'A dad says it takes 2.5 hours a day to be a stay-at-home parent. He couldn't be more wrong.'

This week, via Reddit, we were introduced to a dad who thinks being the stay-at-home parent is easy work and can't understand why many mothers find it so hard. 

This dad's comments suggest that all-day efforts of stay-at-home mums are somehow a result of their own inefficiency and inferiority. Or that those efforts are simply unnecessary or OTT. It's a concerning display of ignorance and misogyny but since he's asking – let us explore for a moment why parenting young children takes longer than 2.5 hours a day.

My day begins at... oh wait, my 21-month-old toddler latches onto my nipple throughout the night so there is no clear beginning or end to my day. I imagine this is a concept someone without breasts would struggle to comprehend. Even when a parent bottle feeds, it's a relentless and time-consuming task that doesn't seem to have been factored into these calculations. Older children require a night shift now and then due to sickness but presumably he also sleeps through this.

So my 'daytime day' begins at roughly 7am after a night of broken sleep. It takes two hours to get two kids on the school bus and have the preschooler and the toddler ready for their day with me. If nobody has emotions that morning I am also able to somehow sling dishes in the dishwasher and pile dirty laundry in the washing machine. But inevitably kids and toddlers do have emotions, and big ones. Emotions are time-consuming but I feel it is my job as a parent to help them ride it out rather than ignoring their feelings.

Watch: A spoken word video staring Laura Bryne articulating the contradiction of pressures that mothers face in their daily lives. Post continues after video.

I understand this guy accounts for meal preparation time, but I find it hard to believe that he has factored in the actual feeding of the kids. It's one thing to throw together a quick, healthy snack platter, it's another thing entirely for the children to eat it. The eating is often more drawn out than the cooking, more frustrating and more likely to make people cry.

Next minute, the dishwasher is singing its song to be unpacked and the washing machine chimes in. The toddler does a poo. The pre-schooler wants to bake cupcakes and also requests a band-aid for a four-day-old scrape I have to squint to locate.

Nap time is great, but obviously I'm still 'on duty'. I finally make it to the washing machine, only to realise the dryer is full of dry clothes. I start piling clean clothes onto the laundry floor but then I hear "Can somebody please wipe my bum?" echoing out from the toilet. I'm just wondering what I should cook for dinner when I realise I'm supposed to be volunteering at the school. Luckily, I remember to pack the sleeping toddler in the car before I rush out the driveway.

I could go on here, but we know how this ends. We get KFC for dinner and I'm too tired to fold the laundry when we get home. The dishes will have to wait, which leaves a backlog for the next day. Parenting and running a household is without a doubt an all-day job and to suggest otherwise is directly insulting to the millions of parents who go through these motions every day. Stay-at-home parenting is as important as any other job, and the people who do it deserve support and respect rather than attempts to minimise the role.

It's possible that the stakes are even higher for the stay-at-home parent because raising kids to be well-adjusted adults with reasonably fulfilling lives is something most people try really hard not to mess up. The kids we raise today will eventually run the world, it's kind of important.

This Reddit post was an alarming example of how invisible the majority of care work is to some people. How readily many of us are able to diminish the contribution of the stay-at-home parent as something ridiculously easy. Even if his 2.5 hour calculation related purely to housework, that's just one aspect of being a stay at-home parent. There is incredible value in other time spent engaging with your children, simply being available to them throughout the day and being active in the local community.

Image: Reddit.

Housework is also the overall easier component of parenting compared to the skill a parent develops in helping children regulate their emotions, answering tricky questions and finding ways to help them explore and learn. It's just plain weird that someone would try to reduce the role of a parent to household chores when it's clear to see the complexities and challenges of parenting extend well beyond domestic tasks.

The most worrying aspect of this post is how many people secretly believe stay-at-home parents are slightly useless and inefficient, but just don't say it publicly? A harmful stigma that surrounds the stay-at-home parent underpins his comments as being less intellectual or ambitious than parents in paid work. Many of us are guilty of perpetuating this stereotype at one point or another - I'm ashamed to admit my friends and I used to joke that we'd become 'housewives' if we failed our high school exams.

It's this same minimisation of the stay-at-home parent role that leads to fights about how to split the domestic load when the other parent arrives home from their paid job. It also leads to a tendency to prioritise the sleep of the parent in paid work. If more people recognised that the stay-at-home parent is in fact also 'working' a very important job more households would see it as fair for both parents to contribute to housework and childcare outside of paid work hours.

This Reddit thread amounts to gaslighting of stay-at-home parents who are already struggling with being overburdened and under-supported. Suggesting that a parent's stress and workload is something within their individual control rather than a product of social structures and policies deeply incompatible with raising children does everyone a disservice.

Listen to This Glorious Mess to learn more about the mental load of unpaid labour.

Feature Image: Supplied.