By Taylor Hunt, Young Women for America Ambassador

“Why do you want to be a mom? You could do so much more.” This is the most common response I get when I tell friends or classmates that my end goal is to be a stay-at-home mom. “It’s a waste of your potential” or “I’ve never known someone to work as hard as you, just to want to be a mom and a stay-at-home mom at that.”

While desiring to be a stay-at-home mom might be strange for my generation, it’s been a dream of mine since I was younger. My mother was and is one of the most influential women in my life, and to follow in her footsteps would be an honor. But in today’s society, this is an abnormality.

The past few generations have not seen motherhood as a job to relish and find honor in but merely as a second-hand job that gets handed to the partner who makes the least amount of money. It is not seen as a job that has real value and long-term implications in your child’s life.

It is no wonder that our current generation is filled with anxiety and depression, and suicide is at an all-time high.^[1] More than ever, we need moms to step up and fill those holes in their kids’ lives, but motherhood and the sanctity of motherhood are under attack from all sides in our society.

In July of 2021, the Biden Administration decided that their most pressing issue was changing the word “mother” to the word “birthing person.” In an interview,

Office of Management and Budget deputy director Shalanda Young said, “There are certain people who do not have gender identities that apply to females and males, so we think our language needs to be more inclusive on how we deal with complex issues.”^[2]

The problem is, this perspective sums up womanhood as the ability to give birth–that’s it. But womanhood and motherhood mean so much more.

In a world that refuses to acknowledge womanhood and motherhood from a Biblical perspective, the science behind the benefit of moms and, more specifically, stay-at-home moms cannot be denied. Studies by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Institute of Child Development of the University of Minnesota found that “Children who spend a large amount of their day in daycare experienced higher stress levels and aggression as opposed to those who stayed home.”^[3]

In education, studies show that a child will go further and perform better in school if they have at least one parent who stays at home.^[4]

Childhood obesity is likely to be lower in families with stay-at-home moms. A study published in Child Development found that “sixth graders with working mothers were found to be six times more likely than those with stay-at-home moms to be overweight.”^[5]

The value of moms cannot be overstated, and in the current climate, we need them more than ever to tackle the suicide epidemic, childhood obesity, and the crisis of loneliness.

^[1] Chatterjee, Rhitu. “More Children Are Dying by Suicide Recently, Study Shows.” NPR, 27 July 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/07/27/1021373104/more-children-are-dying-by-suicide-recently-study-shows.

^[2] Perkins, Tony. “Biden Administration Uses Term ‘Birthing Person’ Instead of ‘Mother’.” The Daily Signal, 15 June 2021, https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/14/biden-administration-uses-term-birthing-person-instead-of-mother/

^[3] Fraser-Thill, Rebecca. “The Forms of Social Aggression.” Verywell Family, Verywell Family, 6 June 2021, https://www.verywellfamily.com/social-aggression-3288012.

^[4] Duncan, Apryl. “Surprising Facts and Research About Stay-at-Home Moms.” Verywell Family, 3 March 2022, https://www.verywellfamily.com/research-stay-at-home-moms-4047911

^[5] Health. “The Longer Mom Works, the More Overweight the Kids.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/childhood-obesity-_n_818385.