By Jim Mullen

Nea Columnist

Like most people, I’m not very good at remembering jokes. But every now and then one sticks with me like a bare thigh on a hot vinyl car seat. A guy wrote to Reader’s Digest a few years ago to say that one day as he was driving his 5-year-old daughter to kindergarten, she turned to him and asked, “Dad, when did Mom come to work for us?”

I remembered the line when it was recently reported that if you had to pay a salary to a full-time, stay-at-home mom for all the different work she did – the baby-sitting, the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping, the chauffeuring, the overtime – it would cost you $134,000 a year.

Now if you are a man, especially a successful businessman, you know how ridiculous that figure is. It’s as if it’s been pulled out of thin air. For the baby-sitting alone a successful businessman would pay himself up to $5 million a year. And he’d also want the family jet to be available to him at all times, as well as the use of the family-owned condos in Paris, Rome, Martinique and Hawaii.

He wouldn’t actually do any of the baby-sitting, the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping, the chauffeuring – he’d hire a crack staff to do that, or have his people hire a crack staff – but he would actively manage the work from a cell phone while using the golf-club membership that has been paid for by the family.

When you add in the shopping, the chauffeuring, the laundry, the cleaning – we’re talking upwards of $40 or $50 million a year. Let’s get real here. A real CEO wouldn’t get out of bed for $134,000 a year – much less make one.

If we’re going to apply business principles to the home, let’s really start applying them. First of all, would a businessman hire a woman with children to take care of his kids and run his house? Of course not. He’d hire a career woman without children. That way, she wouldn’t be distracted by having to think about her own children. She wouldn’t always be asking for time off for pregnancy leave. She wouldn’t complain about the glass ceiling, she’d clean it. That’s thinking outside the box.