Last week, I noticed the main article on MSN.com was about somebody (probably a mom) calculating the salary of a stay-at-home mom to be a ridiculous $138,095 per year. I didn’t bother reading the article because it was early in the morning and I don’t like getting annoyed before I’ve had my Cheerios. I completely forgot about the whole thing until today when I saw a link to reader feedback about the article. Not surprisingly, the feedback was overwhelmingly negative, and probably was written mostly by men.
Some of my favorite reader responses:
“What a load of baloney! If these stay-at-home moms are doing all they say they’re doing, they wouldn’t have time to answer your bogus survey. Do you pay them per hour for watching soap operas and Oprah?”
“The majority of stay-at-home moms spend most of their waking hours on their cell phone or computer, and running to garage sales or thrift stores. Their houses are a disaster, they probably haven’t cooked a decent sit-down meal for their family for months, and the laundry is piled knee-deep in the basement. I was a working mom — 40 plus hours per week — and I don’t know of one stay-at-home mom worth that kind of money.”
“Many of these mothers are unqualified for the positions you described, given the fact that American kids are fat, poorly educated and arrogant at best. Moms are worth no more than the product they are producing.”
Geez, stereotype much? People seemed to be legitimately angry about this article, so I decided to check it out. Admittedly, the $138,095 figure was based on some absurd assumptions, e.g., equating part of a mom’s job to that of CEO, thereby calculating part of her “salary” by using an average CEO’s salary. Add to that the fact that the whole thing was based upon a survey that asked moms to report how much time they spend on each of their daily activities (perhaps some exaggerating going on?), and you can see why a lot of people were bothered by the article’s claim.
Personally, I just think it was a fun article with a intentionally inflated dollar amount that was designed to get a reaction out of people, and the author certainly succeeded. Unfortunately, now my mom is claiming I owe her a lot of money. Geez, I already pay for the nursing home, what more does she want?
