What are stay-at-home wives worth?
What is a stay-at-home wife worth in American currency?
(And why that dollar amount is bogus.)
Disclaimer: No matter how mad you get, read this to the end.
You’ve all surely seen the figures…. Stay-at-home wives do the laundry, drive kids around, clean the house, and countless other things that all add up to an embarrassing salary that they should make, but don’t.
It looks something like this:
Cleaning the house-$100 / week
Laundry-$75 / week
Chef for 14 meals a week-$250 / week
Personal assistant / Personal shopper-$750 / week
Chauffer / Driver-$500 / week
It all adds up very quickly to something near $90,000 per year! WooDoggies those stay-at-home wives are underpaid!
Well, not actually. Because if you were really making $5000 every year to clean the house, there wouldn’t be hair in the sink. Ever. And nobody in the house would ever need to hunt for clean socks. A personal chef making a thousand bucks a month wouldn’t be packing sandwiches for lunch or nuking leftovers for supper. A personal shopper would never forget anything on the shopping list. And let’s not even discuss a personal driver. That’s a stretch by anyone’s imagination. Professional drivers who have Cheerios on the back floorboard by the carseats or bugs on the windshield don’t stay employed as professional drivers for very long.
The simple fact is that if nearly any stay-at-home wife were to actually apply for any of those jobs, they’d probably not get hired.
At this point there are probably a few stay-at-home moms readying their pitchforks and lighting their torches. They say, “Well of course there are bugs on the windshield, I was too busy changing diapers to wash the car.” Or, “I heat up leftovers because I don’t have time to cook after driving the kids to soccer practice.” And all of that is completely true.
So here’s my point…. If you’re not actually doing those jobs, don’t set your value according to them.
You’re not a professional driver, or personal chef, or full time laundry-launderer. So the monetary value of those professions has no bearing on your worth to your family.
Who’s de-valuing the worth of stay-at-home wives? ImAGiver, because he points out the bugs on the windshield? No, because bugs on the windshield don’t matter. The people de-valuing the worth of stay-at-home wives are the people trying to put a dollar amount on their worth.
Making a house a home, even if the laundry isn’t done and there are sandwiches for lunch, is a job that so very few people seem to be suited to today and a job that even fewer women flourish at.
In all honesty there’s not a dollar amount that can be placed on the work of a stay-at-home wife, because they’re irreplaceable.
Stay-at-home wives, if you want to realize just how valuable you are–Don’t ask yourself how much drivers or cooks or cleaning crews are worth. Because, remember this, drivers and cooks and cleaning crews can all be replaced. They’re just faceless strangers crossing off things on a to-do list. But you’re not. You’re not a faceless stranger, you’re the face of your family. You’re who everyone thinks of when they think of your home. And what you do is done with love, and that’s priceless.