you dont have to be a parent to understand the horror of walking into a room to discover that the baby crawled out of his crib and onto that pottery wheel you forgot to turn off, and while the baby is spinning around and around, the dog is sitting there all calm, like a person, gently using his paws to fashion the babys soft cartilage head into something a little more modern. it might be the classic tale of bad parenting, but lets see where the dog is going with this
This post is from 2013. It has less than 100 notes. Together we can revive this work of art that tragically ahead of its time. Weâre ready for it now
Most stay-at-home moms simply canât afford child care.
Can you remember the first time you heard about âtradwivesâ? I canât, and yet I have the vague feeling that at some point a handful of years ago, all at once, the term became inescapable. On phone screens across the United States, beautiful women with glossy hair seemed to materialize en masse, flipping sizzling patties of meat and rocking impossibly calm babies. Conservative commentators embraced them as evidence that women want to stay home. Critics called them agents of a regressive right-wing agenda.
Now, in 2026, Americans seem just as captivated. This spring, Caro Claire Burke released her debut novel, Yesteryear, which follows a modern-day tradwife influencer who wakes up in 1855 and has to face what âtraditionalâ life really looks like. It became a near-immediate best seller; Amazon MGM Studios snatched up the film rights, with Anne Hathaway set to star and produce. In April, Hulu began airing the series The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaidâs Tale that depicts teen girls trained to be docile homemakers. Instead of math or English, theyâre taught to embroider, to cookâand to regard a provider husband as the ultimate goal.
The truth, though, is that the tradwifeâas symbol, TikTok genre, source of fascination, and wedge in Americaâs culture warâdoesnât easily map onto a real-life category of person. The women who post about their impeccable meals and beloved husbands might be better understood as businesswomen; some are making huge sums from this work, supporting their families. And other stay-at-home mothersâwell, theyâre not all in it for the love of domesticity. Many are just exhausted, low-income moms who canât afford child care. âThe real path to becoming a tradwife,â Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me, âis typically through economic precarity.â
The housewife of popular imagination has never been much more than a fantasy. Even the 1950s homemakerâan iconic vision of domestic bliss, standing in the kitchen in heels and a frilly apronârepresented only a small slice of mid-century women, Caitlyn Collins, a Washington University in St. Louis sociology professor, told me. White women with high-earning husbands were generally the ones who could afford to stay home, while many other womenâespecially women of color, whose husbands made far less on averageâhad to work low-wage jobs to help pay the bills.
Since then, the situation has flipped: Child care has grown so expensive that many low-income women who want to work canât afford to get a job. Of course, plenty of struggling moms are still employed outside the home; many of them rely on family members, neighbors, or older kids to watch young children for free, as some women of previous generations did. But not everyone has that option. A great number of parents, especially ones without college degrees, are struggling to bear the cost of professional child care. In low-income families, if only one parent works, they tend to be eligible for much-needed state benefits. But if both work, they might fall into what Calarco calls the âmissing middleâ of Americaâs social safety net: Their combined salaries bump up their income just enough that they no longer qualify for aid. And then they need to pay for child careâwhich, without assistance, they simply canât manage.
When one parent in a straight couple needs to stay home, that role typically falls to the motherâeven when both partners say they want an egalitarian division of labor, Calarco told me. Male-dominated fields tend to be higher-paid, she said, so a lot of women feel that giving up their job simply makes most sense; then, in many cases, their husband finds that any hope for a raise lies in working longer hours. The women are left with an even heavier burden of unpaid laborâand a shrinking likelihood of getting back into the workforce. Once those women are financially dependent, she added, some of them grow afraid to ask their husband for more help: âThey have no bargaining power.â
This is the precarity-to-tradwife pipeline. Families with stay-at-home moms are three times more likely than dual-income families to fall below the supplemental poverty line, according to one report from the think tank Century Foundation. For her book Holding It All Together: How Women Became Americaâs Safety Net, Calarco surveyed about 2,000 parents across the U.S.âand found that among families with stay-at-home moms, roughly 75 percent had a household income under $50,000 a year. Roughly half of those families were receiving food stamps and Medicaid, and more than two-thirds reported difficulty paying bills. And although some of these moms really did want to stay home with their kids, most of those she interviewed said theyâd love to get a job if they could.
One woman she spoke with, referred to as Erin in the book, told Calarco that neither she nor her husband were offered paid family leave through work. They didnât qualify for the public child-care program where they lived in Indiana, but they couldnât afford any other option. When their son was born, Erin took a night-shift job at a grocery store; sheâd clock in after taking care of her infant all day. But then she virtually never slept. Thatâs how she ended up as a stay-at-home mom. She told Calarco that she still dreams about going back to work. When she crunches the numbers, though, they never add up in her favor.
Erinâs everyday life bears little resemblance to that of, say, Hannah Neelemanâthe tradwife influencer known as Ballerina Farm, who has more than 10 million Instagram followers, employs a team of gardeners, and sells electrolyte powders with âhand-harvested French sea salt,â which she markets by concocting homemade spritzes garnished with shaved lemon peel. (Her husband is the son of JetBlueâs founder, who reportedly has a net worth of more than $400 million.) In fact, Collins said, anyone who makes stay-at-home parenting look glamorous likely has some help: if not a fleet of gardeners, then perhaps in-laws shooing the kids out of the frame, or at least pocket money to send out the laundry.
Yet the Pinterest version of stay-at-home parenting, as Collins put it, might still appeal to a lot of moms who are plunged into a far less chic realityâmoms who want to feel that thereâs romance in what theyâre doing, or at least some dignity. Many women, Calarco found, experience a lot of shame after leaving formal employment: about not working, or falling short of exacting and expensive intensive-parenting standards, or using government benefits. (Erin, for one, was determined to not use the food stamps her family became eligible for when she quit her job.) Some of those Calarco spoke with were drawn toward communities, such as conservative mom groups and evangelical churches, that assuaged some of that lonely self-consciousness. âThey tell them, No, this is your rightful place. This is the most important work that you could be doing,â Calarco said. âAnd thatâs a really validating message.â
For some mothers, leaning into the housewife identity may be easier than accepting that youâve been pushed out of the workforce by circumstances beyond your control. Or perhaps a lot of moms have just internalized the very American idea that parenting is their responsibility alone. For Collinsâs book Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving, she interviewed 135 mothers in the U.S., Sweden, Germany, and Italy. In the three European countries, Collins said, mothers generally assumed theyâd have parenting support from their government, their employer, and their partner. And they do get that, at least to a greater degree than mothers in the United States. All three nations have some federally mandated parental leave, for fathers as well as mothers. They have public child-care systems that, though not always perfect, are generally affordable and high quality. They tend to have more options for flexibility, such as part-time work and parental-leave days that can be used over time, when an employee chooses. There, as here, moms still tend to take on more child care than dads. But the decision between paid and unpaid work isnât always so starkly all-or-nothing.
When Collins asked moms in the U.S. how they thought the government might better support them, she said, most âjust totally drew a blank.â That they might get some helpâindeed, that they might be owed itâhad not even occurred to them. Collins posed a question to me: If we woke up tomorrow in a country that guaranteed six months of highly compensated parental leave, where everyone had affordable day care near their home, where part-time work existed across industries, would the tradwife exist? Even if some women would still choose to stay home, maybe the trope wouldnât be dominating popular culture in the way that it currently is.
In the U.S. that actually exists, the average parent has to make difficult trade-offs. When the New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson interviewed 120 midlife adults about their thoughts on work-family conflicts, she found that among participants who adopted a âhypertraditionalâ approach to gender roles, 55 percent of women and 50 percent of men wanted a more equitable balance. Women tended to want more career possibilities, and men more time with their kids. The participants who were trying to share duties across gender lines were happier with their approach than any other group was; 88 percent of women and 81 percent of men said that they preferred it to any other option. But even they tended to feel dissatisfied. Their commitment to caregiving left them worn down, short on sleep and personal time, and worried about underperforming at work.
When Collins teaches about child-care costs, studentsâusually young womenâfind her after class, panicking, asking, âHow can I possibly have kids?â The tough thing is that thereâs only so much she can say to ease their minds. She tells them to remember these challenges when they vote and also when they look for jobs: Whatâs this employerâs parental-leave policy? Does the office have lactation rooms?
The tougher thing is that her students arenât the ones who most need to worry. Thanks to their level of education, theyâre relatively likely to get higher-earning jobs with flexible hours, to have the bargaining power to demand help from their partner, to be able to outsource care so that they can keep working. If any of them become tradwives, they may be among the lucky ones whoâve actually chosen it.
thinking about âyou havenât met all the people who will love youâ and like!!! you also havenât found all the things that will make you happy!!!! there will always be new authors and musicians and artists whose work you will one day discover and love!!!! there will always be new hobbies and skills for you to learn and feel fulfilled by!!! there will always be new things around the corner that will bring sudden and unexpected happiness!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm not a psychology researcher, but my guess would be that the nature of it being a time-limited puzzle game where you have to juggle multiple factors means that your short-term memory gets filled and the traumatic images are "dumped" in favor of remembering how many times to rotate the L piece. "As soon as possible" is probably because the sooner you do it, the less likely it is to become part of your long-term memory.
If that is true, then other time-limited activities where you have to remember and plan in a tight time frame may serve a similar purpose.
This can have an effect hours after the traumatic event happens too! All participants were treated within about 6 hours and played for a total of 20 minutes of Tetris (with at least one play time of 10 minutes straight).
Here are the links given in the screenshot:
Tetris has been proposed as a preventive intervention to reduce intrusive memories of a traumatic event. However, no neuroimaging study has
A single dose psychological intervention, which includes using the computer game Tetris, can prevent the unpleasant, intrusive memories that
Here is the paper that the second link uses as a source:
After psychological trauma, recurrent intrusive visual memories may be distressing and disruptive. Preventive interventions post trauma are
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but the doctor down the street who gives me my T shots
in a clinic so small that it's just two rooms
was excited for me when she said my voice had dropped
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but the receptionist who could see that I was a man
didn't bat an eyelash when I asked to see the gynecologist
and called me sir when he asked how I wanted to pay
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but the barber cuts my hair exactly how I want it
and never gave me strange looks for being in a men's salon
not even back when I didn't pass as one
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but my friends have always gendered me correctly
and stick to it even when it confuses other people
and my friend's little sibling calls me older brother in Kannada
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but my dog learned my new name quicker than the humans
and she runs to give me a kiss when she's told to
without being confused about who's being referred to
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but I can feel the Adam's apple growing in my throat
and my muscles getting stronger, and my smile more real
and I'm growing a beard, and I talk more freely
yes, India made legal gender change impossible
but I'm here, and I'm alive, and so are you
and there are good people, people who care
and don't let them make you forget that--
you are not alone.
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