Housewives break the mould
The days of the stay-at-home mum are long gone. I don’t just mean that fewer women are choosing to stay home and look after kids, as Statistics NZ informed us all last year. I mean that those who do stay home are something else entirely. Even I am not sure what to call them.
It may sound strange, but that change is intricately related to the announcement that Uber is launching in Hamilton.
Well, it’s related to Uber existing, in any case. It’s all a part of the changing world Alison Mau bemoaned last month about how Airbnb is destroying local communities.
I’m an Airbnb hostess, and a mum, so the column got me thinking about just how many of my stay-at-home mum friends do similar sorts of work. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more difficult it was to find friends who were at home fulltime and not earning money somehow.
Most of us are making money off the ‘‘disruptor’’ businesses in one way or another. We might do Airbnb, which disrupted traditional accommodation. We might (now) do Uber, which disrupted the way we commute. We might sell stuff we make on Trade Me or similar platforms. We might sell our skills – like writing or design – over the internet, which disrupted almost everything about traditional work.
If you’re really good, you can even make money off a blog or YouTube account while a stay-athome mum.
I know the internet has been around for a while.
But until recently you still (as I’ve mentioned) needed to have a skill to make money from home using the internet.
Now, all you need is a spare room and the ability to clean. Or a car, a licence and some manners. Suddenly, you’re earning money without having to head back into the office.
Mau might think we’re killing local communities but, for most of us, the upsides are enormous.
That’s because for the majority of families, having one parent stay at home fulltime with the kids is just too financially tough.
Heading back to work, on the other hand, can mean extra pressure on family time, on marriages, and (ironically) on the budget depending on daycare costs.
But the moment you sign up to Airbnb, or start doing Uber, or find a way to sell skills or goods over the internet, you get the best of both worlds.
A spare room that bumped the mortgage up a little is now paying for itself. The cost of running a car is suddenly subsumed by the amount you make off moving it from place to place. Even that group you go to on Tuesday to do Kiwi-themed needlework with could be worth something now that Airbnb ‘‘Experience’’ has launched, allowing locals to sell their insider knowledge as tour guides.
It all means ordinary, every day stay-at-home mums like me get to spend as much time as we like with the kids, and have enough to pay the mortgage off each week. We may not be raking it in, but we have enough, which is more than we would have otherwise.
Formal numbers on all of this are a little difficult to find since, for the most part, councils and government bodies are still catching up with the way technology is changing life.
But if my little corner of the stay-at-home mum universe is anything to go by, that community-killing technology is making family life, and the opportunities for women, a whole lot easier.
When there are so many opportunities out there, with such flexibility built into them, it’s easy to see why we modern housewives are breaking the mould.