Stay-at-Home Mom Shares Sobering Comparison Of Her Life And Her Doctor Husband
One mom is drawing attention to the fact that she works more than her husband but is not compensated.
Ground Picture / Shutterstock Being a stay-at-home mom is the most difficult job in the world. It’s also the most underappreciated.
One mom pointed out the discrepancies between her work as a stay-at-home mom and her husband’s as a doctor.
A stay-at-home mom compared her own life with that of her doctor husband.
TikTok creator Ssonia Ong shares pieces of her life as a wife and mom on the app, where she has garnered over ten million followers. In one video, she offered a glimpse into the differences and similarities between her life and her husband’s.
Ong stated that she went to school for a total of six years, with four years for her undergraduate degree and two years for her master’s degree. Meanwhile, her husband spent a total of 16 years on his education — four years for his undergraduate degree, four years for medical school, six years of residency, and two years of fellowship.
While Ong’s husband spent considerably more time on his education, she is still very well-educated. She has both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. However, she doesn’t use her degrees like her husband uses his.
Ong then went on to detail how many hours she and her husband work each week. She said her husband works a minimum of 60 hours a week, which is certainly more than what is considered full-time. However, it pales in comparison to how much Ong works. She works a whopping 168 hours per week. In other words, she works every hour of every day.
The most significant discrepancy between Ong and her husband is in how much money they bring in yearly. Her husband makes six figures. Ong, on the other hand, makes $0.
That’s because Ong is a stay-at-home mom.
Ong has a good education and works harder than many people do. She is not compensated for it, though.
Some argued that stay-at-home parents should be paid or at least wanted to demonstrate how much they would make.
Salary.com decided to ask a simple question in a survey: “If stay-at-home moms earned an annual salary for all the jobs they perform on a daily basis, how much would they earn?”
The website found the answers. “We surveyed more than 19,000 moms since the start of the pandemic and have estimated the value of a mother’s work by tracking real-time market prices of all the jobs that moms perform.”
Looking at these factors, Salary.com found something surprising. “The median annual salary for stay-at-home moms this past year is $184,820 — rising $6,619 above the pre-pandemic median.”
Writing for The New York Times, Claire Cain Miller said, “It’s not uncommon in the United States for two parents to spend long hours working hard — but the one who works outside the home is paid for it, while the one who does housework and child care is paid nothing.”
Miller stated that the concept of paying stay-at-home parents would be “a twist on typical family policies — like paid leave, subsidized child care or the right to work part-time — all of which make it easier for parents to have jobs outside the home. Instead, this proposal would make it easier for them not to.”
While it sounds like a foreign idea, many believe paying stay-at-home parents would be good.
Several people commented on the video, expressing their wish to be paid to take care of things at home. As one person said, “Now if only we were paid for all of those hours …” Ong replied, “I’d be a millionaire.”
While it’s unclear if paying stay-at-home parents is the solution to this problem, it’s undoubtedly true that the first step is acknowledging that there is a problem. From there, it can be determined if stay-at-home parents should be compensated or, at the very least, more appreciated.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer for YourTango who covers entertainment, news, and human interest topics.