The most valuable things we do are unpaid. We live in the faith that by devoting ourselves to relationships—with God and with each other—God is using our labor to produce things of inestimable value. When we take a sabbath rest to worship, when we pray, when we take time for devotions and fellowship, that is the most valuable time we spend each day and each week. When parents make regular time for their kids, and grandparents for their grandkids, that is the most productive work they can do.

Dan Doriani begins his 2019 book Work with a critical insight: the market economies we live in devalue work that doesn’t pay.

This is why, he says, it’s so hard for stay-at-home mothers, retirees and others to feel their work has significance.

My wife can relate. When I come home she’s eager to hear about my work—even the headaches—because I’m often the first adult she’s talked to all day. She’s worn out by her work—washing clothes, fixing meals, picking up after our kids—and by seeing it undone almost as soon as it’s done.

Stay-at-home moms can find hope in the long-term impact their work has on the hearts and minds of their children, but their surrounding culture—far more interested in material gains and visible progress—won’t do much to nurture that hope.

Our culture regards the material as more significant—in fact, more real—than the non-material. This isn’t a new development. Richard Weaver, in his book Ideas Have Consequences, traced the problem to a philosophical shift in the late Middle Ages, which declared that words and ideas actually did not correspond to universal, transcendent truths.

Over the following centuries, this shift produced a series of other changes that gradually replaced a cultural belief in universals—like God and goodness, beauty and truth, soul and spirit—with a cultural belief only in material things that can be perceived by our senses and sensory tools, like MRI machines. Weaver wrote, “Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and -consuming animal.” This second story is still the one our culture tells us every day.

However, there is encouraging progress coming lately from an unlikely source: economists.

Among economists, there is a growing body of work that has shown that individuals who do not usually directly participate in formal labor markets, contribute informal labor by performing household services, volunteering, babysitting, counseling, mentoring and other activities.

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