“Two kids. No income. No safety net.” The caption belongs to a now-viral TikTok posted by the creator @cortneygetsfit, first shared in December 2025 and since viewed close to 15 million times. In the video, Cortney, previously known for fitness and wellness content, explains through tears that her husband wants a divorce, and she is suddenly confronting what life looks like after more than ten years as a stay-at-home mom. White text floats above her head: “No one prepares you for how financially vulnerable stay-at-home moms really are.” She describes relying on an American Express card for household expenses—her name is on it, but her husband pays the bill—and then being told it will be cut off and she needs to start using “your own card.” Her response is immediate: “What card? I don’t have a card. That is my card.”

For many Care Talk readers, her realization is less new information than an old, well-documented fact. But Cortney’s video earned virality because it interrupted an algorithmic space that has increasingly packaged dependence as tranquility. Over the past few years, “tradwife” and “stay-at-home girlfriend” content has surged on social media: a stylized return to “traditional” gender roles, framed as an appealing alternative to burnout and “career culture.” The tradwife persona revolves around a family model in which a male breadwinner provides, while a woman focuses on homemaking and caregiving.

So Cortney’s panic has particular force because it comes from inside the ecosystem that often makes that arrangement look effortless. You can hear the collision in the comments. One, liked by the creator, warns: “Being a SAHM / trad wife is a dangerous risk to take” (@slapdashstudymumma, TikTok comment, 12/6/2025). Another asks: “Hey trad wives are you listening? 🙄” (@user4251313879808, TikTok comment, 12/6/2025). Scroll further and you find something even more striking than the tradwife and SAHM debates: a chorus of people recounting the same story—happening to them, or to their mothers—years of unpaid caregiving, then a split, then a scramble for survival. The video is viral not because it is rare, but because it is recognizable.

Users are grappling with, in real time, the lived reality that unpaid care work is work and how that reality conflicts with the portrayal of stay-at-home mothering as leisure. They are confronting the fact that the unpaid care they know to be essential labor lacks the protections we instinctively associate with work. It does not automatically generate independent savings, retirement accounts, or an employment record that can be “cashed in” later. It can erode credit access and bargaining power. When a relationship ends, the caregiver may face the job market with a résumé gap that is socially common and economically punishing. Cortney’s fear forces a blunt question: if care is so valuable, why is it so easy for the person doing it to end up economically stranded?

The most common advice in her comment section is also revealing: get a lawyer. Of course. But the video shows why that advice can be incomplete. Cortney tells her viewers that she does not have a dollar to her name; how might she afford a consultation fee? What about a retainer? The same dependence that makes divorce terrifying also makes legal representation harder to access.

That being said, stay-at-home parents do have legal rights in divorce. But legal recognition does not reliably translate into stability. A minority of U.S. states follow community-property rules (which tend to facilitate more equal asset division); most states—including Florida, Cortney’s home state—use equitable distribution, where “equitable” does not necessarily mean “equal.” In experimental evidence on asset division, as Shinall and Hersch show, “equitable” outcomes can leave women with substantially less than half of marital assets. Discretion, bargaining power, and state-specific rules make “fairness” fragile, especially when one party enters the process with less cash, less information, and less time.

Support raises similar issues. Contemporary family law often leans on a “clean break” ideal, treating divorce as a moment when adults should quickly become economically separate, even when one adult has spent years subsidizing the other’s earning capacity through unpaid care. Alimony “reform” frequently promises clarity and modernity while narrowing recognition of caregiving’s long-term costs; the dominant rehabilitative frames obscure opportunity costs and risk consigning women to “mere subsistence while their former husbands enjoy a higher earning capacity achieved through their unpaid labor.”

Feminist economist Nancy Folbre has a name for the larger pattern: the “motherhood gamble”—a wager made in a policy environment that privatizes the costs of raising children and undervalues caregiving labor. Cortney took that gamble (perhaps unknowingly) and discovered how quickly “security” can evaporate when care work is treated as a private arrangement rather than socially necessary labor.

Cortney’s line, “No one prepares you for how financially vulnerable stay-at-home moms really are,” may not be new to scholars of care. But it is newly visible to millions of young women encountering, for the first time, the material underside of content that sells dependence as softness. Cortney’s story will not dislodge the algorithm. What it can do is change what becomes sayable within it: that unpaid care is indispensable work, and that indispensability does not automatically translate into protection. It’s a reminder that questions of how we value care, and how we protect those who perform it, can break into new, even hostile spaces. And it points to a final, practical challenge that deserves our attention: Gen Z is already absorbing lessons about care, dependence, and risk from the algorithm. We should be offering better ones—naming the structures, not shaming the choices, and building protections worthy of the work. It is time to welcome a new generation to the movement to revalue care. We can’t do it without them.

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