Mom’s Salary?

I’ve always been slightly annoyed by those websites that calculate a projected income for the stay-at-home mom. You enter the time that you spend on certain jobs around the house and caring for your family each week, type in your zip code, and voila, out comes your projected yearly income. Don’t get me wrong, I think that the idea is clever and the point is well-taken: as mothers who stay at home we work very hard and are, essentially, the managers of our family’s life. I guess what bothers me is that putting a dollar value on the stay-at-home mom’s job perpetuates the myth that work is only valuable if it is paid work, or that the higher someone’s salary, the more worthwhile her work is to society.  We live in a culture that all too often equates value with money, and many women have a very hard time making the transition from work to staying at home because of this.

If we got paid for our work at home, perhaps some government agency (!?!), would we feel better about our job as stay-at-home moms? Would having a salary make us feel that we were using our education more wisely, and would we take more pride in our work? I know someone who asks me, every time I see him, when I am going to “start using my Princeton education and get a job.” The underlying message is that my education will not be put to good use until I am paid for the work that I do. All of the time that I spend raising my children, caring for our home, and volunteering for the church and the PTA does not count in his equation of valuable work, and I fear that his opinion is shared by many in our country today.

What do you think? I know that the “Mom’s Salary” websites are meant to be fun and light-hearted, but I still get frustrated every time I come across them. Do I just need to loosen up, or do you think that I’m onto something?