I have heard this from so many stay at home moms. "Oh, it's easier to be at work than at home." I take serious issue with this. I am an attorney mom who has worked throughout two pregnancies and in both cases handed over a 3 month old baby to childcare. Babies are now 9 and 4 years of age. It is NOT easier. My day is completely constrained and owned by somebody else. Sure, it's child-free. But I have to produce, bill and make sure I stay current with the job, five days a week. My time is not my own. The rest of the time, I go home, and keep up on homework, piano lessons, soccer practice, soccer games, playdates, keeping groceries/laundry current, etc. Yes, I am married and my husband, the dad, "helps out." On the other hand, my stay at home mom friends, volunteer, work out, can unpack on Mondays after weekend trips out of town, easily cart kids to the doctor/dentist/playdates etc. How about we switch. Then you can tell me how much easier it is to work than it is to stay home.

you said it girl..poopy diapers take a lot less brainpower than preparing a set of constructino documents with many reviewers, clients, and deadlines, not to speak of office backstabbing, etc..

The working life is WAY harder..and also potentially WAY less rewarding..Most of us don't really have a choice in this..I'll be a stay -at-home mom - anybody need one? I won't even require you to pay for children - I don't want any...Just pay for me to stay home..hee hee!

Unless you work a job that actually requires physical exertion, it's not like either is particularly "hard." They're both just draining. But in entirely different ways. At home with young children, you have to be "on" and hyperaware all the time. And I'm not talking about helicopter parenting, I'm talking about always keeping one eye and one ear open for whatever minor disaster is awaiting around the corner: did I put the crayons on a high enough shelf so that the one year old can't color on the walls AGAIN; okay have to make sure that the pot handle is pointing AWAY from grabbing little fingers while I turn my back to open the fridge; gotta zone out the screaming and let them figure this one out because I really don't care who started it and it's just a stupid toy that you only want because your brother is playing with. None of these things are actually hard: but doing this for 12 hours straight is draining. It just is: it always has been (hence the cliche 1950's housewife drunk out of gourd by dinnertime), and it always will be. Your average white collar office job isn't really technically hard either. I mean, climbing Mount Everest is hard. Running a marathon is hard. Beating Gary Kasparov at chess is hard. Writing a brief or delegating projects isn't actually all that difficult, if you're already in a position to do it. You're most likely doing the same thing over and over again over the course of your career, and it's something you've been trained to do, and it's something that you're pretty good at. But it's stressful: always making sure the boss isn't breathing over your shoulder, that the 22 year old who thinks that he's on a straight course to CEO hasn't screwed up yet again, shifting deadlines, that your gunning coworker hasn't taken on too much and thus compromised the entire project when she can't do it all on her own, and then clients calling making irrational demands... all the while you have to smile and be cheerful and get on with your work and really, REALLY hope that the boss meant it when he said that your department would be safe in the upcoming reorganization. So really the argument over who has it "harder" is spurious at best, and just another way that women put eachother down and hold eachother back at worst. In this case, after reading two weeks of totally tone deaf and completely off the mark commentary from Susan, I'll just chalk it up to total cluelessness. But I will agree that Susan's pat little "oooh it's soooo much easier to sit at a desk all day and play solitaire at a job you don't really have!" is pretty offensive to anyone that actually has, y'know, a real job.

Pmegan - you make some good points, but writing a brief/delegating projects is something an employee comes into after at least a few years of sweating it out at the bottom of the pyramid, often after earning a professional degree. In many professions, working is harder than staying at home. As a stay-at-home-parent, the stakes are limited to your own family and you're vested with authority merely by virtue of being mom or dad. I find staying at home all day with the kids exhausting, but it's work my husband and I can pay a nanny to do and it simply doesn't involve the competing constituencies a career/home split does. It's stressful only to the extent that children can be frustrating and unreasonable (I'm not talking about kids with legitimate challenges here, of course), but you can't get fired or demoted as a parent. I can't pay somebody to go into the office to be me for the day.

I have female stay-at-home-parent friends who have told me how much they envy that I can go to work and "talk to grownups" all day, as if that's all I do! It's totally infantilizing and enraging, but I can't say anything lest I seem as though I'm "judging" (heaven forbid) my friends who plainly have no concept of what it's like to work and have a family. I wouldn't have it any other way as I enjoy having a challenging job, but I often get that sentiment that I'm somehow playing dress-up by going to work.

Well put pmegan, although I'd disagree that an office job cannot be "hard." I'm a lawyer, and I think my job is quite difficult, as I'm sure the original poster's job is difficult. Some things get routine and easier with practice, but there are always also many knew things that are difficult, at least for me.

But, I once switched jobs and had the opportunity to take 6 weeks off of unused leave between those jobs. I stayed home with our two young kids during that time. I'll tell ya, after about 3 weeks I was counting down the days to going back to work. Was it hard in the intellectual sense? No, but as you said pmegan, it is DRAINING. It is hard to explain exactly why that is, but it is.

You don't have to be a genius to take care of a kid all day (thank God), but you do need to be conscientious, responsible, good at solving problems, and patient. It ain't easy being all those things 24/7/365.

Okay, Erica C, the part where I said it's not a contest? It's not a contest. Just because you can delegate it to someone else doesn't make it easy. While I don't know what you do, I bet your boss could replace you in about two hours if he or she tried hard enough and the new person could do just as good a job as you're doing within a week. Okay, maybe a month. What you say about the brief is exactly what I was saying too: if you're in the position to be writing that brief, you probably have enough experience that it's not actually all that hard. If it were, your boss would be better off finding someone else to write it. If you and I were to switch jobs, I would probably find your job very difficult indeed: but I don't have the training and experience that brought you to your current position. But presumably you were hired for your job because you know what you're doing. And I beg to differ that you can't get fired or demoted as a parent... the reason it's so exhausting (not hard, but just mentally exhausting) is that there are a few years there when a visit to the ER potentially waits around every corner. Of the three little scenarios I mentioned, only one is dangerous: but replace "crayons" with "knife I was just using to chop the carrots" and the potential for the fight over the toy to turn physical, and that's what parents (and caretakers) are also on the lookout for. I'm sorry that you feel belittled when your friends make small talk, but I'm sure they don't mean anything by it. I hope that you don't respond by talking about how easy it is to pay someone else to take care of your kids, because that's pretty insulting too. As I said, it's really not a contest and to make it such just feeds into the really nasty Mommy Wars marketing strategy that makes us all feel shitty about our lives (so that we buy more products). And in reply A Dude, I'm not trying to belittle anyone's job by saying that it's a piece of cake: I just disagree that most white collar jobs are all that hard. Desk jobs with no support or precedence to rely on are rare. Most jobs certainly have periods or situations which are hard... I'm not saying that you never meet challenges or have a really nasty little problem to solve. But I would say that in most desk jobs, the day to day minutia is not all that difficult for the person who is doing it. And I would say the same thing about being an at home parent: there are some really hard situations that come along every once and a while, but most of the time, it's not actually hard. I don't know, perhaps this is all a silly conversation anyway. I mean, what exactly does "hard" mean? What a subjective term. All I know is that I've been glued to this ridiculous column for the past two weeks, and I'm glad it's over and we can all move on with our lives knowing that, yes indeed, some people have absolutely perfect little lives with perfect little children, jobs that you can put in 3 hours a day at, and a giant money bush growing in the back yard.

I stay at home with my kids and I think going into work everyday, whether that job is writing briefs or ringing up customers as a cashier, would be infinitely harder. Why? Because I'd have to leave my kids everyday and I'd much rather give my time to the kids than sell it to somebody else for $12 an hour.

Sure, I joke that I'm "stuckathome" because the measly salary I could earn would never cover the cost of daycare (well, *maybe* I'd be left with a buck or two for every hour I worked, but I'd rather clip coupons instead), but I can't deny that I'd much rather be here with them than out there, answering to somebody else every day. There are no deadlines, dress codes or angry customers here.

Quite obviously it depends on the nature of the work, and also what you mean be "hard." One thing that's often missed, though, is the lack of ego-reward in working with children. Your focus is entirely on someone else ALL DAY (of course this is true of many jobs as well).

ACCOUNTABILITY - the stakes at home are small - run out of TP? No big deal - use Kleenex. Kid uses marker on the wall? No problem; grab the leftover paint and a brush.

The stakes at work are anything but small - demotion, getting fired, forced into an undesirable transfer or resigning, pay decrease (even w/ excellent performance), no promotions, formal written reprimand.......

No parent gets a goal sheet every year, filled with near-to-impossible numerical targets to reach, which is pulled out again at the end of the year to determine if you met all, some, few, or none of the goals...with consequences to those in the some, few, or none categories. You will not be jailed for raising a junkie, burglar, murderer...

That doesn't contradict anything I said, it actually quite agrees. All of those are stressors about the job, not anything that is practically difficult in the day to day completion of your job. You can just throw all of the examples you mentioned into the list I made of stressful, worrisome things about your job.

I don't think it necessarily has to be a contest, but there's definitely a difference in degree between the cluelessly blustery prose we've suffered through in the last two weeks and the real, daily-grind, draining, nerve-wracking work/life dynamic that most of us experience, whether we take care of kids or slog through the daily grind at a job.

For instance, I have a friend about my age who is a SAHM. The mom stays home, the dad goes to work, and their one son is school-aged. Is her life easier than mine? Absolutely, and without question. While their youngster is in school, she runs the errands, tidies up, and then works on whatever hobbies she likes. She takes naps, plays with the Internet, performs cooking experiments, goes shopping, etc. She's quite aware that her life is pretty leisurely, and she's a little bit self-conscious in talking about it with me, because I wish I had time for all those things. I don't begrudge her or her husband for any of it--it's the life they've chosen and they seem to be enjoying themselves, and their son is pretty happy too. Now, their experience is not universal; caring for multiple children, especially if they are much younger, is a lot more difficult than minding one elementary-school child who is at school most of the day. And not everyone has the resources that my friend and her husband have. But overall, it CAN be easier for SAHMs.

Now, I have no kids and I live alone, but I have a long commute, a mentally demanding job, and barely any time to attend to my personal effects/errands/food shopping. Everything that my friend does during the day, I have to do on my own at night, at the mercy of mass transit. I like my lifestyle and I like my job, but if we had to compare who had more leisure hours, more sleep, and fewer worries about life in general, my friend would win hands-down.

It's not a race or a competition, of course, but it's an interesting juxtaposition: Is my life more demanding than that of these two Slate writers? Absolutely. Is my life harder than ALL stay-at-home moms? Not at all. But there are plenty of grey areas on the continuum between full-time working and full-time childcare, and everyone's circumstances are different.

Here I am again who started this thread. Interesting comments to my original comment about how cliched it is for SAHM to sit around and tell each other that THEIR job is so much harder than if they went to work each day. I feel like trying to succeed in the professional world where there are ten gunners for every person who has worked hard to get where they are, having children and caring about them, and trying to keep the job, and stay ahead, or at least stay where you are, is akin to running a marathon with at least one hand tied behind your back. The population of professional white collar single moms is really quite small because the world--not necessarily intentionally mind you-just conspires to make it difficult. Almost every attorney I work with is married and has a SAHM for a wife. Whereas I, attempt to to most of the jobs of the SAHM, and also concurrently work at their level. It's really a crazy hamster wheel and ultimately I can see I am destined for failure. My loyalties are much more divided than theirs. Perhaps it is my failure for expecting that I can do it all. I don't know. And I had two three month maternity leaves and I know intimately how draining it can be to be home with a baby, bottomless pit of needs, then with a baby and a toddler, both bottomless pits of needs! It was a hard summer. But now, as they are older, the SAHM life is really quite cushy. So a distinction probably needs to be drawn between the early years of SAHM (quite hard) and the later years (quite cushy.)

But this bloggers chirpy take Oh How Much Easier It Was To Be At Work With All Those Grownups needs take a reality pill and realize that probably all those Nice Grownups She Can Play With At The Office would probably gladly push her down a well if it meant they could get ahead. And that almost all of her free time would become devoted to basic necessities of life (the so called "Second Shift") so that any personal time to exercise, or have a hobby, or interact with her husband, would be completely missing, and that she could look forward to that type of existence for the next 15 to 20 years of her life. Hey, this wouldn't be all bad if it could just end two weeks from now. But no. I've got years of this existence to look forward to.