How to Fight Productivity Guilt as a Stay at Home Dad

All stay at home parents have had it: That hamster wheel feeling at the end of the day.

You get up early, do the morning routine, get breakfast in, juggle keeping however many kids you have occupied in the morning, sling lunch, play a game, a bit of laundry during a too-short nap, take a walk, have supper, give a bath, read a story, put the kids to bed, reset the house – with all the joys and drudgery and laughter and tantrums in between the steps. At the end of it all can come the nagging question:

What did I actually get done today?

In the moment, it feels like the answer is, “Nothing.” I didn’t work on anything, didn’t get any projects done, have nothing to show for the day. Zero productivity. The house looks the same as it did this morning, and I’ve got the prospect of getting up and doing it all over again tomorrow.

For you, productivity means getting all of this put back away only for it to look as though you’d never been there at all. Find a way to be okay with this.

While all of that is a natural reaction to have in the moment, know that it’s rooted in a fundamental falsehood about the value of your effort and what “productivity” really means for you. Here are some things to bear in mind as you consider your role within your family:

Your productivity “hustle” as a stay at home dad looks different from a bachelor’s.

Go on any social media platform, poke the algorithm with a few prompts, and you’ll get a tidal wave of “hustle culture” content. Rise and grind, work work work, you don’t have things because you’re not doing things, here are eleventy hacks to maximize your productivity while you’re sleeping. If that’s how they want to frame their lives, that’s their business, but know in your inmost soul that this does not apply to you. You’ve got different allegiances which bring different priorities. Don’t turn any of those quippy quotes into gospel, because they’re not for you. 

And I don’t mean “not for you” in the sense of “that’s a higher plane you’re not entitled to.” I mean “not for you” in the sense of “the medicine at the zoo is not for you.” It may suit a different beast just fine, but it won’t only do you no good, it would be harmful. Just like you have no guilt about not taking that medicine, you should feel no guilt about not internalizing hustle culture. It simply has no application in your life at present. Productivity means something different for you.

Don’t let yourself get shamed by “self-sufficient” productivity porn.

I put “self-sufficient” in quotes because the term itself is a fantasy – nobody is dependent upon only themselves. Plenty of people will tell you they are and that you can be too, though, so another vein of social media subculture you need to defend your mind against is ‘self-sufficiency’ culture. It won’t take you many clicks down this rabbit hole before you’re watching people harvesting food from the wild and cooking it from scratch, building cabins with hand tools, sewing all their own clothing, survival prepping, and forging metal tools using hardwood charcoal they made in their own kiln. Everything is thought through, methodical, quietly brilliant and thorough.

Meanwhile, you’re in a pitched argument with a toddler about what constitutes a serving of chocolate milk after your aborted attempt at a shower because she went on impromptu nap strike, wondering why you suck so incredibly much when the dapper cabin-dwelling survivalist cooks with forged spatulas are living their best lives as productivity gods.

There are certain realities you cannot avoid as a stay at home dad, and one of them is that a kid is a time vortex. Everything takes two to ten times as long when you have your child in tow, and there is most always absolutely nothing you can safely do to change this.

In a past life you could have decided to go somewhere, thrown clothes on, grabbed your wallet and keys, and been on your way in the space of a few minutes. When you’re a parent though – and especially if you’re single handed in the moment – you’d be doing well to only quintuple that. And if you’re teaching along the way, whether it’s about getting dressed, toileting, tying shoelaces, or something else, it could easily be 10x or more.

And you know what? That. Is. Okay.

Beyond okay, it’s often essential. Paring this down would either mean uselessly haranguing your kids to go faster, doing everything for them, or going so fast as to forget important items or skip safety considerations. So don’t wallow in guilt or frustration about your time getting sapped. That’s the name of the game. Remind yourself this pervasive culture of constant motion and output is fundamentally detrimental, even to someone with the time to invest into it.

Maintaining the status quo is a win, and any extra productivity is a bonus.

You have to invert your thinking about productivity as a stay at home parent. In a normal workplace, you go into a static environment, introduce your toil into it, and create something with it that you have to show for your efforts at the end of the day. Even if it’s something intangible like a spreadsheet or a person served, there is some sign of your presence at the end of your day.

At home, though, the opposite dynamic is at play. Kids are agents of entropy – they leave everything they touch less organized in their wake. Clothes dirtied, toys strewn, food splattered, furniture soiled. Unchecked, your home will devolve into chaos with your kids moving through it. If your home’s orderliness were to be graphed out when you’ve got kids, the progress line would always be sagging down and to the right. Your work as a stay at home parent involves constantly pulling it back up.

Keeping it anywhere near the zero line at the end of the day is demoralizing at a glance. “I didn’t make any progress!” Again, though, your productivity has to be measured by the distance from where you wind up to whatever negative state your home would be in without your intervention, not to zero. If you’re able to tack anything on so that you pull the graph to the positive, you’re doing exceptionally well. Don’t guilt yourself for not doing more than this, because it’s simply unfair.

Treat cost savings as income in your mind to combat guilt about your productivity.

Coming from a background featuring traditional mindsets about gender roles, I have over time struggled with my role as a stay at home dad. There’s an insidious nagging voice in my head that says, “You’re not contributing. You’re not providing any income. You don’t deserve anything discretionary, because you shouldn’t spend money you’re not making.” My income-earning wife couldn’t be more supportive or expressive of gratitude for the work I do, but old ghosts can be difficult to scatter. If you’ve ever had similar thoughts, remind yourself of something I’ve tried to keep front of mind:

What would it cost for you to do something else?

If you were to pay someone to do what you do in the course of a day, how much money would be flowing out? Were you to need meal preparation services, house cleaning, transportation services, daycare, home repair, landscaping, or a hundred other things, how many dollars would it require to replace you?

I realize that’s impossible to quantify, but if you can get a hazy idea (which, no matter your circumstance, would be many thousands of dollars a year at minimum), you can frame that dollar figure as the equivalent of income in your mind. A penny saved really is a penny earned here – there’s no functional difference between an added positive and a subtracted negative in your finances. Besides that, though, you also have to price in the intangibles:

How much value do you put in directly raising your kids versus their being cared for by others? How many illnesses (with all of their direct and indirect expenses) are you avoiding by keeping your kids out of full time daycare? How much pride of ownership are you enjoying by maintaining your own home versus contracting the work out? Those questions, and hundreds of similar ones, all have some dollar figure associated with them which should be framed as added value to your labor in your mind.

You are not “unemployed.” You have a job without a commute.

Don’t self-talk about being “unemployed,” and be mindful of even jesting about it. You’re not a mooch, you’re not a bum, and don’t let anybody suggest you are – not even yourself. You’ve got a job. If your kid is awake, you’re on the clock.

It’s easy to tell yourself you’re working zero hours if you’re not getting a pay stub, but the fact is that you’re likely working 85-100 hour weeks in this job. That doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy your job – I hope you do. But with regard to finance, you’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that your recompense comes in non-monetary forms. To find contentment and peace, you need to not only be okay with this, but to celebrate it.

Fellow stayers at home, you are enough. You’re doing enough. You need not pile on your mind, body, or soul the notion that you need to have a bunch of deliverables in order to count as a man.

Seriously, the kids are output enough. Give yourself a break, because they sure won’t.

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This post was previously published on THEUNBOTHEREDFATHER.COM.

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