As anyone who's ever battled through four sleepless nights on the trot or coaxed a reluctant toddler to eat baked beans will know, parenthood is a tough old slog.
It's a labour of love, of course, but what would happen if we put a salary to that toil?
A new survey has calculated that women, in particular, could earn a mammoth £83,427 a year if they were paid for the work they do as mothers.
Online services marketplace Bidvine.com surveyed 1,200 UK mums and found that on average day, they spent up to four hours cleaning and general tidying, around two hours preparing food and one hour cleaning clothes, as well as being on call for their children 24 hours a day.
These hourly tasks were worked up into an overall daily rate by Bidvine.com’s job experts, based on average salaries for jobs such as life coach, chef, domestic cleaner and personal assistant.
That day rate was then applied to an entire year.
The £83K figure is a fair whack above the average UK salary of £28,000. It's a paycheck that rivals jobs such as marketing directors, in-house lawyers and pilots.
Hard work is, naturally, all part of the fun and games of parenthood. But this figure is particularly galling when you take into account that women often pay the price for having kids, with mothers returning to work earning on average a third less than men.
More than 50,000 women a year also lose their jobs over maternity leave discrimination.
In effect, women face a "motherhood wage penalty" that widens for 12 years after having children and plays a significant role in the UK's gaping gender pay gap.
The questionnaire also revealed that 74% of mums felt that they carried out most of the jobs around the house and 67% said they felt almost completely responsible for their children.
You can find out exactly how much cash you would bring home as a parent - depending on your daily balance of responsibilites - right here, using Bidvine's online calculator.
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