As a teen, I remember hearing a story, perhaps in some Dale Carnegie book, about a pair of youngsters who thought they could earn some extra spending money. They tallied up all of their chores and little tasks they had done around the house and outdoors, figured out how much time they spent on these, calculated the monetary value of their work, determined the minimum wage, and left a note for their mother before leaving for school with the bill for their labor.
When they got home, they found a much longer list that their mother had written out, noting all that she had done in a day, without the charges to the kids.
Her son and daughter replied with little note. “Sorry. Thanks, mom,” the two wrote. “We had no idea how much you do for us.”
A group of scholars (Howie, Wicks, Fitzgerald, Dalenberg and Connelly) sought to calculate how much a mother works in a week. “This paper estimates a simultaneous model that addresses the potential endogeneity of employment hours on the time mothers spend with young children and vice versa, using a unique set of instruments based on parental attitudes towards work and child care. Using survey data from mothers in Missoula Montana, we find a significant negative but inelastic relationship between hours of employment and the hours of maternal child care. The inelasticity of child care hours with respect to work hours leads us to conclude that children do not bear a large share of the burden of their mothers’ market work in the form of reduced parental time inputs. Rather, it is the mothers who bear most of the burden, since increased market work seems to be crowding out other activities, such as 2 household production and/or leisure.”
In other words, mothers are often so busy that the kids don’t always see how much they are doing, since child care is but one variable in the equation. Often, mothers have to work at home and outside the home, just to make ends meet and keep the family going.
Time management expert and speaker Laura Vanderkam writes “If you look at the American Time Use Survey, which relies on time diaries rather than estimates, you’ll see that similar categories (housekeeping, lawn & garden care, food prep and clean-up and grocery shopping) added up only give you about 23 hours a week.” This is down from the 44 hours Salary.com calculated for a mother’s workweek that Vanderkam questions.
Debates, of course, followed, but maybe we’re thinking about it all wrong. Instead of calculating a mothers’ “work” we need to give more consideration to the hours a mother spends showing her love to her children.
Just last week, my wife gutted it out through pain and heat through several tennis courts to see her son and his LaGrange Academy teammates win a state title, because it mattered. I know she would fight her way through alligators to see him graduate from high school in a few days. And she spends lots of time helping our oldest child as he goes through the challenges of post-collegiate employment and life. It wouldn’t go on some “.com’s” list of “work.”
My own mother, a former journalist, is one of my biggest cheerleaders when it comes to my writing endeavors. She’d never count that as wages, but just something that loving moms do.
For all the mothers out there who put in the hard labor, the uncalculated child care and counseling, and the general love they show us, Happy Mother’s Day. Your value to us and to society in general is something we’ll never really be able to reduce to a number.