Does it Pay to be a Full-Time Mom?

May 11, 2001 -- 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.

Take our ballot on moms' pay.

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.

Feminists tend to object to both methods. They cite the still-wide gender wage gap and also point out that corporate culture places a very low value on what it classifies as "caring" labor.

Some economists turn to the legal field as an alternate method of gauging net worth. The most common example is to look at wrongful death cases where either a mother, or her child dies. "I spoke to an attorney about a wrongful death case where a mother died. The defendant offered to pay $700,000 for her life in a settlement, and a jury would probably have awarded millions," tells Crittenden.

The Economics Debate

If it is possible to assign a monetary value to a mother's work, then why not include her in the economy?

One reason is that like environmental assets, a mother's work is seen as freely available, explains Nancy Folbre, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. "They are both things that produce resources we need, but because we don't pay for them with a check, we think they're free. Mothers are that way. They don't raise kids to make money so we don't tend to think about them as part of the economy."

But economists and social scientists agree that for a woman, the cost of having a child is very high.

"The effect on a mother's lifetime earnings are negative for several reasons," says Folbre, who is also president-elect of the International Association of Feminist Economics. "It reduces part of her paid employment which impacts current and future employment," she explains. But at the same time, mothers actively contribute to the gross national product by raising the next generation of taxpayers, Folbre adds.

While she and many others acknowledge the financial burden shouldered by fathers, they say it is women who bear the disproportionate cost of raising kids. "Add to that [her] foregone earnings," Crittenden states, "and that's a tremendous financial burden."

Spreading the Financial Responsibility

So how could society alleviate that burden? Who would pay?

Folbre points to Europe for insight. French, German and Swedish governments, for example, support mothers by implementing different taxation laws based on family status, such as imposing higher taxes on non-parents, she explains.

"There is also a sense in which children 'pay for themselves,'" she notes. "They grow up and become taxpayers, and for a good portion of their lives they are paying back the public investments in their education and the public support given their parents."

Suggests Crittenden: "Since moms take almost all the costs of having children on themselves, everyone should pitch in and pay."

"Taxpayers can help by supporting moms through giving them social security for their work," she asserts. "Employers need to provide better maternity and paternity leave as well as offer better, more equal pay for part-time work. And husbands can help shoulder the economic risks by paying better child support and working out fairer, more equal divorce settlements."