When Mother Stays Home

By MEGAN RUTHERFORD

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.

Some women create home-based businesses in an effort to forge a better interface between their jobs and their children. California biologist Tiffany Yuen Hollfelder, 33, used to work full time as a data analyst for a consulting firm. Shortly before her daughter Robyn was born in 1996, she went into the consulting business for herself, cutting back to part time and working from home. "I was actually a bit more productive at home because there weren't meetings to go to or people stopping by to talk," says Hollfelder, whose mother helped out with child care. Then last June Hollfelder gave birth to twins Jeena and Tessa and quit working, at least until the twins are older.

To hold on to their careers--and at least a portion of their salaries--many women cut back to part time. In some cases, though, the compromise gives them not the best of everything but the worst. Tara Fisher, 35, a mechanical engineer who lives in Phoenix, tells a common horror story. From the time her first child was six weeks old, Fisher "dragged her to day care every single day crying and screaming." Fisher tried to go part time but found that staff meetings were invariably scheduled on her days off. She switched jobs and went back to working full time--60 hours a week--until her second child was born, when she again tried cutting back. This time the only part-time thing was her salary. When she quit six months later, two full-timers were hired to replace her.

Fisher found that leaving her job was wrenching. "I felt as if I was letting women down by pulling myself out of the workforce," she says. And she misses the affirmation of evaluations and pay raises. For now, though, the loss of those rewards is offset by her relief from stress. "I didn't know my children very well before. I saw them only at their worst time. I would get home at dinnertime. I would cram food into their mouths, and I would put them to bed. I never got to see the good moments, only the tired, cranky ones. Now I get to hear the genuine laughter of being a kid."

Child-care crises are sometimes the last straw for working mothers who already feel overwhelmed. Virginia Menachof's job as an account manager for a printing company in suburban Chicago kept flooding into her home life. When her sister-in-law, who had been caring for Menachof's two kids, began to reconsider the arrangement three years ago, the solution suddenly seemed clear: "It hit me that I wanted to be home. I couldn't handle the stress anymore, and I wanted to be with my kids." Her husband was a self-employed lawyer with an unpredictable income, and she was carrying the health insurance. But she did the math and figured they could make it--frugally--without her salary.

Joan Williams, author of Unbending Gender, says stay-at-home mothers can be divided into two groups--those who really want to stay home with their children 24 hours a day and those who end up there because they can't forge a good job-family balance in a 24/7 working world. "Americans now work more than any other people--even the Japanese," notes Williams. That's 1,966 hours a year for the Americans vs. 1,889 for the Japanese, according to a 1999 study by the U.N. International Labor Organization. "The executive schedule today basically requires you to be childless or have a wife at home," says Williams.

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.

One of the biggest challenges facing stay-at-home mothers is isolation, which can be particularly intense for professional women. "Because they were working in high-powered, high-pressured, demanding jobs, they often weren't able to spend much time in the community and make neighborhood friends," says Pamela Stone, associate director of the Radcliffe Public Policy Center in Cambridge, Mass. A number of national organizations with local chapters have sprung up to address the loneliness that can surround mother and child, including Mothers at Home, the Moms Club, Mothers & More and Mocha Moms.

Despite the support offered by these and other groups, some women find that the craving for adult company propels them back to work sooner than they expected. Stormy Cooke planned to stay home with her daughter Shea for three years, but when Shea was two, Cooke was offered a job with Pixar animation studios in Richmond, Calif., and she jumped at the opportunity. Though she didn't need the money--her husband is a computer-security architect for a large company--Cooke says, "I knew I'd be happier in the long run doing what I like to do."

Contemporary mothers express little anxiety about their ability to segue in and out of work. "Our mothers went straight from college or high school to motherhood," Bullen says. "Today's mom is working before she chooses to stay home." Furthermore, the trend of workers jumping from company to company is helpful to mothers returning to work, because employers no longer place a premium on an unbroken job history. The booming economy helps too. Says Williams: "With 4% unemployment, workers have the bargaining power to say, 'I won't work that schedule, but I will work this one.'"

Perhaps the biggest difference between today's stay-at-home mothers and those of an earlier era lies in expectations. Says Bullen: "A woman today is definitely not planning to be home for a lifetime. She can take the time to raise her children and still return to work, where she can have another 20 or 30 years. It's not an either-or, do-or-die decision." That may be true. However, as Flux author Orenstein points out, the child-rearing years are "such a short time that you should enjoy them, but you should also recognize that you need to be thinking about what's going to happen when that short time is over."