What Is Mothering Worth?

I

was filling out a form the other day and paused when I got to "What is your employment status?" I stared at the options, but none of them felt accurate. I could have ignored the question, but it hit a nerve. Despite everything I do for my family, why am I considered unemployed?

As I transitioned out of a traditional media career,  I did not consider the cultural implications that came with it. How, as a stay-at-home mom, people would make assumptions about my background and downplay my contributions to our family. Caring for children is one of the most foundational responsibilities in every community. So why do we devalue the parents who do this work? These are a few ways their significance is minimized.

We Let Social Media Dominate the Conversation

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the kind of person the Instagram algorithm thinks I am, particularly since becoming a stay-at-home mom. The content is fairly two-dimensional: women baking bread in farmhouse kitchens, daytime routines that seem a little too perfect, and manifesto after manifesto on the "beauty" of raising children. It's a heavily lyrical interpretation of what moms do, prioritizing theatrics over substance.

Perceptions are reality on platforms like Instagram, that use people to sell lifestyles. So moms battle a digital form of kitchen table politics that overshadows meaningful tasks that can't be visualized.

I get mistaken for a nanny more often than I should. As a mom to mixed-race children, I realize there is a racial component to this. So, it’s hard not to bristle at the question “Are these your children?”

Unpaid Labor Is Invisible Work 

When I was a producer in New York City, I received tons of questions about what my day was like. Now? Not so much. Though, people are comfortable sharing their opinions. "I couldn’t do it,” or “How lucky,” some say—flashing a pitying smile that confirms I've immediately become less interesting. Just once, I'd love to field questions about how I manage my time, what my workload is like, or something surprising I've experienced. 

It's one of the ways we make SAHMs culturally insignificant even though they play a crucial role in allowing our economy to function. Examining how the world measures value paints a clearer picture.

Since the Great Depression, we've used Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure the health of our economy and the value of goods and services in the market. Historically, "household production" is never included in calculations for this national income because it's unpaid labor. This is why economists say, "If a man marries his maid, GDP falls."

We know that including housework in these calculations would boost the economy by trillions. Still, this hasn't changed how we calculate GDP or motivated us to pay mothers. Silvia Federici, one of the founders of the Wages for Housework movement believes this is one of capitalism's long cons against women.  

"Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work. In its tum, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatised kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle," says Federici states in her book.

It allows our culture to define a mother's labor as an act of love. To question the boundaries of where one ends and the other begins upends our social understanding of womanhood, so many of us never ask.

We Make Too Many Assumptions About Stay-at-Home Moms 

I get mistaken for a nanny more often than I should. As a mom to mixed-race children, I realize there is a racial component to this. So, it’s hard not to bristle at the question “Are these your children?” It's also indicative of who we think SAHMs are: wealthy and white. But data tells a story of women who are financially, ethnically, and politically diverse. 

A report from Capita, a nonpartisan think tank that explores underreported topics surrounding family and community, shows slightly higher rates of Hispanic families with parents who stay home. The data also suggests about a third of all families with stay-at-home parents live at or below the poverty line and struggle with housing costs, healthcare expenses, and other necessities.

"We’re not saving for retirement at all. And then we still feel like a little bit of a pinch with groceries and just schooling. We homeschool, so we have a little bit of extra out-of-pocket expenses for books and tuition, but even gas, sometimes I’m like, I’m sorry, I can’t come to that family gathering an hour and a half away. I literally just can’t afford the gas to get there," reported a stay-at-home mom of 7, from the report's sample of 1,500 respondents. Nearly all parents who participated agreed on one thing: America needs fiscal policies that acknowledge the contributions stay-at-home parents make and improve their quality of life.

Finding my footing after motherhood has been extremely eye-opening. I’m incredibly thankful that I can spend time investing my skills in ways that feel purposeful for my family, but it is hard to receive so little cultural recognition. We may never offer stay-at-home moms any measurable benefits, but a meaningful first step might be acknowledging that all moms are in fact, working moms.