Last year there were approximately five million stay-at-home moms in the United States. (The number decreased slightly from 2008, statistically insignificant according to the Census Bureau because of the recession.) In 2007, the Pew Research Center reported a significant uptick in the number of moms who preferred staying home to raise children.
Ohio State University sociology professor Liana Sayer says that society still generally feels it's unacceptable for men to be stay-at-home dads. Nevertheless, their numbers are on the rise, too. The Census Bureau estimates the number of stay-at-home fathers at 159,000, which tripled over a decade. Some say that's a gross underestimation, however, because it fails to account for nearly 2 million more fathers now primary caregivers due to the recession as well as fathers who work part-time to care for their children.
Whatever the exact numbers, stay-at-home parents are vulnerable to substantial financial risk during divorce. Time Magazine recently reported that unemployed men faced a greater danger of being left by their wives, particularly working wives. And though a wife's employment status had no bearing on risk, neither does the law provide stay-at-home moms sufficient protections either, especially under our unilateral divorce laws.
In practical terms, if the breadwinner leaves, the first risk faced is lack of immediate access to funds. Even if you have a joint bank account, your spouse might decide to open a new one in which to deposit paychecks. Joint stock or savings accounts may require joint approval for withdrawals. This could leave stay-at-home parents hostage for money until they are able to secure a temporary order of support as well as funds with which to defend themselves. For that, they'll undoubtedly need to hire an attorney and pay a retainer, unless the lawyer is willing to wait.
New York recently recognized the inherent unfairness of this financial disparity when it came to the ability to defend oneself in a lawsuit for divorce. It amended its domestic relations laws to establish a rebuttable presumption that the monied spouse be required to pay for the non-monied spouse's attorney and experts during the pendency of litigation. Regrettably I had no such statutory protection during my own divorce. In other states, stay-at-home spouses without independent means are generally subject to the proper exercise of discretion by the judicial system to award them sufficient funds both to defend themselves and for support.
The financial risk stay-at-home parents face when it comes to alimony is even more troubling. When no-fault was instituted, permanent alimony awarded to spouses who had given up their careers to become stay-at-home parents began to fall out of favor, permanent alimony being deemed incompatible with the clean break idea behind no-fault. Today, many states cap alimony awards. Unless you're the victim of spousal abuse or have been married ten years or longer, or have physical or mental disabilities, in Texas you're out of luck. Even then alimony is limited in amount and cannot exceed three years. The Massachusetts House of Representatives just approved a bill that will end lifetime alimony altogether. These are just a few of the many examples of the trend toward rehabilitative alimony designed to give stay-at-home spouses just enough time to find jobs and get back on their financial feet.
But what if alimony ends, or you receive none at all, and you've been out-of-work for years, home, taking care of your children? Today's economic climate makes employment hard to come by, let alone a job allowing parents to maintain their pre-divorce standard of living. What, too, if because of custody arrangements, you're forbidden to relocate where the cost-of-living would be considerably less and potential jobs more plentiful? What if you've past the mid-point of mid-life and competing for jobs with freshly graduated college, graduate and law school students who can't find employment themselves?
When his son became unable to attend day care because of health issues, Charlie (a pseudonym he asked me to use because custody issues are still pending) and his wife agreed that he would give up his full-time job to become a stay-at-home parent. Several years later, Charlie's wife left without explanation, filed for divorce, and took her high-paying job with her. Though he has been a stay-at-home dad for six years, Charlie told me he never received a penny of alimony and only one year of limited child support. He recently had a job opportunity in another state, but turned it down. It's more important to him to watch his son grow up.
Divorce financial strategist Jeff Landers says alimony reform has gone too far. "[I]t seems that stay-at-home moms . . . with little or no income of their own have lost their voice in state legislatures largely controlled by men." I believe the lack of sufficient protections applies equally to stay-at-home fathers.
Unlike millions of other Americans who find themselves suddenly out-of-work and without funds, unemployment benefits don't provide a safety net for stay-at-home divorced parents either.
Ditto for health insurance. For 19 years I was covered under my ex-husband's health and dental plans. During that period, I had four operations, not counting the birth of my two children. Divorce booted me off, just like millions of other spouses who are no longer considered "family" once the divorce gavel sounds. My current $971-a-month COBRA plan, funded out of dwindling savings, runs out in a little over six months.
When Charlie's divorce became final, he was excited to learn about that part of President Obama's stimulus package that provided for a reduction in COBRA insurance premiums of 65% for those who had lost their jobs. Like me, though, Charlie's excitement was short-lived. The plan excluded divorced stay-at-home parents who lost their "jobs" and their marriages.
The list goes on. The lack of pensions for stay-at-home parents. The social security benefits breadwinners build up, but stay-at-home parents don't. The absence of disability insurance to protect divorced stay-at-home parents.
Like Landers, I believe the push for alimony reform has gone too far. That our divorce laws also fail to take into account current economic and unemployment realities as well as the need to protect stay-at-home parents. And shouldn't unemployment benefits kick in, too, when alimony ends for stay-at-home parents who are unable to secure employment?
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Almost overnight, we went from an expectation that the wife would stay home with the kids, to an expectation that both parents would work full time.
So stay-at-home parents are screwed by the lack of any protection in the legal system, the kids are screwed because we have done nothing to provide a proportionate increase in affordable childcare, and the working parents are screwed because they usually can't take off work if their kid gets sick or risk losing their job.
The end result of all of the economic War on Families has been the destruction of family life as we knew it.
That is how bad the thinking around divorce has become.
You would have it that someone could get married, stop working out of the home, share parenting with the working spouse, do volunteer work, not try to get a job or to keep skills maintained, then file for a divorce and (a) shed the obligation to provide support for the working/divorcing spouse but (b) retain an entitlement to collect financial benefits from the working/divorced spouse and (c) not be obligated to get a job and (d) as an at-home/non-working divorced spouse enjoy a beneficial position relative to the working divorced spouse if there is dispute as to child custody/placement and (e) get half of the assets that were obtained by sole virtue of the efforts/income of the working divorces spouse.
How does that make sense?
It is time to fix divorce.
Presume/require equal placement time for each parent with the children post divorce.
Require that child support payments be applied to the children or refunded/credited to the payer.
No alimony/maintenance. Require each divorcing spouse to become financially self-sufficient without any contribution from the other divorcing spouse unless there has been a positive contribution to the income-earning capacity of the other divorcing spouse that will continue after the divorce.
Family life is destroyed by the spouse who files for the divorce.
Get a job!
Usually, it's the wife asking for one, being "disappointed" in one or another of her fantasies of married life, or nagging the poor dog of a hubby till he sees only death or divorce as the way to a sane life. Most men are emotionally simple folks. Don't mistreat us, and we stay with you.
In a bad economy, millions of us regardless of marital status are finding ourselves squeezed and scrambling to survive any way we can. When you add parental responsibilities and the extraordinary cost of raising a child in the US (http://dailyplateofcrazy.com/2011/04/18/two-parents-one-child-no-unemployment-cost-of-raising-children/) - as opposed to other countries with health care and education as "rights" - it's nearly impossible not to get mired in the money issues. Because here - money is everything. Here, money is the only thing keeping us off the streets.
Do we cling to former spouses as a safety net, in part because we have no other?
In the context of divorce (unilateral or not), alimony (and its variations), custody contention, and changing gender roles, we need to step back and assess multiple systems with explicit problems/challenges. States swing in opposite and inconsistent ways (I find the Mass alimony laws absurd); but I find child support enforceability far more pressing.
There is no "one right answer" or single path to solving painful emotional and economic problems, and divorce reform (if it is to come) must deal more consistently and dispassionately with underlying issues in our society, and both standard and exceptional scenarios.
That includes recognizing that we must be a more compassionate culture, but also an *adult* one.
Congrats, and welcome to the HP!
Hoping to see much, much more from you!
Cara
How can you post this with the overall unemployment rate at 10% and even higher for people in their 40s and 50s? I was a SAHM, I freelanced after the divorce, my expenses now exceed my income. I have not asked my ex for relief beyond child support in six years. And yet he left and I've had to maintain a household for two and have not been able to move for another job. I find your post uninformed and insensitive. Good for you for getting your act together! Times have changed. If there's a child in the picture and times are tough and the other parent can help, the other parent should help. For the sake of the child! The law turns on that for custody, but not for child support.
I have gone through periods when my expenses exceeded my income. I've struggle financially and done without because I basically had to start over. I was and am better off than I would have been if their had been court ordered alimony to become dependent upon. I have a client now who is in a total panic because her ten year court ordered alimony is about to expire. She has no job, no job skills and has spent ten years setting herself up to fail by refusing to get a job and prepare for what was coming.
I'm not against alimony. It does concern me that there is a belief that when someone leaves a marriage they should be held responsible for the financial well-fair of an ex-spouse for an indefinite period of time.
What I don't understand about this situation is why the breadwinner is ok with the ex living in substandard conditions with the kids. Just because they are divorced that person no longer cares about the situation the kids are living/visiting in? That's really selfish! I don't agree with lifelong alimony, I too have seen it abused but a couple years, perhaps long enough for an education sounds fair and the living conditions between the two households should be similar.
Thanks for the honest portrayal to what happens to people after divorce. When considering divorce, it's essential to consider ramifications. Too many people just focus on the relief of leaving behind an unhappy marriage and fail to appreciate the ways in which their lives might be made more challenging. Thanks!
Michele Weiner-Davis
'Like Landers, I believe the push for alimony reform has gone too far."
Despite the sea change no fault divorce, of working women and higher wages for them, the majority of states have been very, very slow to change alimony laws - laws which were enacted many decades ago when the majority of women were homemakers and divorce rates were far, far lower. Most changes have been very minor.
I'm in favor of a stay-at-home parent getting some alimony while they restart their lives - and I am not aware of a single state which does not make provisions for this - typically one year of alimony for each two years of marriage.
But lifetime alimony was/is heinous. Imagine living in California and getting married at 20, divorced at 30, and finding you have to support you ex-spouse for the rest of her life as she shacks up with her new boyfriend?
Even the new standards can be unfair. I paid two years of alimony for four years of marriage (Washington state) even though my ex always worked and we made similar wages (I made just a couple of thousand more per year). This alimony combined with my child support amounted to 45% of my income - while my ex got the family home, the new minivan and kept 90% of the accrued possessions. She got to keep her annuity while I was forced to cash in my 401K to pay for lawyer fees.
If your marriage is going bad, why not prepare for the divorce by getting a job to support yourself after the divorce?
If you want the "freedom" of a divorce, why not get a job to support yourself?
If you want to perform "administrative, pedagogical, quasi-medical, interior design, personal shopping and culinary housekeeping labors" after your divorce, go find someone who will hire/pay you for those "labors" -- i.e. do that as your job.
Then (a) you will be performing the labors that you apparently enjoy; and (b) you will see what the market a/k/a reality determines to be the economic value of those labors. (Also - if you have a job as a practical matter you may not be doing financially counterproductive activities such as needless interior design and needless shopping that consume/waste (apparently needed/limited) resources of your own household.)
What you are really saying is that after the divorce you want one "job" (childcare/household obligations only) while your divorced husband has two jobs (his paying job AND his childcare/household obligations).
Just say it that way.
By the way - if you believe the children are a "job" then agree to share equal placement/custody with your divorced husband/their father. It is called job-sharing. Share the "burden" of parenting with their father (who probably sees his children as a joy rather than as a burden/job).
it's erroneous to assume one must be divorced or unhappily married in order to favor justice for women in divorce. I am married for 26 years to a wonderful man and hope to stay married.
Your assumption that a woman whose husband leaves his children and wife can easily parlay years of tending to fever and bellyache into a nursing position is naive. The supposition that one with the hybrid talents you outline in 4th and 5th paragraphs can expeditiously line up a job as a teacher, doctor, chef is fallacious. A single custodial parent can begin job training if his/her children are in school full-time and the ex shares after-school care, but I (work in a food pantry) have given bags of emergency food to too many single homeless working parents to think the "just get a job" argument has merit.
Parenting well is a big job. As the mother of 3 teens, I know the job of parenting doesn't end at 1st grade.
In my 15 years as a teacher (a profession I chose because I en-JOY-ed children decades before having any!) I saw too many parents who failed to see parenting as a job -- I also had too many students who'd had babies before age 16 so as to experience the "joy".
As for "joy" and my own children -- "Joy" doesn't even begin to capture it!
Gratefully,
Cara
The argument that alimony reform has gone too far is a farce. The abuse of alimony condemns far too many men into bankruptcy without a chance of retiring while encouraging the female to sit at home cohabitating secretly with her boyfriend. When the laws support this kind of family/society breakdown a very systemic problem exists.
"All women freeloader types, come to Florida for the great life! Men, get the hell out now!"
I was in my mid-forties when my ex left. I hadn't worked in 17 years. He walked away with 87% of our income and left me with two boys to raise. I had two choices, take him to court and try to force him to be responsible for me, or become responsible for myself. In my opinion his financial responsibility toward me ended with the marriage.
If the breadwinner abandons the marriage, yes, they should be held responsible. BUT that in no way takes away any responsibility the spouse left behind has for their own financial well-being.
Bottom line, the moment you are left, get out and get a job.
I agree that if a breadwinner abandons a family that person should be responsible. Most of the time women are abandoning their families (90% of the time in college educated households), and they are not being held accountable. Whoever initiates a divorce (regardless of gender) should have to face a real risk of losing custody and having to pay to support those left behind. A fair system like that would truly discourage divorce.
You are no longer a stay-at-home Dad rlaspari, you are a non-custodial Dad. Your position as a stay-at-home Dad ended when the courts awarded your ex-wife custody and so did her financial responsibility toward you. Just as my ex-husband's financial responsibility toward me ended with the divorce.
Depending upon the state you live in, the judge you get, and who has the bucks (and smarts) to hire a sharkier attorney, a woman who works for pay throughout marriage and child-rearing is just as "at risk" as one who stays at home. And in a dreadful economy, there's no COBRA, no pension, no nothing. And alimony? (Dreams of days gone by... )
We have many inequities in the system - or rather - the many systems at play here. The disparities in state laws and the challenges of enforcement are among them.
Keep it up, my girl, keep it up,
Cara