Does it Pay to be a Full-Time Mom?

May 11 -- Wanted: Cook, housekeeper, baby sitter, party planner, office manager, efficiency expert, personal trainer, teacher, social worker, medical practitioner, healer, spiritual guide and therapist. Must be available 24/7, year-round.

A headhunter assigned to finding a candidate for the job of mothering would find it daunting. Janet Chan, editor in chief of Parenting magazine in New York, says "if everything a mom does in one day would be broken down into composites, she would command a very high salary."

In fact, when taking into account what some experts estimate are the approximately 19 professions mothers typically practice all in the course of the day, their wages could come in as high as $500,000 a year.

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Yet, often times it is women themselves who don't fully appreciate how challenging being a stay-at-home mother is and how much they give up. Many still have the attitude of "What does she do all day?" says Ann Crittenden, author of the book The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued.

"I'll never forget a dinner at the end of a day, in which I had gotten my son dressed and fed and off to nursery school, dealt with a plumber about a leaky shower, paid the bills, finished an op-ed piece, picked up and escorted my son to a reading group at the library, ran several miscellaneous errands, and put in an hour on a future book project, " she writes. "Over drinks that evening, a childless female friend commented that 'Of all the couples we know, you're the only wife who doesn't work.'"

Putting a Price on ‘Invisible Work’

Economists often categorize a mother's unpaid labor as "invisible work." Yet it is not too hard to establish a value for all the unpaid household labor, according to Crittenden.

Both she and Chan argue that the most common method to compute the value of work in the home is to estimate the cost of hiring someone to do all the jobs performed by a wife or mother, or the "housekeeper wage" approach. A second method is known as the "specialist wage" approach, based on the cost of hiring different specialists for the various services.