Happy Mother's Day - you're worth HOW MUCH!

Welcome to Legal & General’s “Value of a Parent” 2013 research report.

They’ve been researching the value of a parent for over 30 years, tracking changes in parents’ behaviours and attitudes towards domestic work.

Parents may tend to take their wages into account when deciding on a level of cover, but they often don’t consider the unpaid domestic work they do.

If either parent were unable to work or carry out the tasks around the home due to death or illness, how would they or their partner cope financially? Would they be able to afford to pay someone to help, or give up work altogether, to do them? It’s crucial that this is taken into account!

They don’t expect to be paid for this work, but, if they were, how much would it be worth? That’s what this research sets out to do – to find out the insurance value of the unpaid work that a parent does around the home.

Parents are massively underestimating the value of the unpaid work they carry out in the home. The value of a Mum’s domestic work is more than double the estimate, and for Dads there’s a difference of 55% between the work that parents think they’re carrying out and the amount they actually are.

As expected, the average value of the unpaid domestic work that a non-working parent carries out is highest at £34,562 per year.

Interestingly, parents in full-time employment are contributing just under £24,000 worth of unpaid domestic work per annum, around the home, in addition to their wages, which is 14% higher than in 2011.

For both Mums and Dads, childcare is the activity they’re spending the most time on. The value of childcare a Mum carries out per week is £277, and for Dads it’s £218 . New Mums are spending the most time on childcare at 33 hours per week, the value of which is £299 .

With the increased cost of living in recent years, some parents are finding themselves having to return to work to meet their family’s financial needs.

Grandparents are playing an increasingly important role in the family, from providing financial support to helping with childcare and looking after the home. In fact, relying on grandparents is the most common back up plan parents have in place to help maintain a family’s lifestyle should a parent die, showing just how crucial they’ve become to modern family life.

Although grandparents are helping an average of 8 hours a week, only 26% of the full-time working parents and 20% of part-time working parents they surveyed pay for this help. If parents were paying for childcare instead of having unpaid help from grandparents, this would cost an average of £73 per week.

Your family is important to you, and that’s why you spend your time caring for them and giving them the best lifestyle possible. But how would they cope financially if you became critically ill or died? Does your family have the finances in place to hire outside help if you weren’t able to carry out domestic work around the home?

Perhaps now is the time to look at personal protection cover. Having this in place can help to ensure that, should the worst happen, you have the finances in place to help your family maintain their current lifestyle.