Parenting for Pay

I always thought the rub about parenting was that it's a dead-end job. You work like a dog for 20+ years developing a bunch of skills that are invaluable to your family's mental and physical well-being, but worthless on the open market. Your kids leave home and you are left with a box of overpriced Beanie Babies, some old kids' potty seats and a few cracked pacifiers, and you have to take a job making $5.85 an hour folding clothes for rich working moms who shop at Ann Taylor.

But no more! It turns out that other parents who are either too busy or too inept will pay dearly for our child-rearing talents. And I'm not talking about the drudgery of working twelve hour days as a nanny or baby nurse. I mean becoming highly compensated Child Life Specialists who are taking over the intimate, mundane responsibilities that are no longer the sacred purview of parents. Who needs law school? Now we all can bill by the hour.

Take this:

Professional Potty Trainer. You too can charge $185 an hour to toilet train someone else's child, like the talented folks at the Soho Parenting center in New York. This tidbit was reported in the October issue of Vanity Fair, which also told of a company called High 5 which will teach your kid to ride a bike (for $60 an hour) and the Los Angeles trend of paying attractive young men to come to your house to horse around -- with your kids. "There's nothing more emasculating than watching a stranger being paid to play with your kids," one (apparently sane) father complained.

Get Babies to Sleep Through the Night. Australia's Baby Whisperer Sheyne Rowley has a waiting list of 1,000 sleep-deprived parents willing to pay for her workshops and five-day home visits. She is going on a national tour to help the masses of parents willing to pay for her insights, plus she runs Sleep Baby Sleep, a company that claims a 99 percent success rate with more than 22,000 babies.

Parenting Coordinator. As described in The Wall Street Journal's September 19th "A Referee for Mom and Dad" (subscription required), you can charge $50 to $350 an hour to help feuding ex-spouses mediate the nitty gritty decisions of child care: who picks up the kids from school, when it's okay for kids to get their ears pierced or take the bus alone, which after-school activities to select, etc. (Well worth $350 an hour.)

Become a Certified Etiquette Training Specialist. Companies such as Manners Matter equip you to charge $50 to $200 to teach kids to "make introductions, show kindness to others, telephone etiquette, respecting yourself, dining skills, manners at school, thank you notes, and party and sleep-over etiquette."

And we haven't even gotten into teaching kids to read, hourly tutoring, taking kids on college visiting trips, helping them apply to college or find good jobs after college. Parenting other people's kids is clearly a huge potential industry!

So I'm proposing we all start a new consulting firm: The On Balance Child Life Company Inc. What are your skills? How much do you think you are worth to other parents? Have you ever paid someone to teach your child something you assumed you would do? What do you think of parents who pay others to teach their kids basic skills like bike riding, peeing in the toilet and using the right fork (or any fork at all)?

By Leslie Morgan Steiner |  September 24, 2007; 7:00 AM ET  | Category:  Moms in the News
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