In their former lives they were lawyers, accountants, teachers, computer programmers, nurses, personnel managers, corporate trainers, and in my case, a marketing manager. We readily gave up our careers in the belief that staying at home with our kids is an investment in their lives as well as precious time for us. Our children are only going to be little once: we don’t want to miss that.
We’ve given up the benefits of a salary and the status that goes with it, because people in our society who do not make money have virtually NO status, to remain at home raising our children. And we’d gladly do it again.
(Note: I think working moms often have it even harder because not only do you function in a workplace all day, but you come home and deal with the issues of a house and your family. Plus many of you deal with the guilt of not being at home).Still, every once in a while, it would be nice to see a dollar figure given for what I do during the day.
Here's a site that does that. Say hello to the website Salary.com Through the Mom Salary Wizard, you can calculate what your ”worth” based on: number of kids and their age ranges, where you live, and how many hours you spend doing various jobs.
Now, I actually disagree with that list because the number of things I do as a stay-at-home mom far exceeds what the website’s designers think a typical stay-at-homer does. The website allows you to personalize that list depending on how many hours per week you spend at each job title (i.e. “Facilities Manager,” “Psychologist,” “Janitor,” etc.). You can also prompt the site to generate a “check” which you can send to family and friends, presumably to let them know what your dollar net worth really is.
Salary.com’s national salary range for a stay-at-home mom goes from $64,990 to $167,296 with the national median being $116,431. Their local range for a Livingston mom is from $114,660 to $163,714 with the median at $135,632. I clocked in at $193,883. Sweet!
Now, I know that figure means nothing to the world at large. But there was something refreshing about seeing a check in that amount, even it was made out to the generic “Mom.” It means that someone in the website’s design team had to take a moment or two to really think about what a stay-at-home mother does before assigning that task a number. It means that every trip I make to Shop-Rite, the Little League Field, CVS, and the Mall, conceivably has value.
And for those of us who choose to raise our children while not being members of the “paid” workforce, it means we’re more than “just” stay-at-home moms.
Source http://livingston.patch.com/
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