The stereotype suggests the housewives are an unhappy bunch. Think of the old hit TV series, ‘Desperate Housewives’. But a new study [1] paints a different picture. Stay-at-home mothers are less likely to suffer from depression or suicidal thoughts, and their use of certain medications and alcohol is also lower than the average.
Here in Ireland, the Government’s recent ‘National [2] Strategy for Women and Girls: Action Plan 2026–2028’ implicitly assumes that staying at home is somehow unfulfilling and that every woman’s dream is to work outside the home. So-called ‘tradwife’ accounts on social media are explicitly targeted as a bad influence.
Data from the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health analysed on behalf of the Institute for Family Studies in America presents a different picture.
The report author, Stephen Cranney, a data scientist with the Catholic University of America, looked at data covering adults aged 18 to 49 between 2021 and 2024. Stay-at-home parents were defined as those who said they were “keeping house full-time” and had at least one child under 18 living at home.
About 10pc of stay-at-home mothers experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year, compared with around 15pc of other women. In other words, stay-at-home mothers were only about two-thirds as likely as other women to have suffered a major depressive episode.
In addition, while 5pc of stay-at-home mothers reported suicidal thoughts in the previous year, the figure rose to 8pc of women who were not stay-at-home mothers.
The differences extend to the use of medication. Some 32pc of stay-at-home mothers had used prescription psychotherapeutic medication during the previous year, compared with 38pc of other women. This broad category includes pain relievers, tranquillisers, stimulants and sedatives, whether taken according to prescription or misused.
Across these measures, therefore, the familiar picture of the depressed, overmedicated housewife does not stand up to the evidence. This does not mean that every stay-at-home mother is happy, nor that working outside the home is somehow bad for women. The study itself stresses that the comparison group includes full-time and part-time workers, students and unemployed women, rather than career women alone.
But it does raise an important question. If women who stay at home with their children tend to suffer from somewhere fewer mental health problems than other women, then why is their choice still so often deprecated and portrayed as inherently unfulfilling?