Mother's Helpers, House Managers, and the Search for Relief

what people are paying, what they ask for, and how they find help

I have been so excited to write this one! I genuinely learned so much and am really thankful for the hundreds of you who reached out to share your experiences. We’re going to get into the nitty gritty and talk about what people are actually paying for help, how they found it, and what they feel like this investment gives them.

This whole post came about after I discovered the Instagram account @mischa.capra. I watched a few videos, and my jaw dropped. It was so satisfying to watch her tidy a room, unload a dishwasher, or fold a load of laundry. And the ones where she notices something that needs doing and simply does it?! DROOL. I genuinely love what she shares and put a few of her videos in my stories. From there, the comments came rolling in! So many of you, like me, were in awe of her videos. So many saying, “I would kill for this.” Or, “I wish I could afford this.” Or “I didn’t even know this existed!”

What Mischa does that is so powerful is that shows how much she can get done for a family in a few short hours. Her shifts are usually 2–3 hours in length, and in that time she gives her full, focused attention to whatever needs to be done in the household. It is possible that she goes to the same houses a few times a week, but I do not believe she is at any of the houses every day, nor is she at any house for a full day. So while on the one hand I watched her in total awe, on the other hand I thought, “This actually looks realistic.”

I decided to put it to my Instagram stories and asked my audience to email me if they had any experience with a mother’s helper/household manager and my inbox was flooded! I knew I had to write about it.

The biggest takeaway I had was that this is one of those conversations that a lot of women are quietly having behind closed doors while simultaneously feeling weirdly ashamed to admit they’re having it.

And if the amount of emails and comments I got about this tells you anything, it’s that this is a very universal feeling, and I really don’t think anyone should feel ashamed.

Women are wanting help (I am sure it’s not just women, but 100% of the responses came from women). And it’s not because they are lazy or entitled or don’t want to put in the work. They are already doing a ton of work and still coming up short. I have joked on my Instagram that I am either clean or the house is clean. You don’t get both. And while joking, it’s a mutual feeling! There are simply not enough hours in the day to do everything you want, so you will either have to ask for/hire some sort of help or lower your expectations of what you can accomplish. Easier said than done. Sigh.

I know hiring help like this is absolutely a privilege, and for some families it simply is not financially possible. But I also didn’t realize until after reading through the emails how many versions of “help” existed.

A few examples:

• A retired neighbor helping a few mornings a week

• A 13-year-old neighbor coming over during the witching hour so mom can make dinner without someone hanging on her leg

• A college student folding laundry every Friday afternoon

And yes, for some families, it truly was a professional household manager, but I realized I had mentally lumped all of those into one category when they are actually all very different. After reading all of these responses, I don’t think the goal is perfection, the goal is making home feel manageable again.

Here is everything I’ve compiled:

1. What people mean when they say “mother’s helper” vs. “house manager/assistant”

2. The biggest stress points (aka what tasks people outsource most often)

3. What people are paying.

4. How people found help.

1. What people mean when they say “mother’s helper” vs. “house manager/assistant”

People use the terms mother’s helper, family assistant, household helper, and house manager interchangeably. Really, the title doesn’t matter as long as both people understand the role, but for the sake of knowing the terms when looking to hire someone, there were a few patterns:

Mother’s Helper

This usually meant a younger person helping while a parent was still home (often a middle schooler, high schooler, or college student).

The jobs sounded more like:

• Playing with kids/taking them outside

• Helping during the dinner hour

• Folding laundry

• Tidying toys

• Keeping little people occupied while mom got something done

Honestly, this category felt much more accessible than I think people imagine. Several women talked about neighborhood girls coming over for a couple hours a week.

One family pays a 13-year-old neighbor $15/hour to come during the hardest part of the evening for 2 hours on the nights her husband works late. Another pays a neighbor $5/hour.

Another pays a younger niece $6/hour to play with the kids while she gets projects done around the house.

Many emails shared this sentiment of the win, win of finding someone who didn’t charge a high rate who was more so looking for babysitting experience:

“It’s my friend’s daughter who can bike to our house. She approached me saying she wanted someone to mentor her daughter and give her babysitting experience. She initially did not want me to pay her but we do $5 an hour which I feel like is so cheap! She has started taking my oldest on bike rides around the neighborhood, plays with the kids in the yard while I cook, helps me with feeding the kids, cleanup up etc.” – ME

And what was interesting was how many moms said even that small amount of help changed the feel of their week and helped them breathe a little.

Household Helper / Family Assistant

This seems to be the category most people are actually looking for. It’s usually someone who comes a few hours a week and helps keep the home functioning. This person is not necessarily deep cleaning, but more often helps with the ongoing maintenance of family life.

Things like:

• Laundry

• Kitchen reset

• Dishes

• Meal prep

• Errands

• Organizing projects

• Backpacks and school prep

• Rotating kid clothes

• Returns

• Sheets

• General tidying

One reader wrote:

“I identified a few tasks that I just generally do not enjoy doing, those include: folding and putting away our clothes, changing the sheets and cleaning the kitchen.” — M

I thought that was such a healthy framework. It’s not “How do I outsource my entire life?” But rather “What are the 2–3 things that drain me disproportionately every single week?”

House Manager

While often the same as the category above, others said this term is usually more professional and more extensive.

Think:

• Managing home projects

• Groceries and meal planning

• Scheduling appointments

• Household maintenance

• Coordinating other staff

A few women actually said they think people sometimes say they need a “house manager” when really they just need 4–6 hours of consistent support each week. I think there’s probably some truth to that, namely because:

2. The Biggest Stress Points

These responses were incredibly consistent. Women are overwhelmed by:

• Laundry

• Dinner/bath/bedtime

• Clutter

• Kid schedules and driving them to where they need to go

• Errands and returns

• Meal prep

• School logistics (teacher gifts came up over 5 times which surprised me, but also I get it!)

• Managing everyone’s stuff

• Feeling like they were constantly “on”

• Working all day and then starting the “second shift” at home

Another sentiment came up over and over again:

“I’d rather have someone help me with the house so I can be with the kids than hire childcare so I can clean.” — A

Women don’t want less time with their kids; they want less time managing the infrastructure around their kids. This matters because one has to do with mothering, while the other feels more like managing. If you lump them too closely together and don’t enjoy managing, you can feel like a bad mom, which simply isn’t the case.

One reader in Dallas wrote:

“I felt crazy at first because it felt like overkill to have someone here. And honestly sometimes meeting someone new and explaining her role still feels weird. But having her in our home has taken such a load off of me mentally and given so much back to my family. [...] Is this a forever thing? Unsure. But I tell so many moms in this season that she is the gift to our family that brought me back to life.” — M, who pays her household helper $23/hour

This ain’t just about folding towels! This is a feeling of relief. And if you can figure out a way to make it work in your family, I hope you get that relief.

3. What People Are Paying

The range was honestly all over the place depending on age, experience, city, and responsibilities, but generally:

• Younger teen mother’s helper: $5–15/hour

• College student/helper: $16–25/hour

• Experienced family assistant: $25–35/hour

• Professional organizer/household management services: $50–60+/hour

The most common range seemed to be somewhere around $20–30/hour.

A few examples readers shared:

• $5/hour for a 13-year-old neighbor helping during dinner hour

• $15/hour for a 13-year-old to babysit while the mom is home getting things done

• $23/hour in Dallas for 15 hours/week of household help

• $25/hour in Tucson for laundry, beds, trash, and kitchen reset

• $28/hour in Atlanta for school pickup, dinner, baths, laundry, and dishes

• $32/hour in Louisville for an experienced former teacher helping after school

• $60/hour through a local organizing company

One reader described her helper as, “Basically my clone. It was a dream.” — J

I appreciated this because it gets at what many of us want. It’s not about checking out and sitting by the pool while someone else does what needs to get done (though I do hope sometimes you go sit by a pool!); it’s the feeling of having another person come alongside you.

Something worth noting: I found it very interesting how many people decided this is actually what they needed more than a house cleaner. For some, this person did enough where they felt the cleaning portion was manageable for them to do, and so decided it was better to spend the money on a house manager than an extra cleaning session. If you pay a house cleaner $150/session and have them come twice a month, that’s $300. Let’s say you find a house manager that charges $25/hour. For the cost of that second session with a house cleaner, you could instead have a house manager coming every other week for 3 hours.

Now I know many of you might be thinking “shouldn’t that other person be your husband?” or, “can’t your kids help?” Here are some thoughts I have as well as messages from readers:

1. Many are two working parent households that resent having the time they get with their kids be spent cleaning, organizing, etc.

2. Many have a spouse working either outside the home or hours that do not allow for helping with all that takes to run a household. It isn’t that the spouse is not helpful, but that in the hours they are working they are unable to provide household support.

3. Most would say they have a really wonderful, helpful spouse, but the demands of life still feel hard and overwhelming.

On the note of getting the kids to help more:

1. Many have babies and toddlers not yet of the age to help, while others have school aged children that simply are not home during the day to do a lot of household tasks.

2. School as work: I know for Nate and I, we do have the kids do some very basic chores (cleaning their rooms, picking up common areas, the older two do their laundry), but we consider school to be their main job during the year and try not to ask a lot of them outside of what is asked by their coaches and teachers. If you add in homework and a sport if they do one, our kids are “working” 9 hour days. We really want any extra time they get to go to play.

3. While most everyone agrees that getting kids to help is important, most said having a household helper did not negate asking the kids for help, but allowed them to ask for different things from the household helper. For example, if your child makes their bed and takes out the garbage, those are things the household helper doesn’t need to do.

4. How People Found Help

A lot of people found help through:

• Neighborhood Facebook groups

• Church

• Local moms groups

• Teachers (especially in the summer)

• College students

• Word of mouth

• Friends of babysitters

Several women said their best helpers were not necessarily people with super formal resumes. They were just dependable, warm, proactive people who liked helping homes run smoothly. One thing I noticed repeatedly was that families who had the best experiences tended to be very clear about expectations. Very clear! Like actual written lists with specific recurring tasks. Which honestly makes total sense because “help me around the house” is incredibly vague.

But what if I already feel overwhelmed and don’t want to think of what to ask for?

I know it might sound like more added to your plate to have to come up with a list, but we started this post chatting about the repeated tasks that feel never ending. That being said, I think after a few weeks, the helper/manager would know what is expected of them, and would likely be able to anticipate needs over time.

One reader said she thought of four things (change bedsheets, wash all towels, tidy the playroom, organize mudroom) and had the helper rotate every other week which two they did along with folding and putting away laundry. So one week they did laundry, changed the bedsheets, and tidied the playroom. Another week they did laundry, a load of towels, and organized the mudroom.

I would start small. Pick 1-2 tasks and see where it goes from there. “Empty dishwasher, fold one load of laundry, prep fruit and veggies, reset kitchen” or “change the bedsheets, start a load of dishes, go pick up the grocery delivery and unload.” It could be that simply having someone tidy one or two rooms while also getting through 2-3 loads of laundry is all you really need to feel like a person again.

My Biggest Takeaway

I really expected this conversation to feel more about luxury than it did. And yes, again, having help IS a luxury. But the emotional tone of the emails I read felt much more like “we are trying to keep our heads above water,” than “we are trying to outsource our lives.”

One school teacher wrote that even just having someone come for two hours on Fridays changed her entire weekend because she no longer spent Saturday trying to recover the house and catch up on laundry. Just two hours was enough for her. That $50 made a massive difference in her weekend.

I also think this conversation is important because people have wildly different capacities and preferences. Some people truly enjoy managing a home. They are energized by cooking, laundry systems, organization—all of it. And some people are not. Neither person is morally superior; they are simply different, and perhaps in different seasons of life, too.

There are seasons where the wheels are on, and seasons where everybody is sick, work is crazy, kids are little, somebody isn’t sleeping, and suddenly the smallest tasks start feeling impossible.

So if you are someone quietly wondering whether asking for help would make your home function better, I guess my biggest takeaway from all of this would be: You probably do not need someone to solve your entire life. You probably just need relief in one or two places that consistently overwhelm you.

And apparently, according to hundreds of women in my inbox…that small shift can change a whole lot.

If you have a mother’s helper service you use or are one yourself, feel free to use the comments to advertise yourself!