The value of a mother!

USAToday - Op/Ed

Fri May 6, 6:11 AM ET

What's a mother worth? The obvious answer, as a gazillion Mother's Day cards will say in one way or another Sunday, is that - as in the MasterCard ad - she's priceless.

Or not.

One category of mothers - those who stay home - are sometimes made to feel they're worthless. A frank answer to the question of "What do you do?" frequently provokes plummeting interest.

Help, of sorts, has arrived. Salary.com, which advises companies on compensation, has calculated the annual value of the work America's 5.4 million stay-at-home moms do: $131,471. Take that, high-powered professionals.

Salary.com categorized the typical work of a stay-at-home mom (with two school-age children) under seven main job descriptions: day care center teacher, van driver, housekeeper, cook, CEO, nurse and general maintenance worker. And it assumed a 100-hour work week of six 15-hour days and one 10-hour day.

Perfectly realistic.

No such sum, of course, will magically materialize in mothers' bank accounts. The currency real moms get paid in is kisses and hugs, with diminishing deposits as the teenage years set in. They also tend to report - when they've had enough sleep to think straight - priceless long-term joy watching and helping their children develop personalities and skills.

Which gets to the real problem. Society is deeply ambivalent about mothers. Yes, the idealistic Hallmark take on motherhood is deeply rooted: the selfless woman who bakes apple pies, loves her children unconditionally and so on. But ever since the 1960s, the feminist movement has introduced another scale of measurement: Women should become CEOs, lawmakers and astronauts like men. And pull in earnings to match.

Trying to do both - ask any real-world mother - can mean unacceptable compromises. Many working mothers contend with guilt and, on occasion, disapproval for not devoting themselves full time to their children. Oh, and the stress of adding at least some of the seven stay-at-home jobs to their day job.

Salary.com's pretend pay scale isn't going to end that double standard. Each mother has to find her own solution. The recent trend is for an increasing number of professional and highly qualified women to stay home - one in three women with MBAs is not working full time, for example, compared with one in 20 male MBAs. Surveys among Generation Xers indicate they are less willing than baby boomers to submit to the stress and trade-offs of "having it all."

One of the few weapons of stay-at-homers has been to answer that dreaded "What do you do?" question with a variation on "I'm a full-time organizational professional." Now, they have a second weapon: the $131,471 compensation estimation.

Which still comes up short of the true value of just about every mother: incalculable.