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Why the non-related requirement? The point of honoring your mother is honoring the sacrifice she and her body made giving you life and then sustaining and raising you.
In many more traditional cultures, men remain more loyal to their parents, especially their mothers, than to their wives. This appreciation-for-life is truly seen as a life-debt which can't really ever be repaid.
Well, I would.
The original discussion was specifically about young women giving up a career in order to focus on having kids right out of college. The compensation for 5 years of paid professional work in the mid-20s is not just $X salary, but greatly expanded skillset and prospects for future earning, a solid professional network, plus a certain amount of prestige/ social capital that can be traded in for increased power in community interactions, etc. If you're saying the only compensation needed for an equivalent amount of time spent in stay-at-home childrearing should be the freely-rendered love of your own hypothetical someday babies (assuming you don't do anything to piss them off), well, it's a sweet sentiment, but it sounds like a terrible deal for the woman.
I don't think status compensation is the right way to look at it. Kids are their own reward. The main thing women get out of the arrangement is more kids who are more well-adjusted.
Their husbands arguably get the same thing with less personal risk, which is why divorce should bear extreme social and financial consequences in most cases.
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