Are Women Wrong for Not Quitting Their Careers to Stay Home With Their Kids if They Can Afford To?

Sometimes, whether or not to stay home with children is an easy decision. It could be that one of the parents wants to stay home, to manage the household and the children, while the other party works for a paycheck outside the home.

It could be that both parents have always worked, and they can’t really afford to drop to one paycheck, or they don’t make enough to cover daycare, etc – it’s a financial decision, and no one really questions those, either.

Moms tend to get judged, though, when they have the option to stay home with their kids but choose to continue their careers or studies instead – and that’s exactly the scenario that has this mother second guessing her choices.

Quick backstory: the pregnancy was a surprise and one they didn’t find out about until quite a ways into it, for very legitimate reasons.

Long backstory short: I’ve been with my partner for 5 years, this was an unplanned pregnancy and I only found out I was pregnant a month ago(I’m now 7 months pregnant 😬), I was on birth control and actually had 2 pregnancy tests come back negative(one was too early in the pregnancy and the other was because of the hook effect).

As an added bonus my partner and I never expected to be able to have kids naturally as he had cancer a couple of years ago and during treatment he collected and stored sperm that he was told were very poor quality plus I have a big family history or cervical cancer and was supposed to have surgery to remove 2 precancerous lesions a week ago and prep for that surgery was how I found out I was pregnant.

They are coming around to being ok with the thought of becoming parents, and as her partner makes good money, she’s even agreed to quitting her part-time job to help care for him when he arrives.

Now. Obviously it’s way to late for an abortion and my partner grew up in the foster/adoption system and got treated like shit so that’s not an option either. We’ve agreed to raise the baby together but over the last couple of days he’s repeatedly brought up how I should quit my job and study so I can focus on the baby when he arrives.

In theory this would be fine, my partner makes enough money to support us and my part time job pays absolute shit so I had initially agreed to drop my job but not my study.

That said, OP is in the middle of defending her Master’s thesis, and had plans to continue directly into a PhD program when she finished.

She had many very good reasons for not wanting to quit for a couple of years and then pick it back up.

I’m in the middle of writing my masters thesis is Bioscience and if I put it down for a couple of years the likelihood is that my contacts would no longer be available for research work.

Not to mention that I was planning on starting my PhD straight after I finish as it will be a direct extension of my masters study and I already have conditional funding for my research that I will lose if I put the project on hold.

It’s really important to her to finish.

Which is really all she should have had to say, don’t you think?

My study is really important to me and I feel like by giving up my job I’m losing a bit of my independence so I don’t want to lose this too. We’ve now had several huge fights because my partner says I’ll be neglecting the baby in favor of my research which I have no intention of doing. Hes chalking up my resistance to “baby hormones” and I want to check that I’m not TA here?

I think so, but let’s see what Reddit has to say!

The top comment honestly says it all, and as a mom, I wish I could shout it from the rooftops.