Stacey Aquino, 53, said she “was a trad wife before it had a name.”

Married at 19 and a first-time mom at 21, Aquino said that was the life she was raised to lead. She worked briefly at her father’s restaurant while her husband finished school but then “fell into this role” as a wife and mother.

“He got this big job and he started making all this money. And he didn’t want me to work,” she said of her now ex-husband. “There weren’t a lot of options.”

Aquino loved raising her six children and knows that it meant a lot to her kids that she was always home. She doesn’t criticize the stay-at-home parent lifestyle and knows that it does work out beautifully for some couples and families. But she questions her own naivete now as she looks back on those years of isolation. When she sees women today romanticizing the trad wife life online, she said her skin crawls. She and Enitza Templeton, another “ex-trad wife,” can’t help but respond with their own videos of warning.

“Please, before you throw everything you’ve got into a family, think about all the situations you could find yourself in one day,” Templeton, 43, said in a recent TikTok post, which gained more than 2 million views. “And maybe that will help you understand the value of an education, and a life independent and outside of just a bunch of kids.”

“It’s just not smart,” Aquino told USA TODAY. “It’s not, because what happens is it ultimately leads to a power dynamic that’s not healthy.”

That’s not true in all marriages where one parent stays home, but resentment and financial inequity is a risk if couples don’t talk about the worth of caregiving duties upfront, said Neha Ruch, author of “The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids – and Come Back Stronger Than Ever.” With the rise of trad wife content on social media, some former trad wives like Aquino and Templeton are speaking out to advise young women of what might lie on the other side of those early years of marriage and motherhood.

Setting clear expectations early on, before kids and care responsibilities are in the picture, is key for all couples, family lawyers say.

“(In couples where) both parties are working, what if one party decides to stay at home?” said Catherine Shanahan, co-founder of My Divorce Solution, a financial platform that helps walk couples through prenups and divorce. “It could be the dad, it could be the mom. It doesn’t matter, but your relationship will change.”

Needs change throughout a marriage, Shanahan said, and having a mutual understanding about finances and values can help shape tough conversations down the road.

As Aquino’s kids grew older, she grew restless. She realized, at 40, that she really wasn’t happy with how her life had turned out. She and her husband had grown apart. He traveled a lot for work, she said. And in the meantime, she hadn’t made much of a life for herself outside of the home, which made it difficult to start over.

“There might not be an exit plan for me,” she realized. “There was a lot of money. But I didn’t know where any of it was. I had been so busy raising the kids.”

The value of caregiving, and why couples need to talk about it before having kids

Aquino got a divorce in 2021 and has since taken to TikTok to share her story. In a recent post, which drew more than 300,000 views, she talked about what happened when she filed for divorce: “I had no access to money at all, because I didn’t work. And he used to tell me stuff like, ‘You do work, you take care of our family.’ But at the end, he didn’t believe that.”

Aquino didn’t leave her marriage the second she felt unhappy. It took her years to file for divorce. “I really tried to think about it and try to make it work,” she said. She felt selfish blowing up her family’s life for the sake of her own happiness. Templeton had a similar experience.

Templeton was also raised to be a wife and mother and said those expectations were made clear to her from her Puerto Rican family with evangelical values. “I felt this intense pressure from my culture and from my religion to be ‘a good woman’ and to do the right thing. And that was to love and serve,” she said. She got married at 26 and had four children, but said she never felt fulfilled.

Leading up to their divorces, both Aquino and Templeton had to grapple with the fact that their years of homemaking hadn’t earned them any income of their own, or traditional work experience for a resume.

“I left myself very vulnerable,” Aquino said. “It was a job. And I did it 24/7 and I did it alone and I didn’t have help.”

Care work in America has been “dumbed down to diapers and laundry,” Ruch said − but it’s so much more than that. Parenting entails community building, educating, advocating, negotiating with insurance companies, “trying to scaffold your family through mental and physical health and development” and so much more. Being a caregiver is taxing, she said, and no one should be expected to work 24/7 like so many parents do.

“We’re just looking at an increasingly complicated landscape of parenthood,” Ruch said. “When couples decide that they want to create a family together, the foundational conversation needs to be, what do we want for our life? Do we see each other as both valid and equitable partners? Do we support each other in whatever shift we may make? And how do we imagine what our family life might look like?”

From there, she said, it’s important to know that those answers might change. But being on the same page and having frequent conversations about money and the value of care work is imperative.

Aquino has since remarried. She’s not against marriage, or motherhood, or even being a stay-at-home parent. She said she’s sharing her story and advice to actually help couples stay together. Her biggest piece of advice? Get a prenup, regardless of financial status, because it’s “a good way to talk through issues that are going to arise.” Shanahan agrees.

“Look, you either talk through it in the beginning, or you talk through it in the end,” Aquino said.

‘I just want to live my life’

The great irony of the online trad wife movement is that those content creators have figured out a way to earn an income alongside family life, Ruch said. The problem is that in doing so, they are painting an unrealistic picture of motherhood and homemaking, Ruch added.

Videos of young mothers in paisley house dresses making sourdough from scratch and picking berries from their backyard gardens are triggering to Templeton, she said, because that used to be her life. It was the life she thought she wanted. The man she married didn’t push her into being a stay-at-home mom or trad wife, Templeton said. She thinks a lot of today’s young women are in the same boat, desperate to find their purpose, and they believe, like she did, that their purpose is solely in family caregiving.

But some women do say they are fulfilled as homemakers. Jasmine Darke, an influencer who posts content about her life as a wife and mom, recently wrote on Instagram: “I genuinely love being a stay-at-home mum, homeschooling, and living a counter-cultural life, that’s not changing.”

She did say, however, that while she loves her life, she doesn’t want her content to impact other women’s choices.

“Even though I fully stand by my values and love our way of life, I realized I was doing it for the wrong reasons and the Lord really called me out on it,” she wrote. “I don’t want my channel to be a place where I tell people how they should live. I just want to live my life, raise my kids, run our home, and share that journey with you guys.”

Templeton and Aquino said they believe their divorces and leaving the trad wife life was ultimately the best decision for themselves and their children.

“You shouldn’t stay anywhere because you feel stuck,” Aquino said. “That’s not good for anyone. It’s not a healthy example to show your kids, either.”

Madeline Mitchell’s role covering women and the caregiving economy at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.

Reach Madeline at memitchell@usatoday.com and @maddiemitch_ on X.