A SAHM is home all day, why would she need household help, especially childcare?

To ask is in a way to answer.  SAHMs should have household help because it’s natural and normal for women to help each other along with the rearing of children and keeping of the home.  As to childcare, it is a curious American quirk that mothers should burn themselves up in a holy fire of helicopter parenting, performing childcare with the utmost intensity of someone in an order religious.  This is heretical, but it’s also pretty much just how Americans seem to be.  It’s traditional-American.

But some mothers have to be on bedrest for each pregnancy.  What do they do about childcare?

Some mothers have children with special needs or severe disabilities.  What do they do about childcare?

Some mothers have to earn a little money even while staying at home.  What do they do about childcare?

All mothers need at least a few weeks recovery time after each pregnancy and sometimes months of recovery time.  What do they do about childcare?

Now, the usual response is to just ignore that such women exist and can, with reasonable safety precautions, have modest to large families of 3-7 children because if such women do exist and are not weird outliers, then maybe the whole isolation of housewives project needs to be scrapped.

But such women exist and are in fact usually the norm.  The outlier is the woman with perfectly pliant children and easy pregnancies and labors.  And hey, even she needs household help and a little childcare too.

 

All mothers need a break now and then.  That’s why SAHMs need household help, especially childcare.  There is nothing unloving, abnormal or unnatural about having a periodic break from the hard work of bearing and raising children and keeping house.  What is unloving, abnormal and unnatural is the American conservative belief that technology can replace human relationships and that women don’t really have social, spiritual, intellectual or emotional needs that cannot be met in their totality by mothering, no matter how intensively.  I am practical in my conservative tendencies.  I want to go with traditions that Americans brought to America and then dropped because they interfered with the short-term getting of money (this is essentially true, look it up, your hair will pop off your head.)  If conservatives wish to actually get women having more children in wedlock, they should desire this too.  And that means supporting SAHMs having household help, including childcare.