Stay-at-Home Moms, Latchkey Kids, and Getting Yourself Back After 50 - Episode 344

Welcome And Why This Show Exists Sandy Kruse 0:02 Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Kruse. Welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. For many years now, I've been a trusted voice for people in midlife and beyond who want a deeper, more honest conversation about wellness. One that includes the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the esoteric.

Most episodes are solo now because I want to bring you thoughtful research, lived experience, and grounded insight without noise or bias. And when I do bring on a guest, it's because their work genuinely adds something meaningful to the conversation. Here we explore the full spectrum of what it means to be well, how the body functions, how the mind heals, how the spirit expands, and how all of these layers shape life lived with clarity and joy. Thanks for being here.

And if this show resonates with you, please follow, rate, review, and share it. It truly helps the message reach more people. The Quiet House And Big Questions Sandy Kruse 1:32 Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. Today I'm going to talk about something a little different.

And if you're over 50, you might be listening to this in a quiet house. That's the reality. The rooms that used to be really loud are empty. The calendar that used to be full of practices and tournaments has a lot of white space now.

And somewhere in that quiet, a question keeps coming up in your mind: Who am I now and who would I have been? And this is really to talk about leaving your career to stay home with your kids and what every woman needs to know. So this podcast episode is actually for any woman of any age, but probably the ones who have children. And if you're a woman over 50, you can pass this on to your daughter.

If your daughter is looking at, you know, having children, maybe staying home with her children, because I have to say I wish I had all of this information before I made a very emotional decision. And that was to stay home with my children, which I did. I left in 2007. And then I started, I went back to college and did a lot of things.

It's not like I didn't do a lot. I mean, my daughter got diagnosed with cancer. I got diagnosed with cancer. I became a big advocate for her, for me.

I built a couple of websites. A lot of stuff happened while I was home. So I wasn't really just home watching the children. And I want to start by saying, I do not have any regrets.

All I have now is wisdom and information to share. So if you're younger, maybe your mom sent you this podcast recording, maybe you're pregnant, or maybe you've got a baby at home and you're trying to decide whether to go back to work or stay home. Maybe you're doing the math on the daycare, the commute. Maybe it's the guilt, maybe it's the emotional side.

And a part of you already knows you're about to walk away from the career that you might have spent years building. So this episode is for both of you. For the mom that's over 50 and now has a quiet home, maybe winding down her career. I'm not.

I'm 56. I'm not stopping anytime soon. However, some of you are in that position where you are slowing down. So this episode is for both of you and all of you.

How about that? For the woman who already made the choice and for the daughter who's about to. So as I was saying, in 2007, I was making that same decision. I was a sales leader in the corporate world, building a very powerful career.

I walked into rooms, people knew my name, my numbers, my opinion, and I left it to stay home and raise my family. I don't have any regrets. I'd probably make the same choice again given the circumstances I was in, but nobody told me what it might actually cost or how to protect myself while I did it. And by protect, it's not like I was hurt in any way, but it's really more my own essence of who I am at my core.

So today I'm going to give you what I wish I had: some advice from somebody who's a little wiser than me. My mother always worked, my sister always worked, and that was great. And that was the choice that was made. And so this episode is really coming from honest research on whether it actually helps the kids, what happens to the woman, and real practical ways to do it without disappearing, and then to rise again on the other side of it, which is what I feel I've been doing for quite a few years now.

I'm going to pause for a second and ask you to hit subscribe wherever you are listening, because this is the work, my work, my research of somebody who's an independent podcaster, which there's not a lot of us around anymore. And I don't have a big machine behind me, but I've been doing this for it's coming up close to seven years. I am a registered holistic nutritionist, a certified metabolic balance coach with numerous certifications in health and wellness. And I used to interview a lot of prolific names in this industry.

And then this year I kind of took a shift to bring you more honest, unbiased information without trying to sell you a coupon code at the end. I've done a lot of work to get here. And a lot of the topics that I talk about really come from my heart and soul. And that's everything that I'm about.

It's yes, I'm about how to age better, but it's really in a holistic sense body, mind, spirit, soul versus I'm going to biohack my weight 120 years of age. I don't know if I even want to live that long. I really don't. So let's get on with today's topic.

Make sure you're following, subscribing. I'm Sandy Knutrition Everywhere. So let's start right here because this is the reason we do it. What Research Says Kids Need Sandy Kruse 7:34 The biggest study ever done on this, run by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, followed more than 1,300 children from birth into their teens.

Everyone expected the big story to be daycare versus mom at home, but it wasn't. How warm the parents were, how responsive family mattered more than childcare every single time they looked. And I actually talked about this in a past episode. Go back to my catalog.

I have a lot of great content there. But I talked about the nervous system of the mom. All of this matters so much more. In 2010, a review of 69 studies asked it straight out do kids of working moms do worse?

Overall, the answer was no. There was a small dip for some kids when mom went back to uh work full-time for the first year, and a clear benefit for kids in single-parent and lower income homes. Then Melissa Milkey and her team looked at how many hours mothers spent with kids between the ages three and eleven. The hours had almost no connection to how those kids turned out.

Not grades, not behavior, not emotional health. But there are two windows where your presence really does matter. The first is the very beginning. When Quebec rolled out low-cost universal daycare in 1997, economics tracking those kids found that the ones in full-time daycare, very, very young, showed more anxiety and aggression.

And some of it followed them into their teens. The second window surprised people. It's the teenage years. In that same Milky Studio, teenagers who spent more engaged time with their mothers got into less trouble, less drinking, less drugs, less delinquency.

So here's the honest answer. Staying home helps most in the first year or two, and again when they're teenagers. In between, they need a warm, steady, regulated mother who shows up. They don't need you to give up everything to be there.

And they're watching. Daughters of working mothers were more likely to have jobs, more likely to manage people, and earned more. Sons of working mothers grew up to do more of the caring in their own homes. Our kids don't copy what we tell them, they copy what they watch us do.

So Gen X Latchkey Lessons On Resilience Sandy Kruse 11:23 how we grew up and why we turned out fine. Now, think about how we were raised. If you're Gen X like me, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I grew up in the Greater Toronto area in the 1970s and 80s.

I'm a 1970 baby. We were latchkey kids. Most of us were, many of us were. The key on the shoelace around your neck, you let yourself in after school, made yourself a snack, and nobody was home until dinner.

As babies, we got put in a playpen and left to entertain ourselves. As kids, we got sent outside in the morning and told to come home when the street lights came on. Nobody really knew where we were. I mean, they can't mine did.

My parents did. My parents were always like a little deeper into our care, always. And maybe that goes to that whole thing about the emotional side. My parents were very emotionally invested in making sure we were safe and okay.

So this was actually the generation when mothers poured into the workforce. Millions of us came home to empty houses. And look at us. We're the generation that figured it out.

We're resourceful, independent, and kind of hard to rattle. We can, at least on the outside. The inside, there's a different story. You can look at my catalog, there's a lot there.

We can fix things, find our way, and handle a crisis without falling apart, at least outwardly. The research backs that up. Psychologist Peter Gray at Boston College has studied the decline of free play for many years. In the 1950s, the time kids spent playing freely without adults running the show has dropped steadily.

We know this. Over the same stretch, anxiety and depression in children and teens have climbed. His argument is that free play is how kids learn how to solve their own problems, handle their own fears, manage their own emotions, take it away, and they never build those muscles. Here in Canada, Mariana Brussoni at the University of BC studies what she calls risky play.

Climbing high, going fast, exploring out-of-sight adults, right? Her team's review of the research found that kids who get that kind of play are more active, more social, more creative, and more resilient. Norwegian researcher Ellen Sandster found the same thing. Kids who face small fears on their own get braver.

Kids who are protected from every fear stay afraid. Now here's the twist. Mothers spend far more time with their kids than our mothers did. Researchers Julia Dotisani and Judith Trias looked at 11 countries.

In 1965, mothers spent about 54 minutes a day on child care. By 2012, it had nearly doubled to about 104 minutes. And that's with way more mothers working. Working moms today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home moms did in the 1960s.

Not on the numbers that matter the most. Studies on overinvolved parenting, the helicopter kind, have found that college students raised that way report less confidence in their own abilities and more anxiety. Jonathan Hayt, in his book, The Anxious Generation, argues we overprotected kids in the real world and underprotected them online. So think about what that means.

We were left alone a lot and we built grit. Our kids got more attention than any generation in history, and many of them are more anxious than ever. More time with mom was never the magic ingredient. This is kind of the part that I wish I kind of understood more when I stayed home.

Being home was never the problem, and being home was also never the answer. What kids need is a parent who is warm and there when it counts. And then a lot of room to figure out life on their own. The kids didn't need all that, and neither did we.

So the kids are going to be okay. When A Woman Goes Unwitnessed Sandy Kruse 16:55 The question is now what happens with you? Where the women you were goes. Nobody warns you that it doesn't happen all at once.

I was home for many, many years. As I explained, I did do many other projects, and that's probably why I just keep going. But there's no day that you wake up and think, oh, she's gone. It happens in pieces so small that you never actually feel this, you know, almost disappearance of who you were.

It starts with your name, the rink that you're somebody's mom. No longer Sandy. At the dinner party, you're somebody's wife. The first time someone introduces you that way, all right, you kind of go, okay, fine.

By the hundredth time, people have forgotten you basically have a name for yourself. Then comes the question. So what do you do? I used to love that question.

I had an answer that made people lean in. I heard myself say, I'm home with the kids, and I watched their eyes drift to the next person. Here's what I didn't understand until much later. Back in 1902, a sociologist named Charles Cooley described something that he called the looking glass self.

We know who we are through how other people see us and reflect us back. At work, I had a hundred mirrors a day. Clients, my team, colleagues, numbers on the board. I was a leader.

Every one of them told me that I was sharp, I was good at this, I was a leader. The day that I left, those mirrors went dark. I was still that woman. So you didn't lose yourself, you lost your witnesses.

And when your witnesses go, everything folds into one role. Psychologist Patricia Linville found that when people that people whose sense of self is spread across many parts of life, work, friendships, passions are far steadier. When one part takes a hit, the others hold them up. When your whole identity lives inside one role, every crack in that role runs straight through you.

And motherhood is a role designed to shrink. If you do it right, they need you less every single year. So a woman who is only mother building her house on a ground that's meant to move. Underneath all of it, your brain is doing its own work.

In 2017, I can't pronounce her name. Showing that pregnancy physically reshapes a woman's brain in the regions that tune in to other people's needs. Those changes lasted at least two years. It's beautiful for a baby, but it means your brain is built for a while to point outward, add years of pointing outward at everyone else's schedule, and that becomes the only direction it knows.

Motherhood is the one role in the world where you literally lose yourself completely, yet it's considered the highest form of love. Sociologist Helen Rose Ebog studied what happens when people leave a big role. She called it role exit. People who leave don't just stop being something, they become an ex.

The ex-nun, the ex-cop, the ex-sales leader. I carried the ex sales leader around for years. It's a strange place to live, somewhere between who you were and who nobody has asked you to be yet. So if you're 50 something and wondering where she went, here's the first thing I want you to take away.

She didn't go anywhere. She was kind of erased. She just went unwitnessed. And a woman who goes unwitnessed can also be seen again.

Clearly. The Hidden Career And Money Penalties Sandy Kruse 22:14 Here's what it costs a brilliant woman. When she goes unwitnessed, the world keeps score. In 2005, Sylvia Ann Hewitt Hewlett published research in the Harvard Business Review on highly qualified women who stepped off the career track.

The average time was just over two years. When they came back, they lost 18% of their earning power. Only 74% made it, and only 40% to full-time work again. These aren't women who got less talented.

These are the most talented women paying a price that never gets back. But I will say one thing. However, I do know that I can say I have witnessed a lot of this. And I'm going to stop right there.

And then in addition to that, witnessing also becoming more bypassed in your own life, which I have talked about. These are things to consider. Heavy breath. In 2007, the same year that I left, sociologist Shelley Corral sent out identical resumes with one difference.

The mothers were rated less competent and offered lower pay. The fathers were not penalized at all. Then there's your voice at home. Marriage researchers, the blood and wolf, named it back in 1960, and it's held up for over 60 years.

The person who brings the money in tends to hold more of the say. Nobody sits you down and takes your vote away. Decisions just start getting made a little faster without you. Money moves, and you hear about it later.

Plans get set, and you're told where to be. And none of this happens because you're just sitting around eating bonbons. I was busier than I'd ever been in my corporate life. Tournaments, practices, lessons, school forums, carpools, being on all the time.

I was the reliable parent, the one who set the foundation for the family. I was the one who showed up every single time, even when I was really sick, because the other one was out earning the living for a family. Sociologist Alison Daminger calls this the cognitive labor of running a household, seeing what's needed before anyone else does, finding the options, deciding and making sure it all gets done. It takes a real mind and it never shows up on a paycheck.

Later on, I built a business on passion over profit, and I'm really proud of this business. But I learned fast in a lot of rooms that if it doesn't make money, it doesn't count. And when I say man money, I'm talking about real money. So here's what quietly happened to me.

I was never lost, I was busy, I was needed, and I was quietly handing the wheel to everyone else. My life started being directed by other people, the kids' schedules, my husband's work, other people's plans. And when a woman stops steering her own life, people notice and they notice fast. And for me, you know, and this isn't a pity party, but I remember my daughter being diagnosed with cancer.

I would have been 40 and I had left the workforce at 37. So three years later, she was diagnosed with cancer, and then I was diagnosed with cancer a year after her. And I remember being so unwell when I had my thyroid out. And luckily, I have a great family support system, but I remember being really unwell, but I could barely have the time to take care of myself.

I had to make sure my kids were okay. Let's get on to the next topic. That was a little emotional for me. I want you to watch his friends and watch their wives.

When you marry a man, you inherit his circle and vice versa. The guys he's known forever, and the wives who come with him. This happens, right? You're joining your friendships, your family units, all of that.

So when you have a career and you have your own rooms and your own people, your own wins, wins, and your own successes and reputation, when you walk away from that, many of the rooms that are left are his. And in his rooms, you're not you, you are the wife. You still will have your own rooms. I have some very close childhood friends, and they will always be there for me.

What I will say as I continue it's really important that your vote still counts. You may be staying at home as a mom, you may have left your career, but your vote in in the personal rooms also count. So watch for the signs early. How To Stay Home Without Disappearing Sandy Kruse 29:20 This little section is specifically to the young woman, how to stay home without disappearing.

If you do want to stay home, stay home. It's actually a beautiful choice. Just don't walk in with your eyes closed. And here's what I would do if I was making the decision today.

Have a real conversation before you leave, not after. Staying home is a job. Sit down with your partner and talk about it like one. What does it mean for our money?

Whose name is on what? How do we make decisions? How long is the season? Although you can't necessarily project how long it'll be.

But what does my way back look like if that is an option? If you can't have that conversation now while you're still earning, it will be 10 times harder once you're not. Know the money. Every account, every login, every debt, every investment.

When you stop earning, you need to be twice as involved in the money, not half. And I want you to try and keep your foot in five or 10 hours a week of something that's yours and yours only. A client or two, a contract, a course, a credential, something that keeps your skills current, your contacts warm, and a few mirrors in your life that reflect you back more than just I'm gonna say just a mom, but don't think that just a mom is me minimizing that role. That is usually how others view that.

Continue to build your own circles, your chosen friends, not inherited wives. Women who know you as you, not as the wife. Be in the room when important decisions get made. If someone tells you that it's handled, ask again and speak before someone else summarizes you.

When I left in 2007, working from home barely existed. Today it's everywhere. So there's no reason that you have to go to zero. The trick is choosing work that builds on itself: a credential, a client list, a portfolio, a reputation, something that's worth more in five years than it is today.

If you come from sales like I did, sales is one of the most remote-friendly careers out there. Account executives, business development, inside sales, later, fractional sales leadership, where you run sales for two or three small companies part-time. If you're good with numbers, look at bookkeeping, you can start with a few small business clients and work towards a CPA designation over time. It's flexible, it's always in demand, and it pays more the further you take it.

If you're a writer or a talker, there's copywriting, content strategy, email marketing, grant writing, social media management for small businesses. Every business needs words, and most of them hate writing it. If you're the organized one and you've ever run a household with three kids in three sports, you are like look at the virtual assistant work that grows into online business management or get your project management certification. Running a family is project management.

Get paid for it. If you love learning and teaching, there's instructional design, building online courses, training programs for companies, there's tutoring, there's coaching. If you love health, like you know I do, there's holistic nutrition, health coaching, and wellness education. As you know, I went back to school when I was 46 years old to become a registered holistic nutritionist.

And if you've been a professional, a nurse, a lawyer, an HR manager, a designer, look at contract and consulting work in your own field. Recruiting, HR consulting, paralegal work, medical billing, and coding, keep your license active, keep your designations current. That alone keeps the door from locking behind you. If you are a therapist, a social worker, most of those jobs, those careers are virtual nowadays.

So this doesn't have to be big. Five or 10 hours a week, and the point isn't necessarily in the money. It's the point that it's yours. And in year 10, you still have that door, that name, a voice.

Now, Midlife Confidence Menopause And The Second Rise Sandy Kruse 34:26 I want to talk to my women. So this is women over 50, the ones in the quiet house, the ones in menopause now, with the kids grown or almost grown, being told in a hundred little ways that your best years are behind you. They are not. Not their 20s, their 50s.

That's when they reported the most confidence, the most decisiveness, the strongest sense of who they were. Anthropologist Kristen Hawks spent years studying why women live so long after we stop having babies. Almost no other animal does this. Her answer became known as the grandmother hypothesis.

Women past menopause were so valuable to their families and communities with their knowledge, their skill, their judgment, their wisdom, that evolution kept us around for decades. We're not leftovers, we're built for this part, and we have more discernment than we ever did in our lives. And most of you know, I'm gonna take a second to talk about my program. It's called Sovereign.

I built something for this, and I would love for you to check it out. The link is in my podcast description. Now there's the hormonal piece that I love because you know I talk about hormones all the time. Through our reproductive years, estrogen amplifies the drive to tend and nurture.

As it drops in menopause, a lot of women feel that volume turned down. Neuropsychiatrist Luann Brenzidine wrote that this is when many women finally turn their attention back to themselves. This isn't drying up, it's the caretaking fog lifting. The empty nest isn't the tragedy that we're sold either.

The 2008 study in psychological science followed women through the years that their kids left home. Their satisfaction with their marriages went up. Not because the kids were gone, but because the time with their partner got better. If you want to read more or listen to more, I did do two podcast recordings on protecting a long marriage after 50.

You will love it. Check it out. And if it's if you think it's too late to start something at this age, I want you to listen to this. Economists at MIT and the U.S.

Census Bureau studied millions of new businesses. The average age of the founders of the fastest growing startups was 45. A 50-year-old founder was nearly twice as likely to build a top-performing company than as a 30-year-old. Your brain is still ready to grow too.

In 2014, psychologist Denise Park had older adults learn demanding new skills like digital photography, quilting for about 15 hours a week. After three months, their memory improved. Challenge, not rest, is what keeps a brilliant brain brilliant. So, what does the second rise actually look like?

It can be going back to school, getting certified, and the thing that you've always been curious about, turning the skills you used to run a family into consulting, coaching, or sales. A lot of the things that I over talked about. I'm proof. After years at home, I went back to school and became an RHN.

I built this podcast entirely on my own. I've got over 1.4 million downloads. And today I'm also the director of brands. So let me tell you: you're not dried up and you're not finished.

You're finally free enough to be the woman you were before everyone needed you, plus everything you learned while they did. What to What To Tell Your Daughter Sandy Kruse 39:20 tell your daughter? If you're my age, here's what I want you to do with this episode. Share it with your daughter, your niece, the young woman at work who just told you that she's pregnant, and tell her what nobody told me.

Tell her staying home is a real choice and a good one if she makes it with her eyes open. Tell her the kids need her most at the very beginning, and again when they're teenagers and in between, they need her whole, not sacrificed. Tell her to keep money top of mind, awareness, knowing where every dollar is spent. Tell her to know where all of the investments are.

Tell her to keep one foot in her work if she can. Tell her to build her own friends. Tell her she will lose her mirrors and go find new ones on purpose. And tell her that if she did get lost for a while, she's not gone.

She can come back. Would I do it all again? Yes. For my beautiful children, every time.

Staying home is never a mistake, but handing over the wheel can be. Final Takeaways And Share The Message Sandy Kruse 40:32 So that's my episode today. I have a lot of science in there, but and research, and I have a lot of soul. I'm gonna ask you to share this with that woman who you feel might benefit.

And I want to thank you for being here each and every week. Have a great week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to share it with someone you know might benefit.

And always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me to keep going and bring these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new exciting conversation. Help you live your best life.