A job description for mothers is unlike that of any other occupation. Mothers have a lot of responsibilities, and yet there's no accrediting institution, mandatory minimum educational level or other assessment to prove one's qualifications. If you're considering motherhood, or are unaware of exactly what the job entails, you might be in for a surprise.
Nature of Work
According to the Mom Salary Wizard at Salary.com, a mother must be a multi-talented individual and be able to act simultaneously in 21 different professional areas ranging from transportations and logistics, education, mechanical, technical, economics and fashion.
Moms are required to have diplomatic skills, negotiating matters of global importance, like sharing. Moms are also required to constantly research and adapt systems to meet the ever-changing nutritional, educational, psychological and spiritual needs of children, without sacrificing her commitments as a wife.
It's a 24-hour-a-day job, and there's often no training to prepare a woman for the tasks at hand. Often, a mother will need to use intuition and smooth-talking to ensure that her charges are well-adjusted and socialized.
Qualifications and Qualities Necessary
To qualify as a mother, for technical purposes, it's merely necessary to produce a child through adoption or physical reproduction. However, to be recognized by society as a good mother, moms must make an effort to raise children that look and act like the rest of respectable society, without breaking the child's spirit or causing irreparable psychological damage. To do this, moms are often required to have bold personal qualities such as spunk, spirit, inner strength and wisdom.
Wisdom and spunk allow moms to stand up for the needs of their children in the face of cultural norms that are counterintuitive to the natural needs of a child. For example, many moms decide to breastfeed their children, even though modern American culture isn't always supportive. Another example of moms with spunk and wisdom can occur in school, when children are under the leadership of adults who have never met them before. Having known the child their entire life, moms know when their child is being treated unfairly by a teacher and administrator and must be able to speak up, to preserve the child's reputation and faith in the world.
Personal organization is a plus, as each child carries a fair amount of paperwork to be dealt with. Mothers also must keep track of birth records, medical records, infant development records, school records and an ongoing record of accomplishments.
Duties to be Performed
Moms are expected to do a variety of tasks, such as ensuring that the entire course of antibiotics is finished, writing the child's last name on the tag of every piece of clothing, scanning every room in the house for choking hazards, attending prenatal appointments, sewing cow costumes with less than 24 hours' notice, sifting through Halloween candy for signs of tampering, get yelled at during random intervals for being unfair, pay obscene phone bills, wash strange things from children's hair and clothing, send a thousand thank-you cards, plan themed birthday parties, teach children important things like sort laundry or tell if a cantaloupe is ripe, explain the concept of "outside voices" to a 3 year old and finally coordinate after-school activities that grow exponentially more complicated when additional children or activities are added to the schedule.
Work Schedule and Comments
All work is to be performed between the hours of 12:00 a.m. on Sundays and 11:59 p.m. on Saturdays, which amounts to 168 hours a week. If mom chooses to sleep, use the restroom, go on vacation or take on outside employment, she is still on call. While on call, mother may be summoned to deal with fevers, disciplinary situations or sudden emergencies. Furthermore, a non-emergency situation can cause mom to be called when child care arrangements fail or kids simply need her.
Salary
In exchange for this work, moms are generally paid on a sliding scale. According to the Mom Salary Wizard, the value of a mom's work begins at $68,000 a year and increases, depending on how many children she has and how long she spends doing various tasks. Most mothers, however are paid in the short term with slobbery, toothless smiles. As time goes by, their pay is received in the form of laughter and fun times or by spontaneous help around the house. Some mothers are paid long after their children have moved out, in the form of grandchildren. With grandchildren come the pleasure of spending stress-free time with little people and knowing that your own children are in charge.
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