stay at home mom - a $134k job

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This study was probably done by women, and should therefore be disregarded completely due to their lack of analytical, logical, and mathematical reasoning ability.

They are pretty to look at and fun to have sex with, though.

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This is an outstanding analysis.

Seriously though, these studies come out every once in a while always saying the same thing, and the ones I've read bits and pieces of use a very suspect methodology. They will say how much a gardener costs per year, say, and then add that to a total as if someone were a full-time gardener. Then they get every other job added together as if it too were full-time. Sorry, but nobody works five 40 hour jobs a week, nor do they have to.

Also, they don't deduct the fact that a gardener has to go home to his own place, for which he pays rent. Last I heard, nobody is charging their wife rent. Or for food, electricity, use of credit, gas, power, telephone, doctor and dentist bills, clothes, etc. And nobody listens to their gardener nagging them or has to put up with their gardener's mother-in-law, which has gotta be worth something.

So, true value supplied isn't really looked at, nor are the freebies subtracted.

Of course, we can argue whether they're really freebies, of course, but that wipes out the main argument, that wives do something that's worth money that could or should be compensated monetarily. You can't call them family one minute and employees the next, picking and choosing wherever and whenever you like to wring the most money out of the equation.

[RiverFenix]

I like that "girl power" feminists did this survey - I wonder what the bulldyke feminist response is.

I'm not trying to be offensive but they're two very different types of feminists imho.

[PhatPots]

sillyness. This is obviously written by feminist who feels the need to try and put homemaker in the same context as high powered attorney/Doctor/accountant

Rubbish

[DrewDevil]

This is retarded... you could EASILY hire TWO full-time housekeepers/nannies, one to take care of the house and one to take care of the kids, for $60-80K in all but the most expensive cities in America.

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Furthermore, anyone you would pay 134k a year to would have to be extremely skilled and come with wads of references and a dandy resume. Having zero qualifications, no references, experience, licenses or degrees -- just having gotten pregnant -- is not enough to grant anyone this kind of wage.

[Klompy]

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This is retarded... you could EASILY hire TWO full-time housekeepers/nannies, one to take care of the house and one to take care of the kids, for $60-80K in all but the most expensive cities in America.

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And most of the day they wouldn't even be busy.

[hamsamich]

My boss has two full time house keepers (one live in with sexy time bonus) and it doesn't cost him half that for both. Why don't these surveys ever account for the fact that most married men would not even elect to have children in the first place if their wives didn't talk them into it??

[RunDownHouse]

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Furthermore, anyone you would pay 134k a year to would have to be extremely skilled and come with wads of references and a dandy resume. Having zero qualifications, no references, experience, licenses or degrees -- just having gotten pregnant -- is not enough to grant anyone this kind of wage.

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That's almost as much of a signaling issue than anything else.

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Why don't these surveys ever account for the fact that most married men would not even elect to have children in the first place if their wives didn't talk them into it??

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Can we get a show of hands by OOT dads that regret their kids and only wanted them in the first place because the wife pulled some sort of Jedi mind trick?

[Blarg]

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My boss has two full time house keepers (one live in with sexy time bonus) and it doesn't cost him half that for both. Why don't these surveys ever account for the fact that most married men would not even elect to have children in the first place if their wives didn't talk them into it??

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Woops, forgot my birth control!

[Blarg]

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Furthermore, anyone you would pay 134k a year to would have to be extremely skilled and come with wads of references and a dandy resume. Having zero qualifications, no references, experience, licenses or degrees -- just having gotten pregnant -- is not enough to grant anyone this kind of wage.

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That's almost as much of a signaling issue than anything else.

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I am not sure what you mean by a "signaling issue."

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Why don't these surveys ever account for the fact that most married men would not even elect to have children in the first place if their wives didn't talk them into it??

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Can we get a show of hands by OOT dads that regret their kids and only wanted them in the first place because the wife pulled some sort of Jedi mind trick?

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This isn't a fair question, really.

How many people would find this easy to admit even to themselves? Certainly there is every cultural pressure to never acknowledge or admit such a thing. You might as well ask someone how much they would like to be ostracized, admit to a terrible mistake, or if they'd like to stab themselves in the eye or something.

It seems fairly beyond question to me that men are nowhere near as interested in having children as are women. I'd also suggest that in general they don't find it nearly as gratifying, as their typical social roles revolve far, far less around childbirth and parenthood than do those of women. Their daily activities, too, tend to revolve far less around children, so their opportunities to intimately experience on a regular basis the presence of their children and the joys and sense of purpose they can provide is substantially less than experienced by mothers.

That doesn't mean there isn't something in it for the dads, but our society isn't constructed along lines that gives nearly the reward for fatherhood that there is for motherhood. Arguably, neither is our biology.