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In many dual-career families, both parents are victims of what Williams calls "the great American speedup." The resulting stress falls disproportionately on mothers, who continue to shoulder the majority of child care and housework. When pressures reach the bursting point, married mothers, who earn 69% of what married fathers earn and may face gender-based hurdles to reaching their full professional potential, opt to reduce or eliminate their paid work.
But staying home in 2000 is different from what it was in the 1950s. Back then, homemaking was what mothers did. Nowadays the focus has shifted to the kids--and assumed laser-like intensity. "There's been a ratcheting up of expectations about what parents owe their children," says Williams. "The fear is that you have to spend a lot of time with the lessons, the tutors and helping them do their homework or they won't succeed." Observes Martha Bullen, co-author of Staying Home: "A lot of these women were used to more programmed lives in the workplace, and they bring this to their home." Notes Peggy Orenstein, author of Flux, a book based on interviews with women across the country: "There's more pressure to be a perfect mother. Listening to women talk about their expectations of motherhood is like listening to teenage girls talk about weight. You can never be thin enough--and you can never be a good enough mother."
Whatever the motivation, many at-home mothers approach parenting with a sense of mission. Heidi Brennan, 47, a former management-training specialist in Arlington, Va., chose to stay home with her five children to shape their values. "No one was going to care more than I was," she says. Johanne Laboy, 33, an M.B.A. living in Cary, N.C., realized her son Austin, 2, would not speak the language of her native Puerto Rico--or be able to communicate with his grandmother--unless she stayed home and spoke to him in Spanish. "For him to know Spanish will be important for his personal development," she says.
Staying home can bring profound satisfactions, but it also carries substantial risks in an era when about half of marriages end in divorce and, according to Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel, more than half of children in single-mother families live in poverty.
Even families that remain intact feel the financial pinch when one parent cuts back or quits work. Single-earner families with kids have lower needs-adjusted incomes than dual-earner families--almost $7,000 a year lower in 1997-- according to Waite and Nielsen. Proponents of at-home mothering insist, however, that staying home is more affordable than it may appear, since a second wage earner's job is accompanied by costs such as child care, transportation, restaurant meals, work clothes, cleaning bills and a higher income- tax bracket. Sheila Grillo, 34, a former sales rep who stays home with her three children in Bowie, Md., learned to use coupons, buy on sale and scale back. "Over the years my whole mind-set changed about material things," she says.