Keller @ Large: What Is Your Mother Worth To You?
BOSTON (CBS) - What is your mother worth to you?
Listen to Jon's commentary:
Podcast
I know, it's a ridiculous question.
A mother's love is priceless.
But each year the folks at the website Salary.com try to put a monetary value on what moms do for us, and the results are worth noting as you warm up for Mother's Day.
They do it by compiling data from thousands of mothers about what they spend their time doing.
This year, they found that a typical stay-at-home mom puts in a nearly 95-hour work week, including the obvious: 15 hours as a housekeeper, 14 each as cook and day-care teacher, nine hours as a computer operator and more than six per week doing laundry.
Van driver, eight hours per week; psychologist, another eight hours, and the list goes on.
Then Salary.com applies the median national salary for those occupations, and comes up with the, in my view, meager totals for all of mom's work: less than ten grand per year for all that cooking, cleaning and tending the kids, nearly 15 grand for the psychological services, nearly 18 grand for my favorite job description: facilities manager.
Total annual salary: about $119,000.
We could go on all day about the mother's work that this survey didn't pick up on – things like nurse, lawyer, batting practice pitcher and crime scene investigator.
But if you're lucky enough to have a mother who's always been there for you with unconditional love and support, then you know that mom's real value transcends all of the above.
Who can you hire at any salary to wipe your tears away when you fall, and kiss the scrape to make it feel better?
Who can you hire for any amount who will go to bat for you, show you the ropes and cheer your successes the way your mother will?
Good dads are priceless too, and we'll get to you guys in June.
But for all the moms, we don't need to wait until Sunday to tell you the truth – to us, you're worth a lot more than 119k.
Just keep adding zeroes, and we'll tell you on Sunday where to stop.
You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. and 12:25 p.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.
