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Stay-at-Home Moms are “worth” $15.74 Per Hour 24/7!
By JLP | May 4, 2007
That’s according to this story on MoneyCentral, which states that moms are worth $138,095 per year based on the jobs that they do. Me, being the nut that I am had to divide it out by the hour. Based on 8,750 hours per year, that works out to $15.74 per hour, 24-hours a day. If you take out 8 hours for sleeping, it works out to $23.65 per hour, 16 hours per day.
I bet a lot of moms think that’s WAY TOO LOW!
Topics: Miscellaneous | 12 Comments »
May 4th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
My mom was a SAHM, a fact that I cherish and value. However, even inflation adjusted, that is more than my dad made working VERY hard. I think it is too high to be taken seriously. How many people make that much money?
May 4th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
LAMoneyGuy,
Maybe Salary.com, the author of the “study” is trying to get some press attention.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Wouldn’t it be great if we got paid to do our own laundry, drive our own kids around, and run our own household? I wish I got paid to change my own oil and mow my own lawn!
Don’t forget the average American watches 4 hours of TV a day (I am flabbergasted that anyone could waste so much time), so you’re really talking $34.25 per hour!
May 4th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
This is silly. They count everything they do as if it is “work” done by a skilled person.
I suppose that mothers act as “psychologists” but given that they probably have no training it’s unfair to count that as work done by a proper psychologist, and similarly for all the other jobs.
Surely if we apply this to anyone, not just a stay-at-home mom, we will get absurd figures. I’m a student and if you were to hire someone to do the same work I do for classes it would run $30+/hr, but that hardly means I am worth that amount.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Chris, watching TV is not “wasting time”. The whole point of life is to have free time to do whatever you enjoy.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Andy,
Good points. What about the parents who screw up their kids?
May 4th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
I agree that the number is inflated as Andy says. The true value should be calculated on what it would cost to replace the work of the SAHM if she no longer were present (say the father were widowed and had to hire a housekeeper, pay to have the children in daycare and afterschool care, send the laundry out to be done by a service and pay for take-out etc)
As a SAHM myself though I can say that the article does have a a certain validity in trying to point out that a SAHM doesn’t just sit at home all day doing nothing (ie eating bon bons and watching soap operas), that the job they do is important and has value, even if it is not actually compensated by a salary. (this is particularly hard even for the SAHM herself to believe sometimes, having been brought up usually to expect that having a career and making money was what was important) However I think that it is somewhat counter-productive to make the dollar figure so excessive because it does cause some people to just dismiss the study out of hand rather than really think about the situation.
May 8th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
I agree with JLP and Andy. Not only are SAHM’s not trained as psychologists, many if not most are not even trained as mothers! It’s like walking in to an accountant’s office and saying you will now be an accountant with no education, training, or experience in the field, and then declaring that you deserve $138,000 a year for being an accountant.
I sometimes watch the show “Supernanny” and am amazed that these parents who are obviously failing and often understand this themselves, but do absolutely nothing to educate themselves about parenting except to call a TV show in desperation or possibly for the cash and prizes. There are tons of resources these people can easily access if they ever wanted to really become competent at their chosen professions – i.e. being full time moms(/dads).
May 10th, 2007 at 8:38 am
My wife’s worth twice that.
Honey, are you reading this?
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:33 pm
No question that MY Mom was worth every penny of that,
and much more. I like to think that some of my hugs
paid SOME of that, but I’ll always be in her debt….
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