou life would have been chaos had I also worked outside the home.

As the years went on and the kids became more independent I started writing–first for magazines (that still existed and paid back then!), then some small books, then a blog. Eventually I published bigger books, and now you all know me from that. But I have never earned close to what I would have earned if I had worked the whole time.

That is not to say that I regret anything–but it’s just reality, that when women stay at home with kids, we give up some financial security. For me, that didn’t matter because my husband is amazing and I have a secure marriage. But everyday I am inundated by messages from women in destructive marriages who are trying to leave 20, 25, or 30 years later, whose professional qualifications have lapsed and who have no way to support themselves. And the way that we talk about this is off.

A reader, Bonnie Hemness, recently sent me her thoughts after walking through this.

She wrote a number of posts on it, and I encouraged her to start her own Substack and publish them there. But I want to publish the first one she sent me here, just to start a conversation. So here’s Bonnie!

There is an unfairness we don’t talk about enough.

A mother chooses to stay home and raise the children. Or she works part-time.

She turns down promotions. She chooses jobs based on the children’s schedules instead of earning potential. She carries the appointments, sick days, school schedules, meals, laundry, emotional needs, and thousands of invisible responsibilities that make a family function.

Sometimes—especially in religious circles—she is told this is what a good wife does.

Support your husband.

Support his calling.

Support his career.

Make sacrifices so he can become the man God has called him to be.

And so she does.

Year after year, his career grows, his salary grows, his résumé grows, his retirement grows, and his earning potential grows.

And hers often does not. Then divorce comes.

And the conversation can sometimes shift toward questions of who changed, who stopped trying, or who made the decision to leave. But rarely does anyone stop to calculate what was already given.

In my personal experience, divorce meant losing almost everything I understood my life to be.

My marriage. My home as I knew it. My financial security. Even the terrifying possibility of losing significant time with the children I had structured my entire adult life around raising.

When my marriage ended, I began to understand the difference between dividing the assets accumulated during a marriage and dividing the opportunities each spouse had to build a career.

The professional experience and earning potential developed over decades do not simply disappear when a marriage ends. And the years spent prioritizing caregiving cannot simply be added back to a résumé.

I left with a share of what we had accumulated together—but I didn’t leave with an equal share of the earning capacity developed during those years.

There is no court order that can divide 23 years of career development in half.

There is no account containing the promotions I didn’t pursue. There is no retirement fund holding the years I spent raising children instead of building a pension. There is no line on a financial disclosure labeled:“Future earning potential made possible by the unpaid labor of your spouse.”

I am grateful that spousal support exists and that the legal system recognizes, at least in part, the financial consequences of decisions made during marriage.

But financial support after divorce cannot fully recreate the career experience, opportunities, or earning potential that may have been set aside during years of caregiving.

And perhaps one of the most painful ironies is how differently we can talk about financial provision after divorce. During marriage, providing financially for a family is often recognized as an act of love, responsibility, and commitment. But when a marriage ends, financial support can begin to be discussed as though it is simply an obligation to a former spouse, rather than part of the continuing financial consequences of a life built together.

Yet the years of caregiving still happened, the career sacrifices were still made, and the children were still raised.

The contributions of both spouses still mattered.

Divorce changes the marriage, but it does not erase the value of what each person contributed to building it.

Now, I’m not saying women shouldn’t stay home with their children.

I treasure the years I had raising mine. But we need to recognize that caregiving has economic value—even when no paycheck is attached to it.

Marriage asks us to make decisions based on we, not simply me. So when a marriage ends, we shouldn’t pretend that one spouse’s earning power was created entirely independently while the other’s lack of earning power was simply a personal failure. Sometimes those two realities were created by the exact same family decisions. One person’s career grew because another person created the space for it to grow.

And if we are going to celebrate that sacrifice while the marriage is intact, we should have the integrity to acknowledge its value when the marriage is over.

Thanks, Bonnie! And join Bonnie on Substack and see her follow-up articles, especially this great one on talking to pastors and lay Christian counselors when you’re in marriage turmoil–and how that can go so badly.

How can we help those who stay at home maintain earning potential?

Because the problem is not always divorce or something bad happening to the marriage! Sometimes a spouse can get sick or disabled. Or, especially in this economy, the main breadwinner could suddently find themselves out of work. This is something we talk about in chapter 6 of The Marriage You Want, in terms of being your spouse’s understudy.

The one-person-works-while-another-stays-home certainly has many advantages, even as it is increasingly economically impossible for many couples.

But it’s also increasingly risky, whether or not the marriage is inherently risky. I’d love to talk about how to reduce that risk! Some ideas off the top of my head:

1. Keep professional qualifications as current as possible. Consider working very part-time just to keep in a union or to maintain credentials. Even if this doesn’t lead to more income (because the shifts just pay for the certification renewals, for instance), think of it like insurance that you pay for.
2. Get quick qualifications, like lifeguarding, for jobs that are constantly in demand.
3. Teach, especially if you’re musical. Piano, violin, guitar, vocal teaching can all make some serious money. Tutoring, if you’ve taught before, can also be lucrative.
4. If you’re staying at home and you’re out of the baby/toddler years, join high profile committees at church or at school or in the community, especially those that handle budgets or staff, or that have public speaking roles. These can be intellectually challenging and a nice change, and also are great on resumes.
5. Invest in skills you can use from home. Video editing, accounting, social media coordinating, etc. can all be done from home, often on a part-time basis. So can catering (often certification is needed), baking, creating meals for busy families, etc.

There are probably more you can think of–leave them in the comments!

But the thing is–do these things before something bad happens and you need the money. Don’t wait until you’re desperate to try to earn an income–realize that nurturing your own earning potential and keeping skills relevant is something that helps your stability long-term, while also giving you more of a creative outlet, which stay at home parents often need!