Work or stay at home? It's still a quandary for moms

ByABC News
October 2, 2007, 10:34 PM

— -- Stay-at-home moms and working mothers have hardly called a truce in the so-called Mommy Wars the debate over which sort of parenting is better for a child: a mother at home or on the job.

The latest salvo: a book by Leslie Bennetts, The Feminine Mistake, which posits that mothers assume too much of a financial and career risk if they stay at home to raise the kids.

Recent research also reflects the ambivalence with which many mothers regard their own decisions about working or staying home, and many feel harshly judged for their choices. There is a widespread belief that today's parents are not measuring up to the standard that parents set a generation ago, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. More than half of Americans (56%) say that mothers are doing a worse job today than mothers did 20 or 30 years ago, the study found.

"I often hear moms who are thinking of going back to work tell me they need flexibility, but being at home is driving them crazy," says Robin Ryan, a career coach and author of What to Do with The Rest of Your Life, in an e-mail. "Stay-at-home moms complain a lot that 'just being a mom' is like being invisible in this society."

But working moms feel qualms about their choices, too. Christina Zola, 39, of Washington, D.C., longs to stay home with her son, Nicholas, 4, but works full time doing marketing for an architecture firm.

"The guilt is there, wherever I am, and I rarely feel I'm in the right place at the right time." Zola says. "We all, as mothers, live with the consequences of our choices, and we don't take them lightly."

More prefer part-time jobs

In the span of the past decade, full-time work outside the home has lost some of its appeal to mothers, a report from the Pew Research Center found. This trend holds for mothers who have such jobs and those who don't.

Among working mothers with children 17 and under, one in five (21%) say full-time work is the ideal situation for them, down from the 32% who said that in 1997, according to a July Pew Research Center survey. Six in 10 (up from 48% in 1997) of today's working mothers say part-time work would be their ideal, and one in five (19%) say they would prefer not working at all outside the home.