In another one of these ongoing amusing attempts to place a monetary value on staying home to train and raise one’s children full-time, salary.com has an article about what a dream job it is to stay at home, and how much a woman who does it is worth. In base pay it is close to $43,500 annually, but we can add twice that for overtime work, coming to a grand total of just under $131,500.
Calculations like these are funny because we’re constantly trying to justify why we should spend our time raising children. When you look at how hard it is—and it is very hard work—it seems tolerable only in terms of monetary reward, at least if you are looking through a certain (materialistic) lens. Of course, on the other hand, work is work, and it would be nice if society rewarded work of any kind, if there were a system for it.
Does that mean that when an employed parent comes home from work, he or she should also get paid for the “day care provider” work on “overtime” for serving dinner, prepping children for bed, and reading stories? Where do we draw the line with this whole notion of imagining that we should be paid for raising our own kids?
Or perhaps I am just taking this too far… maybe it is only an attempt to say, “Hey! Stay-at-home parents are worth something to society!” Which is only too true. Everyone, last time I looked, is worth something to society—even the people who have no homes, or no jobs at all, or no children to raise, or no spouse to greet at the end of the day.
The article at salary.com paints a pretty picture of being home with children, phrasing it in a way to help us imagine it as a fantasy that we’d all like to live out. Not only are there benefits for the children, it says, but also for the parents (well, they say “mothers” in particular). It helps you slow down, see the world through a child’s eyes, and so on.
What’s not mentioned is that when you see the world through a child’s eyes, it’s definitely one of disempowerment. The world we live in is not especially friendly to children. It is a young-adult-driven world with little time or space for moral education, learning, exploration, discovery, unless you have a lot of money to spend on such things. Which means an adult earning it, somewhere along the line. So while it may seem really great to stay home with the children, and there are numerous benefits to it, I also think it’s crazy to glorify it and put a price tag on it as though it’s really of such value to current society.
For me, the reality is that stay-at-home parents are quite invisible, and have little voice in the workings of public policy, law-making, governance and other realms of public influence. We may have more opportunities to volunteer here and there, but such actions are small and slight and easily not noticed in a fast-paced world where humble, child-oriented actions are viewed with little importance. I am not saying that such parents can’t make a difference—I think the influence is real, and strong—I am saying that there is an invisibility factor, primarily because our society chooses to make children invisible. Thus any “profession” that involves children is treated in a like manner: teachers, day care providers, social workers. The salary is lower, and the public profile is lessened.
Perhaps the saving grace is that when you see through a child’s eyes, the world is also one of infinite possibility. The creative imagination can save us. We can imagine the world to be whatever we might hope for it. Instead of “the past” or “reality,” we have “now” and we have “the future.”