Stay at Home Mom: Not Your Typical Job

I recently came across an article about a Madison County, Alabama stay at home mom who is fighting her local school system for the right to keep her children home for National Take Your Child to Work Day. She felt her job was important and wanted her children to see what she did all day. When she approached a teacher about the idea, she was turned down on the grounds that her job was not professional. Escalation to the Superintendent of Madison County Schools did not help. Even though the superintendent's own wife is also a stay at home mom and he admitted it was an important job, he still backed the teacher's refusal.

According to Salary.com's Mom Salary Wizard, if paid, a typical stay at home mom would earn an annual salary of $116, 805. That's a high salary for what the school district considers a non-professional job. While being a stay at home mom is not something you will find in any job outlook book, it is a very important job. Allowing a child to shadow a stay at home parent will expose them to a variety of job skills, including accounting, budgeting, research, and time management, not to mention work ethic.

Many stay at home moms are responsible for managing the family's finances. They must be proficient in accounting in order to design and implement a budget. They need to plan for or be prepared to adapt their budget to account for unexpected expenses such as medical bills.

Most stay at home moms I know are constantly researching. They not only research products they're considering purchasing for their children, but also education, health and safety. I personally spent nearly two weeks researching car seats before buying one for my daughter.

Without time management, running a household can easily become a disaster. Stay at home moms must know how to budget their time so they work more efficiently. This is a skill that is necessary for any job.

A good work ethic is a critical skill in any profession. Employers don't want to hire people who come in late, leave early, and take off every chance they get. Stay at home moms have a great work ethic. We continue to run our households and care for our families in spite of whatever else we might have going on, be it illness or family tragedy.

Several stay at home moms, myself included, work from home in addition to their household and child-rearing duties. If my daughter were to shadow me for Take Your Child to Work Day, she would learn about bookkeeping, which I do for my husband's business, as well as freelance writing, along with the skills involved in writing, including grammar, spelling, sentence structure, punctuation and research.

So should a stay at home parent be allowed to keep their child home for Take Your Child to Work Day? I say yes, absolutely. Thoughts?