Flipping through the newspaper a few months back, I found some really thought-provoking stuff on motherhood in a syndicated Reuter’s column by Sue Pleming called “Perspective: A Move to Put Motherhood in its Proper, Positive Place.” I was so interested in the article that I took it to my book group to share it with my friends, all of whom are young mothers. The article spurred a lot of interesting discussion about the way the rest of the world views the work that we do as mothers. Let me share some thoughts from this article as well as some ideas that came up as I discussed it with my friends.

The article centers around a book by Ann Crittenden called The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is the Least Valued” (2001, Metropolitan). Ann Crittenden worked for the New York Times for years, but after having her first child in her early forties, she left her career to stay home with her son. She was surprised to see how differently people perceived her once she left her job and became a “full-time mom.”

She was amused but quite bothered when she ran into someone at a party who said to her, “Didn’t you used to be Ann Crittenden?” This remark combined with many others spurred her to write her book. She found her job as a mother to be very challenging and rewarding, but was saddened that so few people in the “professional world” understood or appreciated what she was doing. She said, “Being a mother is like being a master therapist, teacher, minister, counselor. I truly was convinced how important my job was, but I got the impression that no one else agreed. All my former world looked down on me.”

To write her book, Ann interviewed hundreds of mothers and analyzed decades of statistics. Her general finding was that American business, government and the law do not really respect America’s stated family values. She pointed out that government policies do not define care of dependent children as work. Babysitters earn Social Security credits, but mothers do not. Employers do not understand the valuable multi-tasking, management, and people skills that motherhood helps women develop.

Ann makes an interesting comparison between serving your country as a soldier (men’s traditional service to society) and serving your country as a mother (women’s traditional service to society). She points out that employers give former military men “extra credit” for the time they spent serving their country and gaining valuable skills and should do the same for mothers. Ann says, “If a woman goes in [to a job interview] and says, ‘I’ve just spent five years with my kids and here I am, good management material,’ they think she’s been in Siberia and her brains have been on ice…I want employers to say, ‘Wow, what you did was hard and incredible and you have great management training.”

Women who step out of the workforce to be full time mothers lose approximately $1 million in financial income over their lifetime, not to mention the social security benefits, 401K savings, and health care benefits they would be entitled to if they were working outside the home. So basically, Ann points out that motherhood is given lip service, but that no one puts their money where their mouth is.

Full time mothers enable their husbands to contribute to the economy by working outside the home while helping their children become responsible citizens and productive members of society. Mothers build the future and make the present more pleasant and smooth for children, neighbors and husbands as they manage households and schedules and lives. According to Ann, “Mother’s work, which creates enormous material wealth, should receive more material recognition.”