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NoTimeForNOW.com

by Marina Martin | Filed under: Groan

A stay-at-home mother should never be compensated by society for sitting at home doing laundry.

If her partner decides that she is worthy of a token salary for doing the laundry, then it’s the partner’s personal and private decision to compensate her. If her adult child decides that her staying home provided a tangible benefit that should be rewarded, then that adult child can retroactively compensate her accordingly.

If you think it’s acceptable, or even mandatory, for society to compensate full-time parents, then you had better equally support those same stay-at-home parents compensating their children if they do a shoddy job.

Every other job is tied to performance and deliverables, isn’t it? 



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First posted on February 5, 2008

Viewing 3 Comments

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    Hi!
    I'm curious if there is something I missed. Is someone considering compensating full-time moms for caring for their children, husbands and homes? I mean financially compensating them? It isn't something I've heard of.

    I'm a full-time mom of two. I don't call myself a stay-at-home mom because I don't stay home. I take my kids to classes, MOMS club activities, the music and movement program that I created and run for mine and others' children, and many other activities. There is rarely a day that we don't go somewhere and do something of value. I also have 2 award-winning podcasts and I'm an administrative/personal assistant for a successful entrepreneur.

    I believe the reward in getting to "stay home" with my children is that I get to do so. When I decided to have children, I told my husband that I wasn't going to have them so that someone else could raise them 50 of their awake hours per week. I was the primary bread-winner when I left my job of 10 1/2 years to become a full-time mom. I have had to work hard and be creative to make enough money so that I don't have to put my children in child care.

    If someone told me they would pay me and I wouldn't have to clean my house, feed my family, grocery shop, do the laundry, create our budget, pay the bills, or have 2 jobs in addition to the full-time job of being a good wife and mother, I don't think I'd take them up on the offer because I would hate being bored out of my mind.

    I'm a little bothered that your tag on this post is the word "laziness" which seems to generalize all full-time moms into some negative category. Maybe it's just a tag and I'm sensitive to people thinking that because I don't work in an office anymore, I just don't work.

    I am aware that there are moms out there who might actually do their laundry while sitting down, but I'm not one of them. I hope you know that we are not all like that.

    This isn't meant to be attackive, but it hit a weird nerve with me. I hope you understand and find my input interesting and not meant in an offensive manner.
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    I suppose in an atomized every-family-fends-for-itself society, this makes some sort of sense.

    I have difficulty relating with it, because I don't believe in the every-family-fends-for-itself way of life that we have brought ourselves to, though.

    There are "compensations" outside of money and salary. To go to an extreme in order to illustrate clearly, consider an indigenous tribe: There's no monetary compensation (there's no money period,) but there are still feedback loops that make sure laundry is done, food served, children raised, sex enjoyed, houses built, and so on.

    I think our efforts to tie everything to a monetary system in the name of efficiency has turned our shared vision of the world into something like a catalog, which may be the best metaphor for the world that we have today. Time=Money, which is then "spent" on purchasing goods, security, relationships, and experiences.

    What are the alternatives? Michael Ende (Momo, the Neverending Story,) had some radically different equations (Time is Life, for example.) Living by commitment to a vision that emerges from within. This may sound like catalog culture (because there is an illusion of choice,) but it is actually very different: authenticity and creativity are not necessarily experienced as choice.

    I can envision societies that "choose," by the visions that come from their heads, to compensate women for doing laundry, as a class. This seems quite legitimate to me, as a social decision.

    Some alternative thinking here.
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    I support the idea of compensating stay at home moms, providing we as a society get to establish performance metrics, evaluate them on an ongoing basis against those metrics, pay them according to their performance and fire them for repeated poor performance.

    If a woman is a stay at home mom and doing an amazing job of it (I know a couple women in that category) then I would say she is providing a tangible benefit to society (as I suspect her children are more likely to be productive members of society).

    I honestly can't think of any value that someone brings to society which I hold higher than "Being an extraordinary parent", I've known a few in my life and every one of their children went on to do amazing and interesting things, and contributed immensely to society.

    Is writing a new program or creating a new website better? I think it would be a hard argument to make.

    However, it is unfortunate that very few parents reach the marker of "Extraordinary" (hence the label) and it is well demonstrated that poor parenting often results in offspring with negative and costly (both to them and society) behaviors.

    As long as it was voluntary (i.e. you would have to request benefits under the program), I'd love to see some government money tied to improving the quality of parenting in this country.
 

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