a thought for the weekend

[tielan]

What if we defined the cost of a full-time parent?

A friend of mine is a stay-at-home mom (Another question: when all the kids have gone to 5-days-a-week school, is she still a stay-at-home mom? Or is she a housewife?) and once calculated that she added $55K AUD of value to the household per annum. Childcare + meal prep + washing + cleaning + oddjobs + income she made from her hobbies = $55K.

She said it helped her think of her job as 'adding value' to her family, even if she wasn't 'paid' for it, even it wasn't recognised.

I'm pretty sure that everyone reading this is well aware of the discussion about the unpaid labour of women adding to the economy, and not every woman is going to be able to add that much value to her household.

In J.D. Robb's book series 'In Death', a future America (2080s, I think) has a 'stay at home parent wage' that is paid to parents with a child under a certain age.

My question is: if we paid - or even attributed - to women (and the men who are stay-at-home parents) the actual value of the work they did in relationships/parenting/household, would that be 'monetizing parenthood'? Would we be 'staining the soul' of parenthood by acknowledging the cost of primary care for a child? Would adding money to the equation cheapen the relationship between parent and child - reduce it to something done for financial gain, instead of something done out of love?

I mean, I can see the neocons blathering that such things "cheapen the purity of the maternal (because ofc it's the mother staying home) relationship by adding money to the matter", and I know, taxesgovernmentebiluntrustblahblahblah, and peoplerortthesystem, and weshouldn'tevenhaveasystemifitcanbecoopted, etc.

But do you think it would?

What if we defined the dollar cost of a full-time parent? Would our appreciation for what parents do change?

Thought.

--

Anyway, today I'm finishing a quilt, and trying to ease people into an action scene which gets progressively worse until it all goes completely to cock. As they do.

Comments

[pensnest]

It *might* be an opportunity for even more judgement of mothers (because it's going to be mothers) along the lines of, Are you working hard enough to deserve that money? Are you *really* doing a good enough job that you ought to be paid all that?

I mean, on the whole, it seems like it would add to the total sum of society's happiness, but there are always opportunities for judgement.

[elanya]

I was thikning thins too - there are already so many accusations towards women on welfare that they're having kids to get the money, like that's an equation that at all works out. I think this would certainly make that worse. And if there is money, especially government money, going into this system then there would be an expectation of accountability - are you taking care of your children well enough? Why are you spending money on X when the kids don't have Y? and so on - and of course white stay at home moms with working partners would be much less susceptible to this kind of interrogation than parents from other non-white demographics...

Personally I would rather see a universal basic income system where people are given a certain amount to live off regardless of whether they are working or not, or parents or not, etc, that they are not directly accountable for.

[tielan]

Some indigenous communities are being forced onto a 'welfare card' where they can only spend the money on certain things (and, of course, at stores that are in that payment system and have the things that they need, presumably at the price points that the welfare card agreements have pre-determined).

[tielan]

Which is to say, yeah, there'd be 'requirements' of a parental income scheme.

[tielan]

Hm. Very good point - I didn't consider that.