I think you'd see a lot of professions of people who culturally value a homemaker, not anything about the highest paying careers. My guess is that the list you describe would be dominated by the trades, trucking, and small business ownership.
The Pastors I've known in my life have been dual-income households, and Megachurches are infamous for using that set-up. Though I grew up in a small town with a decent mix of residential incomes, so there was no particularly poor churches in town.
This is true, I'm in a community that values having a parent at home with the kids. Many are on wages most would expect make it impossible but they live good lives.
Some very small business owners, charity works (earning very little) and a few high paid professionals.
Stay-at-home parents do a lot of financially valuable but unaccounted work that can come quite close to improving the family finances almost as much as if they had a job near the median salary.
You're making a lot of assumptions there. Is it "blue collar" to only have one working parent while the other takes care of the family? I would think most people would prefer that if they can make it work. I am a fairly well compensated software engineer and my wife stays home to take care of the kids because we can afford it, and many others that I work with do the same. It seems a bit silly to have her work just so that we can pay someone else to raise our children for us.
Are there people who don't value a homemaker? You don't value good home-cooked food? A clean house? Clean clothes? Children clothed and fed? Everything else your mother did for you?
I'll throw in an anecdote: I didn't know stay-at-home parents were a thing until embarrassingly late. Like mid- to late-teens. Both my parents worked, all _their_ parents worked, and all my friends parents worked. The only exposure I had to the concept of homemakers was very tangentially on tv, where I assumed the mothers were home because they took the day off. The general attitude of everyone involved in my life was that anyone who stayed at home after the children were old enough to attend school was lazy and mooching off their spouse. Not that that is true, but to directly answer your question: yes, there are people who don't value homemakers.
If an adult child said they want to stay home, cook for you and clean the house, and maybe look after younger siblings, most people would say they need to grow up and get a job.
Can you really not see the difference here? You do know children generally outlive their parents, right?
But the more general difference is a home maker is not a maid. A home maker owns the home. That's a very big difference. Somehow people have been convinced that it's better to work to build/maintain someone else's property instead of your own.
> Somehow people have been convinced that it's better to work to build/maintain someone else's property instead of your own.
It is a bit strange, isn't it?
We've transitioned to having both parents work, but then we pay a large percentage of the extra income on child care, house upkeep (cleaning, repairs, improvements, etc), prepared food, etc. -- things that one parent could do if they were at home instead of working for someone else. It seems worse for the kids too, to have both parents working.
It doesn't have to be the mother by the way. But I also don't think the idea of a stay-at-home mom should be as condemned as it is, at least in certain circles. Women should absolutely have the choice to not be a stay-at-home mom, but it should be a choice without stigma attached either way.
