People sometimes push for this. It’s painful from either direction. “Oh, you’re a stay at home parent, that’s so hard, so important.” Or, “People don’t think my job is as important as my working spouse’s is, but –” followed by a litany of hardships. The labor theory of value; the hardship theory of respect.
I can think of five good reasons this doesn’t work. The most important one takes the most words to say, so let’s start with the lesser ones.
Measurement
First: It’s hard to tell if someone is a great parent. If you can’t measure something, you can’t reward it. And it’s not feasible to reward (with status) mere participation. We have the whole meme about how stupid the concept of participation trophies for this.
Accounting for variance
Second, when you look at the job of a parent, the variance in outcome is not driven by skill to the extent it is in other types of work. Genetics determine about half the variance in many measurable traits people care about. Even the best parent will see a lot of variance in their children, in a way an excellent software engineer will not.
Contribution
More on the analogy to software: I don’t think there’s such a thing as a 100x parent, whereas I do think there is such a thing as a 100x engineer. (I do think there’s such a thing as a 20x parent, though!) This is half because the floor is high with parenting (assuming no abuse, but not assuming no neglect) – and half because the ceiling is lower. No matter how amazing a parent you are, you will probably be a small part of their psychological lives after their preteen years. There isn’t such a thing as parenting 100 children or working 80 hour weeks as a parent.
Fungibility
But my most important argument is about fungibility. If someone is a great parent, it is not really the case that they can parent a random kid in exchange for money or meritocratic placement in a position of power. Status is a representation of the possession of benefits you can move around: information, introductions, advice, invitations, investment. You cannot move around the benefits being a good parent.
Selfishness
As an extension, the benefits of being a good parent primarily accrue to one’s own family, and secondarily and indirectly to “society”. It is extremely reasonable not to award status for excellence that mostly benefit one’s own kin. (This is also why housework can’t be high status unless you have a lot of guests.)
The debate is historically anomalous. Lauding a stranger for perpetuating their clan? What? This only makes sense as a proposal in a highly positive sum, low fertility, high welfare society where someone else’s child is going to pay for your hospice care when you have dementia or are paralyzed from a stroke. But our instincts haven’t caught up with us – we don’t have children out of prosocial instincts. We do it because our wiring tells us it’ll be fulfilling, or at least very interesting. It doesn’t make sense to mandate gratitude or respect for an act people undertake for their own fulfillment, even if (for now) it’s an act with positive knock-on effects for others.
So.
Stay at home parents will never be high status for being parents. The value we provide is not fungible, easily correlatable to our efforts, or socially acceptable to negatively evaluate. It’s possible to enforce politeness but not respect.
I think society can (and should) subsidize and accommodate SAHPs, but they cannot make us high status. It requires great confusion about what status is for and how it comes about to consider this a cultural project worth pouring energy into. The best way to make SAHPs high status is to decrease the costs of raising a child, so that they have more time, energy, or money to participate in arenas where status is actually won.