Parenting is the only job where you’re expected to be on call 24/7 without any benefits. It requires an endless balance of love, patience, and responsibility, all while putting your own needs on the backburner.
One mom is pointing out the difficulties of the role by equating it to that of indentured servitude. However, some people are arguing that parenting is not even remotely close to the brutal manual labor indentured servants had to endure.
In what she referred to as a “hot take,” the mom named Mae(@the.month.of.mae)boldly stated that modern day stay-at-home parenting in America is indentured servitude. “I will not be elaborating. Do what you will,” she said in a TikTok video.
“Every time I try to explain (it), I get so angry I give up. Extreme amounts of labor for little to no compensation, retirement, or financial independence. (I) hate it here,” she added in her caption.
For those unfamiliar with the term, indentured servitude was common during the Colonial period beginning in the early 1600s. In this practice, people worked without pay in exchange for land, food, shelter, and sometimes additional training and skills. Indentured servants were essentially bound under a contract that required them to work for an agreed upon length of time or until a debt was paid. Working conditions were usually abhorrent, and many did not survive.
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“If you picked that life (stay-at-home parenting), that’s not indentured servitude. You had no debt to pay off and you weren’t forced or under contract. You made a choice and then regretted it,” one TikTok user commented. “But we choose to have children, don’t we?” another user wrote, noting that indentured servants often had no choice when it came to their working conditions.
“I raised two very successful women in their 30s. Never once did I think I should get paid for raising them. People choose to bring kids into this world!” another mom revealed. And while these commenters all have a point, it’s okay to complain once in a while. Perhaps comparing modern parenting with being an indentured servant wasn’t exactly the best way to get her point across, Mae was likely just venting.
Even if parents choose to have kids, it doesn’t mean the task isn’t difficult. Even those of us with our dream careers can feel exhausted and complain from time to time about the constant demands of our jobs. Parenthood is all the more taxing since it is such a significant job with no pay, and for many, little to no help.
“Without community, we are doing the work of an entire village as one person. I dream of how different things would be without the isolation,” one user noted. “The world exists only because of the centuries of free labor provided by women,” another user shared.
Even if parents want to work outside of the home for income, they may not have a choice. Childcare may be too expensive, or the kids’ schedules require at least one parent to be homebound with them.
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“For example, let’s say a 29-year-old woman, who started working at age 22 and currently makes $50,000 a year, wants to step away from the workforce for five years to focus on family,” U.S. News & World Report shared. “Taking into account that she contributes 6 percent to her company’s 401(k) and collects another 3% contribution from her employer, those five years off would cost her $250,000 in income, along with a potential $226,373 in wage growth and $189,072 in retirement assets and benefits over the course of her life. Her total loss: $665,445.”
Stay-at-home parenting is so much more than hanging out with the kids all day. It is giving them three meals a day, getting them bathed, escorting them to and from school, getting them involved in extracurriculars, organizing playdates, helping them with homework and doing their laundry while maintaining the rest of the household. Don’t forget all the actual parenting lessons mixed in. We haven’t even touched on the invisible emotional labor moms are doing behind the scenes.
Mae was clearly looking for a reaction with her “hot take.” That’s the nature of social media, after all. She knows that life as a stay-at-home parent in 2025 looks much different than life as an indentured servant in Jamestown, Virginia, in the early 1600s. That doesn’t mean that, below the shock bait of her video, there wasn’t actually an important message, however.
The choice to have children should not be the economic burden it currently is. Childcare should be affordable. Both parents should have the option to work if they want to, and society’s perception of kids and parenting needs to change because it really does take a village to raise happy and well-adjusted kids. All that is very true — Mae should have just presented it slightly differently.
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Megan Quinn is a staff writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Creative Writing. She covers news and lifestyle topics that focus on justice in the workplace, personal relationships, parenting debates, and the human experience.
