Encouragement and Humor Along the Way

Cost of Being a SAHM: Stay-at-Home Mom by Ellie Kay 1/2 Price Living

M. P. Dunleavey, a writer for www.moneycentral.com wrote tongue-in-cheek, "When I was at college in the '80s (and a feisty, liberal-arts women's college it was), the notion of staying home with your kids was, shall we say, unpopular.  Why spend four expensive years preparing for your supposedly brilliant career if you weren't going to put the kids where...feminism intended them:  in daycare?"

     The pendulum has swung the othe way since the '80s as women face the reality of trying to balance work with family and discover incredible frustration and challenge along the way.  In The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild reported that many of the women who worked full time still did the majority of the housework.  Others, as we've mentioned earlier, find themselves working to pay for childcare.  It seems the Supermom idea is a myth, and many women are giving up trying.

     Recently I was on Fox News to discuss the fact that for Mother's Day, www.salary.com prepared a formula for calculating the comercial worth of a SAHM (stay-at-home-mom).  If a typical mom were paid for her momly duties, her base salary would be $43,461.  Since  mothers work is never done, overtime would be an additional $88,009 for a total of $131,471 for a one-hundred-hour workweek, including six fifteen-hour days and one ten-hour day.Job titles, responsibilities, and qualifications were considered and weighed on a scale of importance, frequency, and average time spent on tasks per day.  The SAHM median salary assumes the mother has at least two children of school age.

     After a survey of moms, www.salary.com found the following to be the best-suited job titles for SAHM, ranked from the most time-consuming to the least time-consuming:

1. daycare center teacher
2. van driver
3. housekeeper
4. cook
5. CEO
6. nurse
7. general maintenance worker

     For most moms it's hard to begin to quantify what they do for their families --it's hard to think in terms of money.  At www.momclub.com, when women were asked why they decided to be a SAHM, 66 percent said they didn't want to leave their children, and it was what they were put on earth to do.  An overwhelming 85 percent of moms say the number one advantage to staying home is being there for their kids.