Know What You're Worth
It's easy to feel underpaid and underappreciated when there's no clear benchmark. We put some dollar amounts to activities that can go unnoticed, and a reminder that being a mom is hard work.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads!
What’s New This Week: Handy Calculators for Moms 🧮
As a throwback reference to my Blues Clues’ days (reminder courtesy of my kid), we’ve got some handy dandy calculators made for moms. We originally developed these for ourselves for fun and for our own work, but we’re now launching them on MomBrains for moms who may have similar questions:
Stay-at-Home Mom Salary Calculator: How much would a SAHM's salary be if she got paid for everything she does? It was one of my first questions when I decided to leave my full-time job to be a SAHM. It's more than you think, but when you break it down, it's also an 80-hour per week job. Here's how we calculate the wages and time.
Consulting Rate Calculator: Independent consulting, freelancing, and contract work are great options for moms seeking flexibility within their business interactions. But striking out on your own can be scary, especially if you don't know what to charge. We've created calculators to help as a starting point for consulting fee structures. This is actually how we negotiated rates for some of our own clients!
Both of these mini-analyses have helped us better verbally express the value we bring and the price it’s worth to both our family, our clients, and, most importantly, to ourselves. Don’t let others lowball your contributions!
We originally listed these along with a suite of other analyses we did as a fun Etsy shop, so you can check out our collection here. We’ll likely be adding more to our calculators on MomBrains, so free versions are available for those who don’t have the itch of running their own spreadsheet analysis (like I do!).
What We’re Reading This Week 📖
More on Education: As a follow-up from last week’s read on the American shift to ‘science-based’ reading (aka a rebranding of phonics), we’re reading about the parents in NYC and educators in Oregon looking to make up for the gap in the current educational standards at public schools:
Grade-level reading achievements from consistent tutoring in Oregon
NYC parents paying $$$ for extra math tutoring, and you can check out our take on after-school math programs.
How Gen Z Feels About the Future: These types of articles from the NY Times are some of my favorites. This journalist helps to shed light on and encapsulate the challenges and feelings of Gen Z (born betw. 1997 and 2012) through their own voices about their future. It’s easy to feel disconnected from younger generations, as we get older, and pieces like these help to get a glimpse of other POVs. And if this piece feels too depressing, then check out Fast Company’s spotlight on the money-making Gen Alpha.
Lastly — An anecdote from a SAHM returning to work after 17 years. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to re-enter the workforce and how possible that is given our at-home obligations and unconventional work set-up here at MomBrains. Stories like these help remind me that we can figure it out and there are resources we can leverage, even if it’s hard.
How We’re Feeling This Week 😵💫
We’ve been busy building our MomBrains content, onboarding a new client, and keeping on top of current client commitments. We've also attended to end-of-school-year activities and planned ahead for the summer on the home front.
That’s hard enough when you’re at full capacity, but it’s exhausting when you’re pregnant! It’s been a hard week to keep up with the challenges. Thanks to great family and friends (and even strangers on Reddit, no thanks to Gemini or ChatGPT), I’m reminded that growing a human is hard work, and I should cut myself some slack even if clients won’t always.
This influencer says it best because sitting at a desk never felt so tiring. I’ll definitely consider adding ‘has experience growing a human’ to my next resume update.
Image Source: Instagram from DRBETSEYPT
Signing off,
Your Team at MomBrains