Pay Equivalents for Home

In celebration (re: exploitation) of Mother's Day, salary.com released a calculator of how much pay mothers would get it their home duties received market-level compensation. Try the calculator here. And just to be sure, there is a 'Dad' version too that gives rise to exactly the same results.

And where do such magical figures come from? Well according to the news report:

The eighth annual survey calculated a mom's market value by studying pay levels for 10 job titles with duties that a typical mom performs, ranging from housekeeper and day care center teacher to van driver, psychologist and chief executive officer.

... The biggest driver of a mom's theoretical salary is the amount of overtime pay she'd receive for working more than 40 hours a week. The 18,000 moms surveyed about their typical week reported working 94.4 hours — meaning they'd be spending more than half their working hours on overtime.

Working moms reported an average 54.6 hour "mom work week" besides the hours they spent at paying jobs.

So the methodology is seemingly sound. If you had to replicate the parent's work with outside paid labour, how much would it cost you? Notice that the salary.com calculation is the cost of complete outsourcing of parental tasks (save for playing with your children or really quality time). It even includes the overall management component with a CEO function. (I wonder if that includes stock options?). That said, it has all to do with averages and what is more, the average value of work in the house seems to exceed average outside the home earnings which, makes our definitions of national income really dubious.

And so how might you use this information? For one, you could use it to work out whether a parent carrying out these functions should stop and themselves work outside of the the home. Suppose that the annual pay (after tax) from this is w, then you need to also figure out what the increment to your overall utility (re: happiness or satisfaction) would be working outside versus working at home (including all of the satisfaction you get from control in your parenting and the annoyance you get from lack of control in your career and so on). Call this v. Note that v may well be negative implying that all monetary considerations aside you actually prefer working at home to your best option outside of the home.

Then the calculation as to whether you should stay at home is if the salary.com figure exceeds v + w. If it does, stay at home. If not, outsource the home stuff and go out. (In principal, if you want to take some leisure time rather than do the home stuff you will need to work out the value of that and substitute it for w.)

What this wont tell you is which parent should do what task? That depends on individual expertise and satisfaction from each task. Good luck sorting that one out using numbers!

Parental Leave

In Australia, there is currently a debate about whether parental leave should receive a government subsidy. Over at Core Economics, I have been writing about this and thought it may be of some interest here. Here are links to my posts on the goals, market failures and policies.

Where's the technology?

From Slate, a discussion of the apparent absence of technology in picture books. Wait, the kid wasn't surfing the net in Where the Wild Things Are? (Of course, this book is shameless and a classic for us).

Birthday party wars

You think you have dilemmas over what type and how much to spend on a birthday party for your 7 year old. Well, check out this story from Australia.

TWO warring parents who can't even agree on the location of their little girl's birthday have asked the Family Court to rule on where her party should be held and who should be invited.

It took a judge, three barristers, three solicitors and a day in court at an estimated $30,000 to work out where the girl should celebrate her seventh birthday.

... Her dad wanted to celebrate at McDonald's with gifts, balloons, his relatives, his new partner - and their seven-month-old baby girl.

Her mum wanted it to be on familiar ground at her daughter's usual play centre, with no relatives.

Me thinks that this is probably not about fundamentally differing birthday party philosophies. I guess in 20 or so years, some barristers may need to get ready for the wedding.

Men in the Delivery Room

Blogger DaddyDaze talks today about being present in the delivery room.

We attended the classes at the hospital before delivering Grace. I was dreading "the movie" that we would eventually be shown, and when that night came, I don't mind tell you that I nearly went unconscious. I knew that the baby wasn't the only thing that would be delivered on that magical day, but I wasn't prepared for all the pain and groaning and, well...blood. It was rough.

Worst of all, I feared that I'd have the same reaction in the delivery room. I wanted to be a source of support for my wife, not a nauseated coward.

However, I did a much better job during the actual delivery. I was more upset at the helpless feeling of seeing my wife in so much pain, and not being able to do anything about it. Sure, it was the most blood I've ever seen in my life (the article makes a good point: Stand at your wife's shoulders, not her feet), but I was less bothered by that than the movie blood. Odd.

The blog refers to this Washington Post article from 2006 that describes in detail some of the issues involved with having 'daddy' present. When it comes down to it: if you are unprepared, you may do more harm than good. But the strategies involved tend to be one of shielding 'daddy' from certain things rather than working out what he really needs to be doing.

Now I haven't written about such matters on this blog before but I did fill the second chapter of Parentonomics on this subject (one of the few to have totally new 'material'). Suffice it to say, my reaction was precisely the opposite of the 'shield your eyes' view. I can't say that I am especially noted for my bravery but the video of a birth only provoked in me the reaction that I needed to do more than stand around at the shoulders and provide 'support.' How much support can you give if you don't know what is going on?

2 for DS

For my 7 year old son, his Nintendo DS is his lifeblood during the boring waiting bits of life -- like airplane travel and waiting for his sisters' activities to finish. Our two most recent game purchases on this have been outstanding.

The first is Drawn to Life. This involves you first drawing your hero and then playing a game. The drawing opens up all sorts of fun possibilities and my son loved this. The game itself is fairly standard but you can draw lots of bits for it and this makes it much more innovative.

The second is Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Basically, this involves traveling around a village, for reasons I haven't explored, and happening upon various puzzles that need to be solved. The puzzles are just great. For instance, one had 8 blocks and a set of scales. You are told one of the blocks is lighter than the others. You then have two opportunities to figure out which one it is. You don't need the game to work out what the right approach is but it is much more fun that way. My only problem is I kept hoping for my son to fail at working these out so I could have a go.

Bending the rules

My two eldest are learning Taekwondo; the Korean martial art. In Australia, Taekwondo has the quality that it is a real activity where the instructors are actually trying to teach the children the art rather than fill in time and siphon off parents' cash. And, of course, as a result they can impose all sorts of conditions such as attendance requirements, twice weekly meetings and testing. To be sure, these are things that most parents would willingly pay more to not have but sadly, due to the immaturity of this particular industry, the supply of less for more has not yet taken off.

Today, my 9 year old daughter had a full contact class -- called Maniacs (presumably after the parents who permit this). This is a class where the kids gear up (checkbook please) and then beat each other up. Now I am a fairly non-violent person and do not watch violent sports (even archery). But I must say that I get quite a thrill watching my daughter kick some other kid in the chest. And on the same score, I am not too traumatised when she gets punched out. As far as I'm concerned, she had it coming.

After these sessions, we spend a little time debriefing.

"You looked good out there. That girl -- let's call her Gigantor -- was twice your size."

"Yep, and that is much harder too. I did very well."

Or ...

"You really got in some good shots with that boy. But he was quite a bit smaller than you."

"Yep, I was happy with that. The smaller ones are harder to hit."

Suffice it to say, she always comes through against the odds.

So today two things happened that seemed a bit different. The first was when the instructor was demonstrating -- using some small boy -- a series of moves for the class. During the altercation, he pushed the boy. The boy then pointed out that pushing wasn't allowed. The instructor then said, "it is allowed until the referee gives you a warning. Until then you can bend the rules as much as you like."

Well that got the attention of all the parents watching the going's on. It seemed a tad weak on the values front. Normally, these sporting activities are big on values and playing fair and, sensibly, because they are trying to get repeat business, down on things like winning. Let's face it, there just aren't enough winners in an average crowd of children. Indeed, the Taekwondo folks also usually are quite big on honor and restraint and are continually telling the children that they can never use their skills outside of the classroom. I guess during a competition, morals are a more flexible concept.

Anyhow, despite some initial glances, it took only a few seconds for the majority of us to decide that it was all just fine; indeed, better than fine given that at some point soon our children would be getting into a ring with another child (from perhaps an equally less moral club) and we would be hoping for them to survive with limited medical bills.

Medical bills brings me to the second thing that happened. One kid lost their mouth guard during the lesson (they take these things in and out depending on the activity). So the instructor got everyone to take out their mouth guards and hold them up to see if any one of them had the wrong one! Suffice it to say, they didn't but there was some nervousness amongst the parents that their child might have been caught with some other kid's mouth guard in their mouth.

So it transpired that the kid had forgotten his guard. That lead to a stern lecture from the instructor who asked the class if this kid gets his two front teeth kicked out, who will be blamed? Someone said, "you." He said, "exactly. And his parents will shout at me and then, you know what, I will shout at you because I keep telling you to bring your mouth guard."

To me, it seemed like the last bit was not a really credible threat. After all, if there is a kid standing there and bleeding, I suspect Mr Tough Instructor is going to be a whole lot less worried about chewing the kid out. Anyhow, it appears most of the children don't want their teeth kicked out and their parents are likely to be just as happy to chew them out as they bleed as they will face the big dentist bills.

All this aside, by her 10th birthday, my daughter may well be a black belt (yeah, really) and I will be bragging about it until the sun goes down. You should have seen me show off the wooden board she broke with her bare hands. Hopefully, she won't realise her physical power when we negotiate over doing chores.