The ideal is a situation where both people do an equitable split of the overall labor needed to finance and care for a home. The problem is usually that the person working outside of the home typically over-values their contribution and undervalues their partner’s, as it doesn’t come with numbers on it.
Think about it, though:
3 meals a day would run a family of four $150 dining out; $50 of that would be labor- $1,500 a month.
Daycare for two kids is close to $2,400 a month, and that’s with a much bigger class size.
A maid service for 2 hours 3x a week will run you maybe $100 per session or $1,200 a month.
Uber-ing kids to daycare and back, doctor’s appointments, grocery shopping, etc is going to run at least $50 a 20+ days a month, so there’s another $2,000
An executive assistant runs ~ $30 an hour, so at a low-ball estimate of 7 hours a week, you’re looking at ~ $800.
I’m forgetting or excluding a ton of stuff, and the cost of replacing a typical stay-at-home parent is still around $8,000 a month.
