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Parr soon found she was in a world unlike any other, one filled with endless money and round-the-clock help. Along with the baby's nurse, Parr took care of four children, ranging in age from four months to seven years, while the mother remained right alongside her at home. "When I found out they wanted someone seven days a week, twelve hours a day, I guess I assumed that the mom must have been doing some sort of work off island, so she needed somebody at home to take care of her kids. I had no idea that she was just sitting at home all day long! These moms don't go anywhere, they just stay at home and act like these superintendents of the house watching everybody run around busy. They are able to sit there with their grace and their charm and they can articulate what their husbands do, but they hire someone else to do all of their tedious, monotonous...work."
Focusing her research on motherhood and domestic care, Parr's literature review looks at women in domestic care. "The biggest problem with domestics (like Parr observed with the family's baby nurse) is that they are off taking care of someone else's kids all the time. They give these children such affection and love, but that is the love they would want to be giving to their own kids. Unfortunately they can't because they have to make the money to pay for their kids to go to school. They are doing this to secure a place for their own kids."
Not having found any articles or books written on the subject of this particular trend of motherhood, Parr began to believe she had come across a new phenomenon. "At first I thought that this new generation of moms had concocted this ingenious idea of what motherhood should be. You can conveniently whisk away to do whatever you want because somebody is on call all day long. But then I thought back to the mammy from slavery times. She was this maid of all work that did everything while the mistress walked around holding the keys to the household." In a historically centered chapter, Parr focuses on the figure of the black mammy and the resemblance of this new trend with these that existed.
Another part of Parr's thesis is a case study in which she recounts her own experiences. "Everyday after work, I had to go home and just sit down and purge everything I had seen. There are just all these little things that I had seen all day that have so much weight."
The experiences that stood out most for Parr were those when she noticed the children objectifying her. "The five-year-old told me, 'You're our servant.' And then the three-year-old takes a couple of bites out of her apple and throws it at me and says, 'Throw it away.'" Parr noticed that each year she came back, the kids had less respect for her. At an early age, the children could recognize the division between employee and employer. "The kids walked all over me because the mom isn't really disciplining them all that much because she's not even paying attention and I'm not really disciplining them because she is right there and it's awkward for me. So those kids are going to be brats forever. That is a problem."
"The most twisted thing I noticed was that these women somehow actually think they are good moms. Because these kids are being cared for, they are being loved, and they are being nurturedâ€"but by someone else. The mom is just happy that the kids are getting all of those things and she is still present. But she hasn't made the connection that no, your children need to be nurtured by you. To these kids, she's like a dignified deity who's not supposed to be doing things like that (manual labor). They just assume that every kid has a nanny to take care of them and do all of those physical labors."
Although Parr, an American Cultural Studies major, has greatly enjoyed writing her thesis, her initial motive for her diary entries was to write a book. She plans to begin writing "Wealth Mom" during Short Term.