It never occurred to Laurie Tennant that she would quit her job when she had kids. "Growing up, my friends dreamed of their weddings or of the families they would have," Tennant, 37, says. "I dreamed about my career." She loved her job as a director of human resources for the Northern California branch of a Big Six consulting company and went right back to work after her daughter Hannah was born in 1993. "I felt no pull from home when I was at work and no pull from work when I was at home. I felt perfectly balanced." Then she had her second child. During maternity leave, she spent more time with Hannah than she ever had before and was jolted by how deeply she enjoyed the experience. Within a year she quit her job. Since then she's had a third child. "I don't feel derailed," she says of her career. "I've just taken a pause."
In many ways, Tennant is a typical modern stay-at-home mother. More than 30 years after the feminist revolution of the 1960s sent women hurtling into the workplace, they remain torn by conflicting pressures from family and work. More than 80% of American women have a child at some point in their life, and most of those mothers must decide if and when to return to work. It's a decision many make not once but a number of times as their families and job stresses change. More than half of married mothers with children under 18 do not work full time, and nearly half of those do not work at all, according to Linda J. Waite and Mark Nielsen of the Sloan Working Families Center at the University of Chicago. In addition, preliminary data suggest that the number of stay-at-home mothers in certain demographic groups may be increasing. More mothers ages 36 to 40--a period that may include the birth of a second child--are opting for part-time jobs or leaving the work force altogether, according to a recent column by financial writer Jane Bryant Quinn,
So who are the women who stay home, and what are their concerns?
First of all, these days staying home is relative. Women take varying amounts of time off from paid work to have children, and if they return to work, their schedules may be full time, flex time, part time or occasional. Thus being a stay-at-home mother is often a matter of attitude. Washington lawyer Sharon Rutberg, 41, has continued to work a few hours a week since leaving her full-time job three years ago, yet she considers herself an at-home mother "because the vast bulk of my time, energy and attention are devoted to raising my children."
Many mothers shift between home and office several times in the course of their child-rearing years in a process called "sequencing," a term coined by sociologist and author Arlene Rossen Cardozo to refer to the phenomenon of having it all--career, family and marriage--but not all at once.