If one parent stays home with your kids, put life insurance on that parent too. Losing them would leave you paying for the childcare, driving, and housework they handle now, often for a decade or more. Price that work, multiply it by the years until your youngest is grown, and buy a term policy that covers the total.
It’s tempting to skip this policy when no paycheck would disappear and the working spouse already has life insurance through a job. That coverage insures the worker, so it pays nothing if the parent at home dies.
Replacing what that parent does starts with childcare. Child Care Aware of America found the national average price of child care was $13,184 a year in 2025, so two young kids in care at that price cost more than $26,000 a year. School runs, meals, laundry, and summer camp come on top, and the working parent still has to work.
Price full-time care at your local rates, then add what you’d pay for help with the house and the driving. Multiply by the years until your youngest is grown, with a lower yearly figure once the kids are in school, and add funeral costs. Say that comes to $30,000 a year until your youngest starts school in three years, then $12,000 a year for the 13 years after that. That’s $246,000 before the funeral. Round up for rising prices, and $300,000 of coverage does the job.
A 20-year term policy covers that stretch, and in your 30s it’s cheap. MoneyGeek’s 2026 rate analysis puts even $500,000 of 20-year coverage for a 35-year-old nonsmoker in average health at about $37 a month for a woman and $47 for a man. Buy an individual policy, not spouse coverage through work, which employers often cap and which typically ends with the job.
Insurers usually approve a parent without earnings for half to all of the working spouse’s coverage, so plan both policies together. Make the working spouse the owner and beneficiary, so the parent raising the kids controls the money. Name a trust or an adult custodian as the backup, not the kids. An insurer can’t pay a minor directly, so a court would have to appoint someone to manage the money.
If you’d have to hire someone to do it, it belongs in the policy.
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