Stay-At-Home Mom and Stay-At-Home Dad Self-Image Booster!  Check This OUT!

For those of you who stay home to impact your children for good, it is sometimes difficult to feel like what you are doing is all that valuable.  A recent article in Investopedia on Yahoo! tried to quantify it, putting a price tag on such things as: driver, chef, house cleaner, yard keeper, etc., added them all up and reported it’d be worth $96,261, which is pretty funny, because we know you are all worth more than that!

You can’t pay a mother or father enough to train a child in the way he should go.  You can’t really pay anyone for love and caring and tenderness and guidance and patience and insight and consideration and fun and organization and giving and kindness.

To think you can break down a mom or a dad or a husband or a wife into roles that someone could fill for a buck is a pretty sorry way to look at fathering and mothering and being a spouse til death us do part.  Typical that we Americans would do that, but pretty sorry nonetheless.

You can’t buy love.  Sorry.  It ain’t for sale.

You can’t pay someone to be your spouse or your father or your mother.  You could slip them a Benjamin or portfolio, even, but even the effort would be insulting.

Her worth is far more than rubies, it says in Proverbs 31.

I hope you don’t need an article on Yahoo! to give you a boost.  The value in parenting and being a spouse is its own reward.  It’s a privilege.

Being able to stay home with the kids and see them grow and to help them learn and to play with them and to tease them and to keep your own self together in the process?  Count the days, my friend, because they will soon be over.

Your life is a breath, and, just like that, it’s done. One day your kids sit on your lap and cuddle with you and the next day and ever after they never sit on your lap again.  Boom.  It’s gone.

How much is that little cuddle time worth?

You can’t put a price tag on it.  No one could pay you enough.  They don’t need to.  You were blessed unfathomably.

Maybe that’s the problem.  Forgetting.  Forget not all of His benefits, the Psalmist says.  Number our days aright.*

So you are at home for these few, fleeting days under the sun?  Count yourself among humankind’s most blessed.

It is more blessed to give than to receive.

Really.

You’ll see.

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*Psalm 103:2; 90:12

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Dr. Bing Wall is a therapist specializing in marriage and relationships and issues facing single adults with a practice in Ames and Urbandale, Iowa.  To set up a time to see Dr. Wall click here or call 888-233-8473.  For more information about Dr. Wall click here.