Stay-at-Home Mom or Bread-Winner? How To Be Both in 2025.

WHY IS IT that when women have babies it feels like we’re forced to choose between our kids and our career? Between earning a living and raising our family? We’re faced with the 2 options: stay home now while they’re young and worry about money “later”, or go back to work to earn and save with the hopes that “one day” we’ll be able to spend more time as a family.

Well I’m now a mom of 2 boys under 3 and below I’ll share what started me on this journey of retiring from my day job to stay home with my kids AND build real wealth in 2025. And how you can do it too!

The Traditional Path:

Before my first son was born in the fall of 2021 I largely defined myself and my success by my career. I’d followed the path. I graduated high school with honors, got a partial scholarship to college, graduated with my bachelor’s in less than 4 years and was in a management program with a billion dollar company before I was 25 years old.

I got married, we bought a house, and started thinking about starting a family…

I thought “This is It! I’m living the American Dream, climbing the corporate ladder and building something for our future” 

Then when our first son was born in 2021 something in me changed. And changed in a BIG way. For the first time in my life I understood why anyone would want to be a stay-at-home Mom. Those first couple months of being home with my precious baby could not have gone slow enough for me. I wanted to stay in the space of being home with my baby forever. However as the end of my short leave drew closer and reality of going back to work sunk in, I faced facts that we lived a life that required both mine and my husband’s incomes to maintain. So back to my corporate job I went. 

A Shift In The Wind:

I was lucky I was able to work from home a lot of the time (thanks to COVID) but that just gave me a taste of what it would be like to be home with my baby full time and not be working. I day-dreamed about peaceful lazy afternoons sitting on the back patio with my son when the weather was nice, soaking in every one of his developmental milestones. Instead, in reality I felt trapped in my home office as I and only heard bits and pieces of my son’s day as he played and napped and grew with various nannies in another room.

I knew I was missing things during this critical time in his development and it killed me that I was trusting basically strangers to do the one thing I wanted most.

Then towards the end of 2023 we got pregnant with our 2nd baby. This time, that BIG change I’d felt with my first son exploded into a deep desperation for something different. I had several issues with the way things were going: 

• A nanny was incredibly expensive and not something we could afford for 2 kids
• The pay raises (if you could even call them that) I’d gotten over the last few years were not close to keeping up with the rising cost of living and inflation
• We finally got our older son into a preschool we loved part time, but part time hours meant pick-up in the middle of the work day
• I was constantly living in fear that my hybrid work schedule would change and I’d be forced to put the kids in full time daycare
• I genuinely did not enjoy what I was doing for work, in fact, I dreaded logging on each morning

And you know what? I was not alone in this internal battle of Mom vs. Provider. A quick Google search revealed the following statistics about women returning to work after maternity leave:

Time For A Change:

So in the few months leading up to my due date I started doing some research on how to make money online. (I researched surveys, product reviews, freelancing and even selling feet pics!). But what kept coming up over and over was this stream of videos on social media about Moms making $20k/month working 1-2 hours a day from their phones, and while I secretly wished this to be true and that it was that easy, deep down I knew it wasn’t. If it was, everyone would be doing it. But I saw this pop up so often I figured there had to be some truth behind these claims, so I dove deeper.. and that’s when my life changed..

Enter Authority Marketing!

Now- hear me out. Yes, it was another offer to learn digital marketing but this one felt.. different.. doesn’t seem a strong enough word.. it felt genuine.. It felt legitimate..

And it is!

From the first time I watched Stuart talk about Authority Marketing I knew I had to give this a chance. While there is of course discussion about making tons of money and being financially free, at it’s core, this is about a skill set you can apply over and over and over again to build wealth for years to come in any business model.

My due date was getting closer so I quickly made my initial (very small, less than $50) investment to start learning, even before I received my first video of the free intro series via email.

Over the next few days as the intro videos came to my email I eagerly sped through them. I learned about affiliate marketing and even heard testimonials from REAL members! It was inspiring and I came up with the plan to dive into the actual Modern Wealthy Lessons head first while I was on maternity leave in the summer of 2024.

You may be thinking I was crazy to plan to “work” on maternity leave when I started this journey because I didn’t want to work at all, but this wasn’t the corporate grind I knew. This was education and a chance. The chance to make more money than I ever would with my current 9-5 job yes, but what hooked me was the idea that I could have this income rolling in passively- so like while I was driving my toddler to school, or rocking my new baby to sleep for example. 

In a corporate job, you trade your time for money. You’re paid X amount to work Y hours. But imagine learning to leverage the internet to work for you… an earning potential without a ceiling.. The thought that this even might be possible was enough for me to give it my all. What if this could be my reality? 

So after my 2nd son joined our family I spent the first 4 weeks just recovering and living every second to be with him and my first born as he was off for the summer. But by the 5th week of leave I was already dreading going back to work and knew that if I didn’t start making changes now, nothing would actually change for our future. The only thing that was for sure right now, was that I would be back at work and trusting strangers again to watch my baby before he was even 4 months old.. and THAT truth, felt like falling off a cliff.

So I dove in. 

My First Wobbly Steps:

When I started my journey I honestly had no idea where to begin. I had no product, no background in marketing, and no clue where the path I was on was going to lead, just a desire for better. But as I worked through the material my mind was opened in the coolest ways! I never liked the idea of sales because it always felt pushy and unnatural. The cliche of “sell me this pen” or a used car salesman with a sleazy mustache comes to mind but that’s about as far from “Authority Marketing” as you can get. Here I learned that “if you try to sell to everyone, you sell to no one” and that the key to success in online business is putting a meaningful and honest message in front of the right audience. And I learned how to do this! It wasn’t about master re-sell rights or having followers on Instagram. I learned how to prepare, launch and grow my own online business in my now chosen business model of authority marketing from scratch. What makes this opportunity so different than all the other social media claims to make you money with affiliate marketing etc is the level of training, community, and support you have access to. 

Flexibility and ownership is key, and how much support and help I wanted was up to me. Yes, you could probably learn a decent amount about affiliate marketing, e-commerce, drop shipping etc online through YouTube and various blogs, but the difference would be like learning how to become a race car driver by watching videos and playing Mario Kart (one of my all time favorites btw) vs getting to spend time on a track, in a real race car, with a professional sitting in the passenger seat guiding you through each turn and then being handed your own car to start racing with. And, you’d still get to meet with your driving coach after each race for feedback. This analogy may seem ridiculous but that really is what it’s like in this community.  

To me, that difference was worth the investment in myself as I was serious about real change in a short timeframe. Nobody ever became a famous motivational speaker, NFL player, or college professor without investing in coaches, education, and the best training camps and equipment money could buy. Why would building an online business that’s actually successful be any different? 

So throughout the rest of my maternity leave I dedicated what time I could. If I had 20 minutes, I spent 20 minutes, if I had 5 hours I spent 5 hours. The flexibility was addicting and I knew I was on a course for a new kind of reality. I was attending coaching sessions and webinars, and building out my business, all with my newborn close by. This was the first taste I had at “working” and truly being able to be there for my kids.

Fussy Baby that needs to be walked around for a while? No problem! It’s not like I had a boss to report to.
Summer school half day means a 12pm pickup? I didn’t have to think twice about pausing what I was working on to go get my older son in the middle of the “work” day.
Time freedom was starting to have a physical manifestation in my reality.

But building something sustainable for the future doesn’t happen overnight. (And if someone promises you that, RUN!) For months I didn’t even tell any friends or family what I was working on. I didn’t want to face the ridicule of being too much of a dreamer. I knew my boomer parents would scoff at the idea of giving up a steady income with health benefits for my own empire run 100% from my laptop, but this was real. The idea of staying with my current job for the next 30 years, of seeing my kids only when I was “done working” for the day made my stomach drop and my eyes sting with tears.

For me, the chance to truly break the cycle of living for the weekend, suffering corporate burnout, and only seeing your kids for a couple hours before bed time was the motivation I needed. 

So does it work? Is this real?

YES!

I made my first sale in a matter of months and have even woken up to an email saying “YOU’VE MADE A NEW SALE!” I literally made money while I was asleep! That feeling… is indescribable!

Everyone says it, but having kids really did change me. I do deeply resonate with Moms who give it all up to stay home with their babies, but I’ve also climbed the corporate ladder and couldn’t see having nothing for myself to build and work on. I knew I’d have to go back to work after my maternity leave was over, at least through the end of 2024, but this lifestyle of choosing between my kids and an income will be in my rearview soon. Society wants us to choose between being home to raise our kids, or in the workforce bringing home the bacon. Well I’m not choosing one, I choose both! And Authority Marketing is the key to that reality in 2025!

It’s very quick and easy to take that first step! You’ll want to sign up to get the free intro videos emailed to you below, but once you do that, you’ll be taken to a page to sign up for Modern Wealthy! This is where you’ll get the first real taste of the lessons (the ones I first did on maternity leave) and can decide if this is the path for you too!