Is the trad wife trend harming families?

An issue I have with the trad wife movement and what our family is doing instead

For the first three years of our marriage, my husband and I both worked full-time corporate jobs from home. My husband traveled for work 30-40% of the time, but it was usually day trips. We shared an office, so we pretty much spent 24/7 together. We tag-teamed watching our son during work hours when childcare fell through.

We bounced ideas off of each other through out the day. Our work calendars were in sync. We’d try to do weekly lunch dates. We shared household responsibilities pretty evenly with both of us working from home (here’s the system we use to split up household responsibilities).

A few weeks after our second son was born, my husband quit his corporate job and started working full-time building up a seed business we bought (here’s the full story).

For the first time in our marriage, my husband would leave the house for 8+ hours a day, 5-6 times a week, to go work in our family business while I stayed home with our sons and continued to work full time from home. During fescue harvest in the summer, he’s gone 16-18 hours a day for a month.

We’re only a few months into this new arrangement, but the impact it’s having on our marriage and family is substantial. We now have limited time to catch up on our days without a child needing our attention or cutting off our conversations.

My husband gets to see our baby for a few minutes at a time before work or bedtime, or on weekends. If we added up the time my husband spent with our first son when he worked from home vs. the time he’s spent with our second son now that he works outside the home, the difference would be substantial.

On full days, which in this season of our life is most days, it begins to feel like we’re two ships passing each other in the night.

So, when I see all these reels of women saying how grateful they are that their husbands work two jobs or extra long hours so that the wife can stay home with the kids, I don’t get it.

I’ve experienced how amazing it is for both parents to be home with the kids - to do all of life together as a couple and as a family: working, cooking, cleaning, building, exploring, playing, dreaming, and it’s the best.

So, you may ask: if you had such a good arrangement, why’d you give it up?

Because although it was good to both be working from home, the corporate jobs were not getting us where we wanted to be in terms of finances and the lifestyle we wanted to lead.

For example, annual raises in corporate (especially if you stay for one company without changing jobs every 3-4 years), rarely keep up with inflation, let alone allow you to build wealth. You are also working 40+ hours a week building someone else’s dream. My husband’s former employer also required him to live in a city where the company had offices, which for the most part were large cities and we really wanted to raise our family in a rural area and closer to our families.

Which is why we decided to make some changes and short-term sacrifices towards the big vision we have for our family and legacy.

Yes, my husband works outside the home full-time now, but our vision is that this is only for the first few years of getting the business established. Eventually, we hope to hire someone to run the day to day so we can focus on other income streams and ministry work without having to be at our physical business location daily.

Having a family business also means we can bring our kids to work with us. Every Saturday morning, our two year old goes to the seed house with my husband “to work.” He may only be a toddler but he’s already learning the family business and you can see the ownership in how he struts to go do certain “work” tasks. And our baby is literally growing up in the business (we closed on the business on his one month birthday!).

One of the issues I see with the trad wife movement has nothing to do with gender roles but with the fact that it paints husbands and fathers out of the day to day operations of home and family life. The man is delegated to the role of a financial provide, while home and child rearing become the domain of the wife.

"Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and forsake not your mother's teaching." -Proverbs 1:8

Historically and Biblically, the running of the home and raising children was a family effort. For centuries, families had gardens, livestock, etc., and worked off the land or in a trade as a family unit. Businesses were run out of homes (or homes built on top of businesses) so that work, home and family were integrated into one full life.

In fact, the model of a woman staying home in a pretty apron and making dinner for her husband who comes home from work in a suit is a trend that emerged in 1950s U.S. advertising as men returned from World War II to take back the jobs women held while the men were at war. 

The government and corporations needed to get women out of the workforce and back home, so they painted a pretty picture of a nuclear family featuring a stay at home mom and a successful working dad.

So when the homemaking influencers gaining popularity today promote going back to the good old days where the woman is the primary parent and full-time homemaker, they are referencing a 1950’s ideal, not a Biblical mandate. It is government and corporate propaganda resulting from the Industrial Revolution.

Now, I’m not saying that moms shouldn’t stay home and raise their kids and take care of their homes.

Nor am I going to the other end of the spectrum resulting from the feminist movement that encourages women to prioritize career over family and claim that we don’t need no man cause we’re strong independent women.

What I’m saying is that there is a dark side to this trad wife movement that is rarely talked about in that it breaks up the home and family into a man’s and woman’s domain, and so making less of the oneness of marriage. It fractures the family.

Yes, it’s possible to have a strong marriage and family culture with a dad (or both parents) working outside the home, but it is much more difficult and takes a lot more intentionality and communication.

If you look at the numbers, it can look like this: we all have 168 hours in a week. Let’s say you sleep 7 hours a night, that brings waking hours to 119. If your husband has a job that truly only works 40 hours a week (rare nowadays, especially in blue collar work), and you add in a hour a day for commuting, that brings us down to around 70 hours left per week, which is about 10 hours per day.

Add in time to eat, personal hygiene, church, scrolling on our phones, taking kids to their activities, etc and the time that men have left with their wives and kids is minimal.

How can you have a strong emotional, spiritual and physical connection with someone you get almost no daily quality time with?

But what if we painted a different ideal to aspire to?

• A family business that the husband and wife can both contribute to using their own unique strengths and interests. Yes, I believe women should contribute financially to their households, even if the how and how much she contributes financially may ebb and flow with the seasons of raising kids.

• A business where the kids can tag along to when they’re young and then take on their own responsibilities in running the family businesses as they get older.

• A lean business that generates a healthy profit that can help the family make investments and start up other income streams.

• Time freed up to be together as a family and to serve in ministry together.

• A diverse portfolio of work and investments that allows the family to go build up generational wealth and give back generously to the church, their local community and those in need.

“A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children, but the sinner’s wealth is laid up for the righteous.” -Proverbs 13:22

Our kids need their dads just as much as they need us moms. And when the Bible says we are to become one as husband and wife, I truly believe God means one in every way.

That there shouldn’t be an intentional separation of “church and state” where the husband is pushed outside the home and the wife stays at home, but instead a family building a shared vision.

Now, I’m not shaming or judging families who by choice or out of necessity have a structure where dad works outside the home and mom stays at home - that’s our situation now and it’s how my husband and I grew up and we both have strong relationships with our parents.

But I would guess that if you are in such a season, you may also want your husband to be home more often with you and your kids.

Which is why I want to encourage you to build a life that doesn’t conform to today‘s society that pushes dad (and mom) outside the home, even if may feel impossible for you.

This is what this newsletter is all about:

Building a portfolio life that allows you to maximize time spent with your family, aligns with your values, and invests in what will last long after you’re gone and bless your kids for generations to come.

The kind of life where you have financial and time freedom.

The kind of life where you get to do it all together side by side with your spouse and your kids.

This kind of life isn’t only for the wealthy. It’s not an out of reach dream or only for the select few “lucky ones”.

But it does take intentionality and it likely might mean choosing to live differently than your peers or friends and family.

It looks like years of praying, saving, working, investing, building, and sowing seeds of faith.

But your family foundation is forged in those building years.

If you want to strengthen your marriage, work on building a big dream together for the benefit of your family.

Although Daniel works more outside the home now, our marriage has grown stronger the last few months as we’re taking steps towards the dreams we’ve talked, prayed and saved towards for years.

Because we know what we’re working towards and that seeds we’re planting today will reap an enduring legacy.

“Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on one.” -1 Thessalonians 4:11-12

So, as my husband kisses me and our boys good bye and goes to work in the morning, I just don’t get why there’s women out there celebrating a husband leaving home as if it’s a good thing.

I guess what I’m saying is I wish there were people out there talking about the beauty of a family that gets to stay together all day, every day, building a life as a family, not as individuals each doing their own things.

Yes, I recognize that is hard to achieve today. But I know it’s a worthwhile investment to work towards.

If you feel a tug to dream up a life like this for your family, check out our “Dreaming Together” ebook - it includes conversation starters for couples to come up with a shared family vision and goal setting worksheets to help you translate the dreams into actionable next steps.

And if you want to chat more about this, reach out! This is one of my favorite topics to talk about 😍

Until next time,