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I read an absolutely fabulous article recently on Medium from a self-made millionaire and Australian working mom who hired a housekeeper and household manager for her family. In fact, Denise Duffield-Thomas said hiring a housekeeper was the “gamechanger” for her. Here is her summary:
We hire a housekeeper from 7 am – 12 every weekday to basically be my wife.
She makes breakfast, light tidying, preps lunch and dinner, and then does the million and one things that run a house. Food shopping, laundry, calling the handyman, going to the post-office, replacing batteries and toilet paper, remembering to buy milk, etc.
Think of everything you mentally hold in your “to-do” list, and she does it.
We’ve talked about how to level up your childcare game when time, not money, is the issue, but not in the detail that she goes into here. I don’t know her personally, but she’s in one of my business Facebook groups, and I’d bet her Medium posting was based on a comment thread that she chimed in on.
She shared her entire job description in the group, which included planning and cooking meals, cleaning kitchen from the night before, removing old items from the fridge, organizing closets, tidying the house, errands like shopping, returns, taking items to the charity shop, going to the post office, filing paperwork, making appointments, and more. I’m so happy she published her thoughts for broader consumption; it was a great piece and I highly encourage you to read it.
I also have one Facebook friend (whom I know primarily through a blogging connection) who hired a stay-at-home mom whose kids were in school to come over for a few hours a week and “fold laundry,” which I could imagine being the same kind of job. I also know it was pretty common among senior women lawyers at my old New York law firm to keep their nanny on even after the kids were in school to do these kinds of duties.
{update: I tried to use a virtual assistant to delegate family tasks — here’s how it went}
Let’s discuss, ladies — what do you think of housekeepers for working moms? Do you think a household manager is a good use of money if you have two working parents, and where does it rank among other expenses?
1) If you HAVE hired a housekeeper (or, say, kept on an old nanny now that your children are grown and this is the role she serves), some questions for you:
- How did you find this person?
- How much do you pay per hour?
- What is the person’s title — housekeeper, personal assistant, or something else?
- How long has this person worked for you?
- What kinds of things do you always delegate? What do you prefer to do yourself?
- What are the non-cleaning things your housekeeper does, an how much of those are kid-related?
- Do you feel like you can trust the person to do urgent/important things?
2) If you have NOT hired someone like this but in theory could afford this kind of help, what’s holding you back? To me the biggest things are a) navigating the etiquette of the arrangement if you’re hiring someone you know (like, say, a stay-at-home mom you met through your kids’ school), and b) bringing someone you don’t know into your home to do this stuff — from a safety perspective, from a “I want to be the only one who puts away my underwear” perspective, and from a “who knew I had such strong feelings about X?” perspective.
For example, I’ve had cleaning services “unload the dishwasher” by sticking big knives blade-up into the big canisters with spatulas… so I feel like there would be a huge learning curve to make sure that things were done “my way” and that said learning curve would involve a TON of my own time, including making lists of what I want the person to do and making sure I have “enough” for him or her to do.
Ladies, I’d love to hear your thoughts — have you hired a housekeeper? Does your current nanny already do these duties, or when you hired for childcare did you make it part of the job description? If you haven’t, what’s holding you back?
J says
“We hire a housekeeper from 7 am – 12 every weekday to basically be my wife.” While I’m sure this comment was in jest, the awfulness of “basically be my wife” prevents me from taking anything this woman says seriously. It is horribly offensive to both men and women.
Anon says
This this this. Signed, someone whose husband does all the cooking and most of the grocery shopping.
PregLawyer says
I felt the same way, but I liked the article. Her whole point is that it’s okay to outsource this work, and much of the push-back against outsourcing housework is caught up in inappropriate gender expectations. I liked this quote:
“It’s weird — housework is practically the only job in the world that’s supposed to be fulfilling for women to do for free (how convenient) but somehow shameful and exploitative to pay another woman (and it’s mostly women) to do it.”
Anonymous says
I understood her intention, though. I constantly have to remind my male coworkers that everything their wives do for them (magically!) while they’re at work, I have to do in the same amount of ‘free time’ that they have. It’s not *right* and it’s not how things should be, but it’s a reality.
shortperson says
4 yo and 1 yo in daycare, i’m in biglaw, we have a housekeeper 4 mornings a week. she does dishes, laundry (including folding and putting away), takes out trash, puts cans to the curb on garbage day, refills TP, breaks down amazon boxes, unpacks our suitcases, as well as the normal housecleaning work. we pay $20/hour (HCOL area) and have her on the books, about $25/hour. she does not do a lot of childcare but will entertain the baby while i get dressed, help us out to the car etc. she’s worked for us for 5 years, with increasing frequency so she knows where everything goes. she is great, comes up with systems for things as she feels necessary. she is much more careful about laundry (i.e. line drying) than i am. occasionally she mixes up the kids clothes and she doesnt fully understand where i want the toys to go (for a while kept treating the dollhouse as shelves to hold toys) but that’s better than me doing it myself!
i’d like to give her a big target gift card and have her shop for household things for us but my dh thinks that’s too fancy for us. which means it is now his job (used to be mine). her english is not great so i would not have her do other tasks (i.e. go to post office) both because it would be hard for her and it’s hard for me to explain things to her (my husband communicates more with her in their shared native language). we had a goal for her to teach kids that language but that is not working out.
Anonymous says
My issue is finding this person. How did you find someone capable you can trust?
Anon says
I might have been able to stay in biglaw with this kind of household help.
We wanted someone who could cover childcare as needed, but if childcare wasn’t needed, do housework (laundry, meal prep, errands, etc). We didn’t get very far in the process, but it seemed close to impossible to get someone willing and able to do both well in our area (Silicon Valley). From what I’ve seen, local wages are a typically quite high for this kind of position—much more than you’d pay someone with a good liberal arts degree in an early career job. We needed to pay on the books; I’m not sure of market for off the books help.
ER says
Also Silicon Valley, also biglaw, looked for years for this type of household manager without success. Then I finally found someone on NextDoor who was interested in a new gig. For a while we had her 3 hours a day, five days a week. We paid $25/hour on the books. The problem was that she was both very slow (and I’m very, very fast at household chores), and didn’t have good judgment. I got sick to my stomach watching her do tasks that three times more slowly than I could do them, and finally fired her after four months or so.
I think it’s just really hard to find someone who is smart, able-bodied, and willing to just do chores in our town, unless they’re somehow otherwise limited in their ability to get work (because for example they don’t speak good English or can’t be paid on the books).
RR says
I would absolutely love to hire a house manager/housekeeper, but it’s not in our budget now. If I made around $50,000 more (possible in the future), I would do this. I do think it would be awkward at first navigating how I want things done, and just asking someone to do things like refill my toilet paper roll, but once you got a rhythm, I think it would be amazing. And, I’m not that picky about how I want things–given how little time I have to do things, “done” is basically how I want things.
anon says
We sort of have this through a combination of people? We have a cleaning person, who has been with us for ten years and comes weekly. An elderly family member folds our laundry each week and does all our ironing (it takes her about 3 hours – I wash and dry the stuff that I don’t care if it’s wrinkled ahead of time, like kids clothes and sheets, so she just folds). Everyone puts away their own clothes. Our nanny comes an hour and a half early each day and does light cleaning (empty dishwasher, wipe down counters, sweep). I also have her run errands (I gave her a business credit card, which doesn’t show up on her credit report) – go to the grocery store, return items, go to the post office etc. I don’t have her do all the shopping, mostly because we are picky about produce and meat and she isn’t. I do give her very specific instructions (like pictures of the exact item I want). I also preorder things at places like Target and have her pick it up. It means I can have her run to all the stores I want during the week (e.g., Safeway for our favorite ice cream and Trader Joe’s for yogurt), and on the weekend I just go to our local grocery store with the nice produce. (Also, my entitled kids like fresh bread, so she buys a lot of midweek bread.) We go through an agency and pay on the books, and it costs a lot, but honestly, I couldn’t find anyone to just cover childcare anyway (I need about 4 hours/day), so this makes the shift a more reasonable 5-6 hours). There is nothing I find more depressing than looking at the dishwasher waiting to be emptied when she’s gone :). We are in the Bay Area.
Anon says
I know that this might not be a popular comment, but the thing that has always bothered me about hiring out this sort of non-professional help (I’m calling it that to differentiate it from hiring people who have some sort of specific expertise/ability that I don’t have) is that I feel like it would give the kids the impression that there are certain things that we don’t do, that is the role of “other people” (particularly people of a lower social class). I know that a lot of people do it, and there are probably other ways to work against instilling that idea, and I’m not really absolute about it (i.e., though we do our own yard work, it wouldn’t bother me a lot if we paid someone to mow, for reasons I can’t really put my finger on), but every now and then, you hear some idiot say something like “well, who’s going to clean your toilets?” as if that’s not something that they’ve ever contemplated doing before, and that really bothers me.
Anon says
Eh, I don’t really think it’s that big a deal that we’re teaching our children that we don’t currently have time to clean our toilets. They know that we both work outside the home, and that having two working parents gives us more disposable income than most families in our area, but at the expense of time. The trade-off is that we spend money to have as many of our chores taken care of, so we can focus on quality time with the family when we’re not at work. We aren’t teaching them we’re too “good” to clean toilets and I think that’s a significant distinction.. Fwiw, I am not wealthy by the standards of this s*te…HHI is just over $100k (albeit in a pretty low cost of living area).
Anonymous says
I hear you on this, and I think (hope) you can control the message with how you talk about the people who are paid to take care of your household chores. For example, we tell the kids that we pay other people to mow the lawn, and the housecleaner to come wash floors and clean toilets because otherwise they would take up time on the weekends that we want to spend playing with the kids. It’s a choice we’ve made about how to spend our money, (subtext, not because people like us don’t do things like that). We talk about how different people have different jobs to earn money, and while mom and dad’s jobs are to do things on computers, some people have jobs cleaning, or driving trucks, or working in a doctor office whatever.
Anon says
We have strict rules about this. My kids are required to walk up and say hello to every person who works in our house when they see them. Every. single. time. They know that the cleaning person, nanny and gardeners are adults who deserve their respect. The people who work in our home have real jobs – and they use the money they earn from our household to sustain their families. There is nothing lowly or shameful about that at all.
Anonymous says
+1 Similarly, I care about our ’employees’ and their families and always ask about what they’re up to, how their kids are, etc. Just like you would with anyone you work with, even those who do less ‘professional’ tasks (like your admin). Their work is still very important – its enabling us to our jobs better.
Inspired By Hermione says
I read a book that will be coming out in a few weeks (Maid) and I wish I was more surprised how badly most of her clients treated her- just fully ignored her existence. Like, why would you treat someone so poorly that you don’t even say hello to them when they’re in your house?
Anonymous says
I would love to hire someone to do the boring repetitive tasks that require little instruction or supervision: cleaning, laundry, yard care, chauffeuring kids. But I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to delegate more complex household management tasks such as shopping, meal planning, signing kids up for camp, paying bills, tax preparation, etc. I spend all day delegating and supervising at work and I hate it. I don’t want to spend my personal time delegating and supervising when it would be faster and easier just to do the tasks myself.
Seafinch says
Our Au Pair is fulfilling some of these roles. He walks the big kids to school and then has a two year old all day who sleeps for two or three hours. During that time, he does small, easy tasks like wiping down the kitchen, emptying dishwasher, doing breakfast dishes, running the steamer over the main floors, cleaning his shared bathroom, chopping or prepping a few veg or making rice for supper in the IP. He takes care of for kid related deritus of the day. So I get, what feels like, a big break on a few tasks that add up during the week and the house is tidy and I get a jump on supper. He will also do random things like take the garbage out and shovel. He makes great money and has the time, works for everyone.
C.R. says
I have had a personal assistant who worked 5-10 hours/week. I started at $13-15hour. I live in a very small city. I found my PA by having a grad student friend post on the grad student classified board at the local university. I also had a cleaning service every other week. My personal assistant did things like:
* baked healthy snacks (muffins);
* made or prepped dinner entrees;
* dropped off dry cleaning and postal packages;
* researched household things like decor/furnishings, house cleaners, etc.;
* prepared craft projects for my kid;
* organized kid birthday party invites;
* hand wash/iron;
* watered gardens
I found a “how to hire your first employee” check list, and paid her on the books. I hired a payroll service. I loved my personal assistant but she switched her regular job and had to quit after a few months. I work part-time and have only 1 kid. Husband travels a lot.
I think more working moms would have personal assistants/household managers if there wasn’t a stigma. You can’t duplicate yourself, but it helped me a lot to be able to push tasks that were making me feel overwhelmed to a competent person. We used a notebook to communicate to each other. I gave her a pre-paid credit card to pick up dry cleaning, buy craft supplies etc.
Anonanonanon says
My son will age out of after-school care after 6th grade in our area. I don’t think I’m 100% comfortable having him get off the bus, get in the front door, and wait at home alone for us at age 12. My solution is to hire someone to be primarily a housekeeper in the afternoons, but who can also be an adult who is in my home to notice if he does not make it back at the expected time. In my dreams, they handle a lot of the tasks mentioned above, such as:
-unloading/loading the dishwasher
-Changing sheets/towels and washing/drying them
-Cleaning the bathrooms
-Getting my son a snack after school
Rayne of Terror says
I’m not sure how old your son is now, but I have an eighth grader, and if your son is an average seventh grader when you get to that age, HE can do those things after school for you. An average seventh grader is extremely capable plus it’s a good education. I text my son a list around 3 pm – this is what I want done before I walk in the door tonight at 5:30. Several of my friends have a standing daily and weekly before school and/or after school chore list for their middle school aged sons. When I asked around I found out my expectations were WAY lower than my friends for what my sons do around the house when I’m not there.
Anonymous says
+1. My seventh-grader just turned 12 and can do all of those tasks competently, although I mostly have her do chores over the weekend. She recently started coming home on the bus by herself and loves it. Because middle school gets out relatively late, she is only home alone for about two hours, and it’s usually only two days a week because she has sports practice or school clubs the other days. The independence and responsibility have been great for her, and seem to be inspiring her to act more mature in general.
My daughter can put a casserole in the oven or throw together pizzas with premade crust so dinner is ready when we get home. Her 11-year-old friend actually cooks an entire dinner for the family while her parents are on their way home, but she is a little better with knives and hot pans than my daughter.
Kay says
I like the idea of incorporating children in household management, but the result is that you’re still managing the to-do list. To me, the biggest advantage of the housekeeper is that those tasks are no longer things you have to think about at all. They are not on your plate and free up physical and mental energies for use in a myriad of other areas. I find that very appealing.
Anonymous says
I give my kids responsibilities and they help around the house, but they are in school 7 hours a day, have after school activities and sports, and then homework, so their time is also very limited and that is not even including other things like pleasure reading, practicing instruments, or hanging out with their friends. Certainly, however, even if I have a housekeeper, my seventh grader will be getting their own after school snack.
Ducky36 says
I don’t disagree with other posters that children benefit from doing household chores. That said, I think you know what is best for you and your child. If it will take stress off of you and you feel that he isn’t ready to be left alone then you should definitely hire someone. I have a weekly housekeeper. She doesn’t really do a great job with the cleaning, but it makes a big difference and I can handle the things that she consistently misses (like spiderwebs). I think the most important thing is to get someone trustworthy and reliable because otherwise it just adds stress to your life when they just don’t show up. (FWIW I am an attorney with two children. In addition to the housekeeper I also hire a weekly yard service and my husband does the grocery shopping and cooking.)
Hanna says
Does anyone follow Nicole Walters on IG? She talks about this a lot and has a household manager. She specifically says, “He works for ME. Not my kids.”
I loved that quote- meaning her children still contribute and do household tasks/chores/cleaning.