Can Working Mothers Have It All?

Nov. 9, 2006 — -- My first week back to work after maternity leave turns out to be a historic one for women in this country.

With the Democrats winning the majority in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi stands poised to be the first woman ever to be Speaker of the House and second in line for the presidency.

Standing in front of a malfunctioning microphone at a news conference Wednesday, she joked that she would use her "mother-of-five voice" instead, so reporters could hear her.

Regardless of your politics, this working mother and grandmother is a terrific role model for the 26 million working mothers in this country.

When ABC announced that I would be stepping down this past summer as the co-anchor of "World News Tonight," there were a lot of people who felt this was a bad precedent for working moms.

Women's organizations protested to my bosses at ABC, and columnists debated the message my job change would send.

For me, though, giving up the anchor chair at the evening news, and returning exclusively to anchor "20/20" was the right decision.

I loved my job at "World News," but the prospect of doing it well, and still finding time to be a good mother to 3-year-old Zachary and my new baby, Samuel, felt impossible.

Anchoring "20/20" gives me a lot more flexibility to be a good parent.

But all the controversy and debate about my decision got a lot of us working moms -- and dads -- talking: Why don't more of our employers offer paid maternity leave?

Why can't more parents have a little more flexibility at work … to stay at home with a sick child or catch that all-important school assembly?

And most of all, why is good, affordable child care nearly impossible to find?

We decided to do some digging into this for my first night back at "20/20."

We found that the United States lags far behind when it comes to family-friendly policies.

For example, of 168 countries surveyed in the world, only four offer no national maternity-leave program: Lesotho, Swaziland, Papua New Guinea, and the United States of America.