Stay-at-Home-Mom Depression Is Not Only Real, It’s Become a Crisis
During her nine years as a SAHM, the mother of three has struggled on and off with the same depression that plagued her in college. “As a mom, especially as a mom who stays at home and suffers from depression, you just don’t have that time to take care of yourself because you’re so busy taking care of your family,” she says. “You do it because you don’t have a choice.”
Even for women who never suffered from depression, the transition to at-home parenting may be especially hard for mothers who had careers before having children. The loss of the identity and self-worth a woman’s career provided to her is real, and loss is a trigger, says Susan Silver, a psychotherapist in Illinois. “When we think about loss, we usually think about death or divorce, but any major change can be a source of depression,” she says.
Complicating matters is the fact that depression is often overlooked among SAHMs because not going to work every day is viewed as a privileged choice. It’s lucky. That often means moms who struggle may feel they don’t have the right to speak out. “I told myself that so many other women would kill to be home with their kids all day, so I bottled up my feelings for fear of seeming ungrateful,” says Pamela Gillett, 32, a former stay-at-home mom of two from Michigan who went back to part-time work (before the pandemic) in order to cope.
Compounding the pressure that many at-home moms put on themselves to not feel ungrateful is the message that if you’re at home and unhappy, you have only yourself to blame. Common advice given to at-home moms—get up early so you can have me time or exercise at home—send the message that if you only worked a little harder, you wouldn’t be so miserable.
At the height of some of my own depressive episodes as a SAHM, I can remember crying while pushing my daughter outside in her little baby swing, telling myself over and over that I should be happy just to be with her, or crying when I had to drag four little kids with me to get my teeth cleaned, yet again, because finding a reliable sitter is not as easy as all of those “helpful” articles make it out to be. Not being able to voice my own misery or find the help that I knew I needed only served to make me feel like even more of a failure as a mom.
Those messages may be amplified by the other demands coming out of the pandemic–work-at-home coworkers who may be less than sympathetic about the plight of working with kids underfoot, complaints from the childfree about being “bored” in quarantine (Was I actually jealous when my own sister contracted a mild case of COVID-19 and lamented over being stuck home alone with TV and food delivery? Yes, yes, I was, and I’m not proud, okay?), or the strange pressure to come out of this whole thing somehow better, fitter, and adept at baking homemade sourdough bread.
How common is stay-at-home-mom depression?
The reality is, the very structure of stay-at-home mothering can make a woman who is already prone to depression even more susceptible. “As a person, you need conversation, you need human interaction, you need stimuli that as a SAHM you don’t get on a daily basis,” Moeslein says. “That’s something nobody talked to me about before I had kids.” Modern family dynamics are getting worse at supporting this, Silver says—extended family members like cousins are less likely to live nearby, and grandparents are more likely to be working and living their own active lives. Those key forms of social communities once available to SAHMs aren’t always there anymore. The systemic struggles that SAHMs face are also a very real part of the problem—from the way we treat mothers postpartum (spend 15 minutes with a doctor checking in on your health after giving birth and hope that covers it!) to the lack of paid maternity leave. The message to moms is clear: You’re on your own, lady.
