The calculator that estimates how much you should be paid for parenting
We spend more time during the week, parenting than doing paid work – and apparently, if it was a paid job, we’d all be rich!
The work we do as parents is relentless, with hours upon hours filled with countless tasks that range from cooking, cleaning and shopping, to accountancy, chauffeuring and dispute resolution. And it never fits neatly between 9am and 5pm, rather spilling over into evenings, weekends and the middle of nearly every night.
Naturally, we do it because we want to raise a family, but think how great it would be to get paid for all that work. I know I’ve thought about it. And now, thanks to a cool new tool, you can work out just how much it might be.
UK retailer, Funky Pigeon has developed a parents’ salary calculator that reveals what you should be paid for all your many hours of parenting. But be prepared – the amount will blow you away.
How did they do it?
According to the Funky Pigeon, they identified eight jobs that parents spend their time doing for their kids and found the closest professional equivalent of those jobs.
“Next, we gathered wage and salary data for these eight jobs (from an Australian jobs site), and did so for every state and territory in Australia, including over 300 individual towns and cities across the country,” they state on their blog. “So, when you enter your weekly hours into the tool, we convert them into yearly salaries for each of these jobs. Finally, we add everything up to give you a total yearly #ParentSalary”
Going by this, a stay-at-home parent in Canberra could apparently earn an estimated average of $485,875.20 per year.
Multi-tasking
Funky Pigeon cites cooking as an example of a job, saying that if you spend seven hours a week cooking for your children, this would equate to 364 hours a year. If a chef was paid $25 per hour, then the estimated salary for this one job alone would be a whopping $9,100.
And that doesn’t include the rest of it. There’s also the work you do as a personal assistant, nurse, psychologist, cleaner, taxi driver, laundromat attendant and teacher.
Whew! It’s no wonder we’re all so exhausted. Maybe if enough people try out this calculator, there might be a mass movement towards introducing some sort of payment scheme later down the track.
But then the next problem will be couples vying over who gets to stay home and bring in the big bucks.
To work out your salary, visit the website.
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