Stay-at-home parents, or partners for those who have no children, are neither inherently leeches nor heroes. A host of variables impact whether it is pragmatically beneficial to have only one person work professionally, especially outside the home, and one person tend to needs inside the home like cooking and cleaning: individual personality and mental or physical health are enormous factors. While this is absolutely not for the reasons conservatives might think, it is logically true that a stay-at-home parent does not necessarily detract from or hinder the economic prosperity of the family.
They do (or could) handle domestic affairs that legitimately free up more time for the other partner to professionally work or that can minimize the latter's stress while away. Thus, stay-at-home parents or partners less directly contribute to the financial stability of a household if this is executed correctly. However, remote work allows for stay-at-home people, parents or not, to have some sort of job that can be done from home. It is not impossible to remain at home and still engage in professional work. This is also not the more conventional arrangement for stay-at-home partners.
Unfortunately, worsening economic conditions for those at the lower end of the wealth spectrum makes this arrangement increasingly difficult and outright unlivable. Independent of the obvious sexism against both genders often associated with this practice (that men should slave away because they are men and women should give up financial independence or be borderline locked in the home because they are women), the idea that one parent or spouse should stay at home without professional work, whether or not it is the mom or wife, is intrinsically classist. Many families not born into wealth or unwilling to expand their resources by doing what logically and Biblically is exploitative of others, whether the ones committing the exploitation think so or not, will be at an inherent disadvantage economically.
Simply put, not everyone will be fortunate enough one way or another to be able to literally afford to have one spouse/partner at home, with or without children to take care of. It is separately irrational to base who works or remains home--not that this has to exclude working automatically--on the objectively irrelevant factor of gender because stereotypes are false one and all for the same reasons [1], and thus there is no metaphysical basis for gender-based family/workplace roles or moral obligations. A stay-at-home father/husband/boyfriend is not any different than a stay-at-home mother/wife/girlfriend other than with regard to the literal anatomical and physiological differences entailed by being male or female.
A parent who stays at home does not have to give up professional work for the aforementioned reason, but it is certainly not as if they are incapable of contributing financially-adjacent value to the relationship or household. There is just no relevance to gender. And it can nonetheless severely hinder the economic advancement of a family if one parent or partner does entirely forgo professional work. However, this would depend on the exact situation. In some situations, having someone stay at home might be objectively best for handling children or managing mental or physical health, but not everyone can afford this dynamic even then. The matter is more nuanced than some insist!
[1]. While the falsity of gender (and racial/national stereotypes) is necessitated by strictly logical truths, and is thus knowable independent of social experience with particular men and women or my prompting, one can always read other posts where I prove such things, like this one:
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