Everyone wants their hard work and effort to be recognized and valued.  When you earn a paycheck for your work, there's some built-in validation of the "worth" of your effort.  But the external recognition of stay-at-home parenting is often more complicated.  Sure, the contributions of stay-at-home parents are validated rhetorically but things seem to usually get a little more murky after that.

For this reason (and many others), stay-at-parents were justifiably outraged when new credit card rules, instituted last October as part of the Credit Card Accountability and Responsibility Act (CARD), unintentionally made it impossible for credit-worthy stay-at-home parents, no matter their family's income or credit history, to get credit in their own name.  As we at MomsRising pointed out in one of our first email action alerts on this issue, these rules would mean wealthy stay-at-home moms Michelle Obama and Ann Romney would be unable to get credit cards.

But the story doesn't end there!

Stay-at-home parents, led by stay-at-home mom Holly McCall, fought back and won!

Yesterday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that it had taken significant action to change credit card rules that have unfairly denied stay-at-home parents access to credit.   The CFPB formally released proposed changes to the rules related to the CARD Act in order to reverse the wrongful interpretation of the CARD Act and restore access to credit to credit-worthy individuals.

The CFPB took action after Holly McCall worked with MomsRising and Change.org to generated over 50,000 signatures on our petition to the CFPB to restore stay-at-home parents' fair access to credit.  With Holly, we delivered these signatures directly to CFPB Director Richard Cordray and discussed our concerns about the issue with he and his staff at length.

Soon after, MomsRising was invited to testify about this issue before the U.S. House of Representative's Sub Committee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.   During the hearing, Sub Committee hearing, Congresswomen Carolyn Maloney and Shelley Capito praised our work on this issue and said our campaign was making a real difference in moving things forward.

The CFPB heard us!  In fact, in the text and justifications of their proposed rule change, the CFPB cited MomsRising member concerns as a key reason for their decision to take action (page 6, footnote 14!).  This is a testament to our work together!

Let's reward "good behavior"!  Click here to add your name to a "Thank You" card to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

We'll deliver the card to the CFPB to let them know that we appreciate and support their decision to recognize the value of stay-at-home parents' work.

To learn more about this issue and why it's so important for stay-at-home parents and others, check out my previous blog on the topic.

What do you think about the CFPB's move to restore access to credit to credit-worthy stay-at-home parents?  Add your comments below and tweet them to @momsrising and @ashleyboyd