Frances's mom was under-appreciated
She wasn't just eating bread and jam
The real story behind children's books: The book is "Bread and Jam for Frances", but the real plot is "Holy Cow, Frances's Mom Does a Ton of Unpaid Work". Her kid eats like she's got an executive chef. The book concludes with Frances chowing down on tomato soup, a lobster-salad sandwich, celery, carrot sticks, black olives, plums, cherries, and vanilla pudding.
■ This is no knock on the book itself, per se -- the intended underlying message is that kids ought to be open to trying new things, and that's a pretty defensible position among parents. But even though the book is only from 1964 (making it the same age as Vice President Kamala Harris and only a year older than the first members of Generation X), aspects of it seem both wildly antiquated and unfortunately current.
■ Keeping up a household (cleaning, cooking, performing maintenance, groundskeeping, paying bills, and in many cases, caring for children) is a major consumer of resources. The allure of devices like dishwashers and clothes washers and dryers is self-evident to any functioning adult who has had to perform those tasks manually. And the amount we are willing to pay to get devices that make other tasks even easier -- like Roombas and robotic lawn mowers -- reveals that at least some people in the modern world know how to place a value on their non-working hours.
■ Just as we place a price tag on the work we do outside the home, we really ought to place a value on the work done inside the home, as well. This non-market housework is valuable. Even if most parents aren't making their children Frances-quality meals for lunch, it all adds up: While it isn't counted in our GDP, the estimated value is in the trillions of dollars each year. It does appear that some of the time spent on this labor has decreased overall in the last two decades, but a yawning gender gap between women and men has remained. The average employed woman does more than the average non-employed man, and the average employed woman spends about 50% more weekly hours on that household work than the average employed man.
■ Measurement is hard, but that shouldn't stop us from acknowledging that household work is an important component of how people spend their time. And even more than that, it is valuable -- to the tune of something around one-fifth of measured GDP. That's a whole lot of tomato soup and lobster-salad sandwiches.
