A dispute over stay-at-home mom finances sits at the heart of one reader’s question to Business Insider’s For Love & Money column: her husband earns well into six figures, their home and cars are paid off, and yet he resists her plan to leave work, homeschool their youngest three children, and take on the full weight of domestic life.
The couple has five children between the ages of seven and 16. The letter-writer earns a fraction of her husband’s salary. Her argument is that leaving work would not eliminate much childcare spending because her children are past the ages when daily care costs are highest. Her husband’s counter is that public school is free, so paying for her to quit when it is not strictly necessary makes no sense to him.
The Real Cost of Childcare, and What It Tells You
His instinct has some logic behind it. The national average annual price of childcare for one child in 2024 was $13,128, according to Child Care Aware of America. In 45 states and the District of Columbia, the average annual cost of childcare for two children in a centre exceeded annual mortgage payments. With older children and no mortgage, the direct childcare offset this family would gain from her staying home is limited.
But the financial picture has layers his argument does not fully address. Homeschooling is not a niche preference at the margins of American education. There are an estimated 3.408 million homeschool students in grades K-12 in the United States in 2024-2025, representing approximately 6.262% of the school-age population, according to the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI). A 2026 review by Ray, Hoelzle, and Pietersma, published by NHERI, found that 64% of peer-reviewed or representative-sample studies on social, emotional, and psychological development show homeschool students perform statistically significantly better than those in conventional schools.
Those numbers do not make homeschooling the right choice for every family. They do reframe it as an educational option with a body of research behind it, which is precisely the kind of material that belongs in a financial and values conversation with a sceptical spouse.
Making the Stay-at-Home Mom Finances Case
The challenge in any stay-at-home mom finances disagreement is translating a domestic aspiration into a document a financially cautious partner can engage with. The column’s columnist, Olivia Christensen, advises the letter-writer to build a pitch: monthly budget modelling, a projection of what her salary actually contributes after tax, and an honest account of what homeschooling requires in time and cost.
One concrete item worth including is the tax treatment of a one-income household. Under IRS Publication 503, a family with a stay-at-home parent cannot use a Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account; both spouses must be working or actively seeking work to qualify. The Dependent Care Credit carries the same condition. For a couple currently using either benefit, her leaving work would eliminate access to those tax-advantaged tools, and that cost belongs in the spreadsheet.
On the other side of the ledger: if the family were to hire childcare workers to cover any remaining gaps, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median hourly wage for childcare workers at $15.41 in May 2024. Across a full year, even part-time coverage adds up. That figure is a useful benchmark for what her unpaid labour is worth when modelled honestly rather than treated as having no monetary value.
The Values Question Underneath the Money
Christensen draws a distinction worth separating from the financial mechanics. The husband agrees with his wife’s reasons for wanting to homeschool. He has not rejected the idea; he has objected to the mechanism of funding it. That is a narrower gap than it may feel when living inside the disagreement.
His reluctance to carry the full financial load, including discretionary spending and retirement contributions for her, is a real concern that needs to be addressed directly rather than assumed. The IRS rules on dependent care benefits, the childcare cost data, the homeschooling research, and a clear-eyed account of her salary’s net contribution after tax: these are the building blocks of a proposal he can respond to with specifics, rather than an argument he can deflect on principle.
Christensen’s advice is to give him room to articulate exactly what worries him about the arrangement. He has apparently never stated it plainly. Asking directly, and going into that conversation having already done the numbers, shifts stay-at-home mom finances from a recurring emotional standoff into a decision the couple can actually make together.
The eldest child is 16. The window for homeschooling the youngest three is finite. That timeline makes the next conversation the one that matters.