Stay-At-Home-Mom Is Torn On Whether It's 'Best' Or 'Worst' Job While She Goes Through Her Daily Chores
She acknowledges that parenting is both joyful and challenging.
TikTok A stay-at-home mom on TikTok is shedding a light on the extensive list of tasks that are involved in keeping a home, and a family, running on a day-to-day basis.
Alyssa is a stay-at-home mom who, as is evident from her TikToks, busies herself with baking, lunch prep for her kids, cleaning, and doing all the things parents have to do in order to nurture their kids. But her videos also serve as a reminder that the often thankless role of being a stay-at-home parent is as much of a job as any corporate 9 to 5.
She acknowledged that her role as a stay-at-home mom was ‘the worst and best job.’
She filmed herself sweeping the floor while her baby sat on the carpet, playing. She posted footage of herself holding both the baby and a bag of laundry and ended the video with a shot of herself doing dishes while her baby sat contained on the other side of the sink.
Alyssa jokingly referred to her daughter as “her boss,” while commenting that the tasks she completed were “assigned” by her baby’s dad. She captioned the video by saying, “Yes, I put her in the sink,” and said in the comments that “You do what you gotta do when your kid is attached at the hip.”
While her post wasn’t entirely serious, Alyssa raises a valid point— that the role of a stay-at-home mom is often full of thankless chores and uncompensated labor. She recognizes the mixed feelings she has in her position as a stay-at-home parent, noting that it can be both great and difficult at the same time.
Paying attention to the gray space of conflicting emotions is valuable. Putting a voice to those emotions benefits not only the person experiencing them but creates a space where honest and open dialogue can occur.
Another mom commented on Alyssa’s post, saying, 'We have the same job and same tasks,' which led Alyssa to declare it both the best and worst job.
Salary.com completed a Mom Salary Survey in which they surveyed over 19,000 moms in 2020. The site estimated the value of a mother’s daily labor by “tracking real-time market prices of all the jobs that moms perform.”
The results of their survey found that stay-at-home moms work an average of 106 hours a week, which breaks down to 15-hour days, 7 days a week. The survey declared that the median annual salary for a stay-at-home mom in 2021 would be $184,820, which was over $6,000 more than the pre-pandemic median salary.
Yahoo Finance broke down the various tasks completed by stay-at-home moms into categories, including childcare, food preparation and cooking, housework, and child-care-related travel.
The categorization of this child-rearing labor doesn’t include the emotional heavy lifting that being a parent entails, nor the weight of the mental load that many moms carry. This "cognitive labor" includes the non-tangible, unseen tasks involved in running a household. The mental load can include the way parents keep running lists in their heads of what the household needs, both literally and emotionally.
One could argue that the role of a stay-at-home parent is invaluable and that there’s no price high enough to compensate for that kind of work—but if a monetary value were to be assigned, it would certainly help a lot of households.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers celebrity gossip, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.