Are You Making $117,000?

Posted by: Lauren Young on May 16

I posted this last week…but somehow it got deleted, but it’s okay because I’ve updated it with some more recent data.

Maybe I should stay at home.

According to a survey last week from Salary.com, a stay-at-home-mom would earn almost $117,000 annually, a figure which includes ample overtime pay.

And that’s precisely why I’d like to quibble with the results. I receive no “overtime” pay for my day job, which often extends into the night or weekends. Last weekend, for example, I spent much my time juggling family with work because I had to turn around an article and fact-check the piece with a source.

Oh, and as a working parent, I am not DEFINITELY compensated for my second job—cooking, light housework, paying the bills, etc.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen had the same reaction on Time.com’s Work-in-Progress blog.

I have no problem with the job of mom being highly valued, if only by some b.s. survey designed to garner the website some press. But what sticks in my craw is the devaluing of working moms and dads. We too perform those other roles—housekeeper, cook, shrink—but on top of schlepping off to bring home the bacon.
Amen, sister.

Like Lisa, I realize cute surveys like this one, as well as another survey from MomConnection, are designed to generate some marketing buzz. What sticks in my craw is that it’s impossible to put a pricetag on the value of parenting. Some weeks I’m the top contributor to the team. Other weeks my husband and caregiver pick up the slack.

What about stay-at-home dads? Last year’s figures from Salary.com determine that dads who perform 10 typical job functions would equate to an annual salary of $128,755 for a stay-at-home dad. Stay-at-home dads, however, are in short supply. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates there are 159,000 dads who made the choice to stay at home in 2006, compared to 143,000 in 2005. Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates there were 5.6 million stay-at-home moms in 2006. We’ll have to wait a few weeks to see if there are any changes for 2007.

If you had to come up with a number, how much would you say a Working Parent should earn? Should the starting salary be high, considering the physical demands of working with newborns? Or do the parents of teenagers deserve bigger paychecks for the mental challenge?

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Reader Comments

AF

May 16, 2008 06:55 PM

The whole concept of quantifying the job of parent utterly bewilders me. Being a parent is not a job, there's no interview, no qualifications, no education required, no retirement plan, no tax forms. And let's not forget, to be a job you need customers, and in a free market your customers can get their services elsewhere. If parenting is a job, does child abuse get you fired, or drug abuse or just bad parenting?

Parenting is something you do because you want to, it makes you happy. Should we also pay people to adopt homeless pets? Do charity work? What's the value of a priest whose spiritual guidance affects the lives of hundreds of people, should they be paid like CEO's?

Lets be honest with ourselves, being a parent is a calling, a personal need, a religious imperative, even a talent.

But it's not a career.

tom

May 28, 2008 08:43 PM

and just who do you expect to pay your $117,000.00 ??? If you don't want to be mommie because you LOVE your kids, keep your legs closed & enjoy your career.

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About

In this blog, BusinessWeek’s Lauren Young, Cathy Arnst, Diane Brady, Karyn McCormack, Anne Newman, Mauro Vaisman, Ben Levisohn, Sarah Davis, Lourdes L. Valeriano, and Joy Katz, along with freelance writer Savita Iyer-Ahrestani, lead a broad discussion of the issues and day-to-day concerns of working parents, offering up interviews with work/life experts, examinations of relevant research, and their personal accounts of bouncing between separate, sometimes conflicting worlds.

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