The Tradwife movement is shorthand for the ‘Traditional Wife Movement’, a community of Western women who are rejecting many of the postmodernist feminist ideologies that have resulted in the rise of dual income households and consequent problems in society that have arisen as a result. In particular the tradwifers promote a lifestyle where the wife stays at home as caretaker for the children and household while the husband is the primary breadwinner of the family.

Over the past several years there has been a trend of interest of traditional family structures and rejection of post-modernism ideals of alternative family structures — in particular, a rejection of the third wave feminism that has gripped many Western countries, in particular the United States.

For example by looking at Google Trends data we can see the term tradwife has seen a sharp increase in interest based on search queries for the phrase, and we can see which states have the largest number of populations interested in this topic.

Unfortunately when you search for the term ‘tradwife’ on search engines like Google, you are often greeted by articles that are written by junk tabloid writers who treat third wave feminism as a religion. These radical feminists (who advocate for alternative lifestyles) dismiss the so-called “tradwife community” as being a group of racists or religious zealots. While I do agree the tradwife movement in the USA does appear to be rooted in conservative Christian communities, I have seen no evidence to suggest it has anything specifically to do with white supremacy. In fact I have observed black women talking about being “tradwives” — which should surprise absolutely nobody given that the vast majority of women around the world today and throughout all of human history, are essentially “tradwives”.

While the “tradwife” movement has been mocked in the very liberal Western media, the reality is that the lifestyle Western tradwifers advocate for has been the norm for most of human history and it STILL is the norm in many non-Western countries, particularly those in Latin America, Asia and Africa. So to suggest its ideas are some construct of “white supremacism” is not only disingenuous, but ridiculous.

Men as the breadwinners and women as caretakers of the children is the norm in most of the world. It’s only in Western first world countries that you see anything different, and this is a result of the embracement of feminist ideologies by these countries.

Why Has Interest in Tradwives Increased in the West?

It doesn’t surprise me that more people in the West are becoming interested in traditional family structures, gender roles and marriages. Even as an atheist myself I can see that there are many advantages to a more traditional marriage structure and numerous disadvantages to the “alternative” lifestyle arrangements that many people are advocating which are completely experimental and have not been demonstrated to give children any advantages — in fact, as the studies I will cite in this article show, they greatly reduce a child’s chances of succeeding in life and can expose them to abuse they would otherwise not be at risk for.

At the time I write this article, over 60% of children raised in the US attend daycare and in my opinion, it shows in how these kids develop problems that were almost unheard of in prior generations. Significant social problems such as illicit drug addiction, homelessness, depression and mental disorders have increased in society as employment among women has increased. In the 1950s, only 10% of women with children had employment and drug usage aside from tobacco and alcohol was almost non-existent in the United States; this sharply changed during the 1960s and coincides with an increase of women’s participation in the workforce to 38%.

Now I am not suggesting that women being able to have a career automatically equals high drug usage. What I am saying is that the rise of mothers who work and do not stay home with their kids has dramatically increased the number of children raised in unstable environments and causes them to develop psychological issues that lead them to be more likely to abuse drugs. I am not alone in this belief, and there are numerous studies that demonstrate the negative consequences of children who are not raised in stable traditional households.

Studies Prove the Negative Consequences of Non-Traditional Households’ Effects on Cognition and Behavior in Children

As of 2020 the United States has the highest percentage of single parent households of any country on the planet. 23% of children live in single parent households, overwhelmingly single mother households. By comparison Canada is 15%, but other countries such as China and India are just 3% to 5%.

US Census data shows that during the 1960-2016 period, the percentage of children living with only their mother nearly tripled from 8 to 23 percent and the percentage of children living with only their father increased from 1 to 4 percent. The percentage of children not living with any parent increased slightly from 3 to 4 percent.

Many studies have proven that kids raised in these environments, what is subtlety called a ‘transitional household‘ (that is, where the parents are separated and constantly bringing new romantic partners into the kids’ lives), do far worse in life.

Some examples,

  • The research paper School adjustment in sixth graders: parenting transitions, family climate, and peer norm effects by L A Kurdek 1, M A Fine, and R J Sinclair serves an important example. It found that children who experienced at least one transition in family structure during early childhood were more likely to have elevated levels of behavior problems by age five, regardless of mother’s marital status at the time of the children’s birth. 
  • The study Impact of family type and family quality on child behavior problems: a longitudinal study by J M Najman, B C Behrens, M Andersen, W Bor, M O’Callaghan, G M Williams found that elementary school children who experienced two or more transitions were more likely to show disruptive behavior at school, to have poorer emotional adjustment, and to have lower grades and achievement scores compared to children who experienced no transitions or one transition.
  • The study Father Absence and Youth Incarceration by Cynthia C. Harper and Sara S. McLanahan found that boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity. 
  • The study Does Father Absence Place Daughters at Special Risk for Early Sexual Activity and Teenage Pregnancy? by Bruce J. Ellis, John E. Bates, Kenneth A. Dodge, David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood, Gregory S. Pettit, and Lianne Woodward, found that 33% girls raised by single mothers whose fathers left the home before they turned 6 ended up pregnant as teenagers, compared with just 5 percent of girls whose fathers stayed in the household.

Studies also show that children in daycare do worse than children that instead stay at home with a parent.

This should surprise no one; daycare centers have extremely low standards to operate. All that is required to open a daycare center as a business is for the staff to be certified in first aid and CPR, and then submit an application for a business license. No special education credentials are required to open a daycare and there are no special programs required for attendance to provide training for daycare center workers by any state in the USA. This is probably why the majority of daycare centers are ran by people that have limited education backgrounds and operate them out of their homes, often letting the kids run around in their backyards and watch PBS television programs to occupy their time. The daycare owners have no long term vested interest in the developmental welfare of the children, as their client is only the parent and daycare centers have an abundance of clients due to so many women choosing to be working moms today. On top of this, daycare centers can receive money from states using HUD and welfare voucher programs meant for low income families to pay for their child care. This is exploited for fraud sometimes; one notable case defrauded taxpayers in the state of Missouri as much as $556,000 when the daycare owner exploited the state’s Child Care and Development Fund. The case is also notable in that the daycare center had failed numerous inspections as far back as 2013, and yet was still operating until 2019 — the owner was even able to start new daycare centers even with his first one having failed inspections.

The kids are often more than just neglected in daycare though; a 2017 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Services on Child Maltreatment found that 2,237 daycare providers were found to be abusing and neglecting children in their care. On top of this, despite common misconception that child molestation is primarily done within families, a 2012 Department of Justice study titled Characteristics of crimes against juveniles found that 70% of children who are sexually abused are molested by an adult the family trusts.

Like, you know, a daycare center worker. In fact, if you were to do a search on Google Search for ‘daycare worker abuse’ you’ll find a seemingly unlimited amount of articles discussing convictions and arrests, complete with even security footage of daycare workers abusing children. As an example that is sadly common among these cases, in 2014 a female daycare worker helped her registered sex offender boyfriend molest several children at ABC Kidz Child Care in Elyria, Ohio, and she even participated in the creation of child pornography videos. Daycare centers are exploited by sexual predators to gain access to children, and there are cases where child porn rings have operated daycare centers for this explicit purpose.

Yet even though daycares are associated with development problems in children and place them at greater risk of abuse, US Census Data shows that 62% of children have a mother who works outside the home. Since less than 5% of single parent households are stay at home dads, this means over half of the population of children who are raised today are being exposed to daycare centers that dramatically increase the chances of the kids becoming developmentally scarred — all of this as a consequence of radical feminists advocating for family and social structures that allow a woman to be “equal to a man” in the workforce but that also requires strangers (who may abuse them) to take care of their kids for them.

Currently the mainstream media is so fixated on gender equality in the workforce that we’re ignoring the drawbacks to children who are not being raised by a stay at home parent, and then inevitably do grow up and become the adults who cause more problems in society as a consequence of what happened to them as a child. Per numerous studies on the subject, such as this one (Cycle of child sexual abuse: links between being a victim and becoming a perpetrator) children who have been sexually abused are extremely likely to become abusers themselves, perpetuating the cycle and ultimately increasing the number of abused children each subsequent generation after.

Studies Show That Having a Stay at Home Parent is a Huge Advantage for a Child’s Development — and a Significant Drawback if They Don’t

Unfortunately if you search for “stay at home mom studies” you get blasted with junk science polls from Pew and other garbage tabloids about if being a stay at home mom is “mentally healthy” and the economic status of stay at home mothers, and other nonsense that is designed to make it seem like stay at home moms are women who failed at succeeding in the work place.

What Google hides in the search results are the studies that show the positive impact on children who are raised by a stay at home mom.

One prominent study in particular is actively buried in the Google Search results and which I want to emphasize here in my article. Published in the Journal of Labor Economics in 2014, Home with Mom: The Effects of Stay-at-Home Parents on Children’s Long-Run Educational Outcomes by Eric Bettinger, Torbjørn Hægeland and Mari Rege studied the academic performance of 68,000 kids in Norway and found that children aged six to nine with a stay at home mom performed academically better in their test scores compared to kids that attended daycare.

The study is particularly good because Norway has a program called Cash for Care that provides a financial incentive for moms to stay home with the kids by providing financial aid to married couples who chose to have the female stay at home to care for the children. This means the study cannot be dismissed by claiming that it was only very wealthy families which saw these advantages; the study controlled for economic status due to the Cash for Care program allowing low income families to have one parent stay home with the children.

This study should be the #1 result for “stay at home mom studies” and yet it is not. Instead Google Search is suggesting junk science articles. I doubt this is an accident and I suspect it has been the consequence of a politically motivated engineering of the search query results to advance a political agenda by the Google employees who have access to the manual review tool for Google Search.

Regardless, the point still stands; the evidence that traditional family structure lifestyle has a very positive impact on children is undeniable. It is socially irresponsible for tabloid magazine writers to encourage women to be single mothers in light of this evidence and it is leading to more instability in society as larger populations of people are raised in unstable households.

Is the Tradwife Movement a Good Thing?

I think it is, although ideally I believe it would be more effective if the religious undertones were not focused on so heavily by those in the community. I think trying to push conservative Christian religious beliefs is not going to be very effective at convincing enough women to abandon third wave feminism for the culture to shift, as religious participation is definitely in decline and not likely to rise. Humans as a species simply know too much about our universe now and it is difficult to continue to believe in metaphysical viewpoints and still claim to be a person who makes intelligent, reasonable decisions in their life. It would also be better to emphasize how the mother tends to make more sense to be the one to stay home with the children given that men tend to select occupations that earn more and that pregnancy is a period that severely limits a woman’s employment options given the nature of it.

The tradwife movement would do better to focus on highlighting the numerous studies that show that alternative lifestyle households harm the development of children and consequently create many psychological problems the child didn’t need to develop and must now overcome in order to find success in life, as compared to his age peers who were raised in a more traditional family unit with a stay at home parent. This would be more successful at convincing women to participate in the community and give radical feminists less ammo to use to attack the movement.

I also think that feminism at its root, is quite fine and acceptable for a stable democracy to function. Democracies depend on perceived fairness of the system by its citizens in order to run well. It is difficult to have a perception of fairness if women don’t have the right to make their own choices or have their opportunities legally restrained based on their genders.

However just because something is legal does not necessarily mean you ought to do it — seeing the long term social consequences over the past fifty years of feminism becoming ever more radical and antagonistic toward men has led to the creation of apps like Just a Baby that intentionally encourage women to become single mothers and consequently will doom those kids to be raised in an unstable household. Through misinformation created by radical feminists to advance their zealous political crusades , many young Millennial women are making the poor choice to intentionally have kids outside of marriage, with men who make poor fathers and consequently become single mothers. Worse still, some of these radical feminist ideas encourage women to divorce men simply for being bored in the relationship. Irresponsible writers and bloggers encourage women to intentionally make choices that will absolutely result in creating unnecessary obstacles between the woman accomplishing her goal of becoming happy, and tend to lead to misery. So an emerging community of women who are pushing back against this garbage is a good change, and I think necessary.

That does not necessarily mean that becoming a “tradwife” is a guarantee of success. I think women still need to pick good husbands and men need to be proactive in being good fathers. There is just as much bad information being spread encouraging men to “go their own way” (as I have previously criticized) that will inevitably lead to men being miserable later in life, too.

Still, I think more women recognizing they need to cultivate the qualities of a good wife and mother — the qualities I refer to as the Cinderella qualities — is a positive thing for Western societies. It is better in the long term for society as a whole if children are raised with the most advantages possible and the least opportunities for developing psychological scarring that will haunt them for their lifetimes.

We need the children of tomorrow to fix the problems created by misguided generations over the past fifty years. The children cannot do that if the same poor parental choices that created the dysfunctional people who are causing the problems of today keep being made by new generations of parents. The bleeding can only stop when the experimental “alternative family lifestyles” of third wave feminists are abandoned and a voluntary return is made to more traditional family structures to raise new generations of kids that will become adults able to fix the problems.

If the bleeding continues, eventually there won’t be enough functional and productive members of society in America to keep the machine of the economy running. The USA will then cease to be a super power, and the entire world will consequently become a much darker place as Communist Totalitarian countries like China supplant our country’s role in global affairs, forcing its social credit system on everybody as a form of neo-slavery.

Perhaps you are okay with the real world becoming an Orwellian dystopian nightmare, but I am not.

So ignore the radical feminists whose want to undermine the fabric of society by continuing to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. The Millennial Gentleman supports a return to more traditional family values and structures in the hopes of producing a better more stable society. After reading this article, I hope you do, too.

Author

Carey Martell is Editor in Chief for The Millennial Gentleman. A thirty something modern man who is politically independent, non-religious but a firm believer in ideals of chivalry and traditional family values. Carey lives his life as a vagabond digital nomad traveling and living life to the fullest while managing his businesses remotely with a laptop and internet hotspot connection.