Topline
Stay-at-home parents of two children in the United States do roughly 200 combined hours of cleaning, shopping, cooking, childcare and other tasks each month, a new study by Beike Biotechnology shows, labor that would cost between $4,000 and $5,200 per month to outsource in a handful of American cities.
Zachary Moore is a stay-at-home dad who takes care of his family's two children Rossalyn Moore, 5, ... [+]
Key Facts
The study of 80 major cities around the world analyzed the household and childcare tasks taken on by the stay-at-home parents of one to four children and researched how much it would cost to outsource those tasks in each city.
The Swiss towns of Zurich and Basel were the places where stay-at-home parents were found to have the most monetary value, with San Francisco coming in at No. 3—a stay-at-home parent of two children in the city does about $5,200 worth of tasks per month, the study found, or roughly $1.25 million over the course of 20 years.
Of the 10 cities where stay-at-home parents of two were the most valuable, four were in the United States: Washington D.C. was ranked No. 7 (it would cost about $4,400 per month to outsource the work of parents there), New York City was No. 8 ($4,380) and Los Angeles came in ninth ($4,250).
The value of the parental workload was found by analyzing eight common chores—cleaning, cooking, shopping, laundry, transportation, emotional support, tutoring and planning/administrative tasks—and averaging how many hours parents spend on those tasks, based on the number of children they have.
An average parent of two children, for example, spends 19.9 hours cleaning per month, 23.7 hours cooking, 16.8 hours transporting children and 22.9 hours planning, scheduling, arranging activities or doing other household administration tasks, the study found.
Researchers then found how much it would cost per hour to outsource those tasks in each city and found the “value” of a stay-at-home workload.
Big Number
$1 million. That's how much it would cost, on average, to outsource the work of a stay-at-home parent of two over the course of the 20 years it takes to raise those children in the six American cities (San Francisco, New York City, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago) included in the study.
Key Background
For decades, it was common for American mothers to exclusively be homemakers and childrearers while one parent worked a job outside of the home. In 1967, 49% of mothers were stay-at-home moms, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but those numbers largely declined through 1999, when only 23% of mothers worked exclusively at home. As of 2021, roughly 18% of parents did not work for pay, but the stay-at-home gender split has greatly shifted. Dads now represent 19% of stay-at-home parents, a study from Pew Research Center said last year, up from 11% in 1989.
Further Reading
