more moms or dads would stay home and raise their kids. Of work shifts so one is home.

option for many parents, if the economy would support this. Instead, an obscenely large percentage of our children are living in poverty.

Sounds dreadfully boring...Staying home drove my mom nuts. Moms need to have a life too, I suppose. Betty Friedan wrote the book on it.

Not all women want the same things out of life.

I stayed home with my kids when they were young. I had lots of friends who were also stay-at-homes. Later, I worked full-time. I recently found that I was no longer enjoying life the way I once had. I had little time to read, to knit, to spend time with friends. I have always loved Christmas--everything about it, but I found that Christmas never felt like Christmas, and that I didn't have the energy to decorate, to shop, to wrap gifts. That's when I knew that I needed to make a big change in my life. I quit my job in January, and have rediscovered all those old things that made my life worth living.

I have been trying new recipes, instead of just throwing the same old things together day after day. I can plan meals, and shop instead of just picking something up on the way home. We are eating waaaaaaaaaaay less pre-packaged food, and saving on grocery money.

Please don't make the assumption that having a meaningless job for the sake of having a job is the right thing for everyone.

she stopped working outside the home about six months before she became pregnant and has not been back to work since. My oldest in 18 and heading off to college in August, and my youngest is 16 and in 10th grade.

A few years ago I encouraged her to go back to work, but she was not interested. No she does not do all the house chores. I do most of the cooking and grocery shopping for example. I work extensively with my daughters on their homework as well.

That is of concern whether or not they are "moms."

They just seem to apply a different label. The same could be said of many men, of course, but they are more readily labeled as 'unemployed' because, as the article implies, there is a different meme for them (us). Frankly, anybody who wants and needs a job and can't find one should be listed as unemployed. The idea that most women are staying home out of choice falsely supports the RW meme that women should be at home, barefoot and pregnant, doing the chores. The women I've known throughout my life preferred to earn their own salary/wage if at all possible. Sure, some were stay at home moms by choice, and more power to them, but the fact remains, that should be a personal choice and not something forced-either way-by society.

However, during periods of economic downturn men are disparately affected since many of the jobs they predominately occupy like construction are the first to go and the last to come back.

and found that after paying for child care and gas, there's not enough left over to justify the cost of working at current wages.

children cost almost what she made working so she stays home to raise the kids. For the ones that said that the mom and dad should work in shifts do not think about the rise in divorce rates for those that do that. I did that with my kids and hardly ever saw my wife. You end up like business partners instead of husband and wife.

For years now, we work on rotating shifts... It's lonely, tiring, and you feel more like a single parent than in a marriage. It sucks ass. I'm looking for a jobs where I can do a more normal week and have weekends off and it would have to pay more money so I could pay after school daycare expenses and over summer all day daycare or Y- day camp.

My parents at this junction if their lives were making double what my husband and I do, paid for 2 kids at daycare, and saved up enough that we had 2 wk - go on a trip and spend money - vacations. However, growing up, I spent more time at a sitters and missed out on having a mom raise me. It was important to me that my kid had a mom around pre-elementary school... Now, he'd be better off with me home on weekends.

There is no give on this. There is barely any choice whether you work or not. There isn't a state in this country one can live on min wage and make rent on just a small 1 bedroom apt. These wealthy asses are killing us to death with work and we now don't have enough to barely make the basics, let alone think about a vacation... And don't get me started on not having paid maternity and paternity leave. For the so-called family values party, they really suck at supporting families!

five to seven days a week depending on workload. If I saw any family members for 10 minutes on a given day, I was lucky! Even so, I had it easy compared to one guy, a single father, who had to arrange day care around that!

cut off all of the money to politicians. To do that we need a lot of willfully ignorant people to get informed with the truth, which isn't going to happen anytime soon.

With two small children, there was no way my mother could get a job that would even cover the childcare expense.

If you have to pay for childcare plus all the other working expenses, a mother may well be better off staying at home.

Also, part-time poorly paid jobs with rotating and/or variable shifts are particularly hard for those who need to arrange for childcare. In many cases, staying home will put the family in a better/more stable economic place, esp. when you figure in social benefits.

It's crappy, poorly paid jobs just as much as no jobs that account for this change, and one of the worst problems workers face are jobs that offer part-time hours but require you to be on call 24/7 for whenever they need you. If you have dependents at home, that frequently makes life just about impossible.

Also, when I was a stay at home mom, I knew a lot of other stay at home moms that did a lot of 'on the side' money making activities. Selling crafts online, selling on ebay online, babysitting and so on....if they netted a few hundred dollars a month, they were far ahead of where they would be with a traditional 'job' while paying for childcare. A lot of the same women were into couponing, further saving their families a few hundred a month. For these women, staying at home was a lot more lucrative.

When I was with my ex, he wanted me to go back to work. We have 4 kids. I calculated the daycare and I would've had to take home more than $2000/month to break even (not including gas, car maintenance, clothing etc)! And that was with my oldest able to stay home on her own afterschool and with 2 kids IN school and only paying afterschool care for them and fulltime care for my youngest. That kind of salary for me was almost impossible given that at the time I had zero post-secondary education and hadn't worked in more than a decade.

As it so happened, he left me (not because of THAT) and while I was in school I had to pay for daycare for my youngest for a few years. It was super costly and I only had *1* kid in childcare AND I had subsidies because I was single, in school and low income. There were some people with 3 kids in full time care and their daycare bill was well over $2400/month. You have to be making a lot of money to justify that kind of childcare expense.

n/t

A woman with children is still the most likely of a 2 parent home to take sick days to take care of their children. And they will want insurance for a family plan to cover their kids.

If an employer can hire a single man or woman who is young and cheap, they most likely will. Just look at the mother in TX (?) who left her kids in a car to go in for an interview for a job. Stuck trying to figure out how to feed the kids vs needing help with daycare.

We spend an avg of $30,000/ yr on paying for an incarcerated person in jail; but we can't help parents out when these kid are in their formative years... So much for that family values party!

for the last 16 - and we're still playing catch-up for those years at home - paying off credit cards and student loans .

If I had worked those years, we might be retired today. As it is, I wish I could have been home full-time for the younger kids until they were out of high school. Sure - they were in school all day, but once they were home, I was tired and trying to catch up with everything needed to be done at home. (not to mention all the years working back shifts!) Anyone who thinks this is a child centered country is dreaming!

I decided to stay home after the 2nd was born (after working at least part-time from the time I was 12 - I "retired" at 40). We are still paying off the student loans as we both have multiple degrees. I am grateful that we have a good income, health care, and the promise of a future for our kids - but we are not living a luxurious lifestyle by any means.

Part of the problem for families is that when you have kids in school they may be away from the house 8-4 (at best), but there is still the dropping off/picking up, sick days, teacher work days, doctor's appts & activities to drive them to. Someone has to do that - whether it's a grandma (if you're lucky), babysitter, or yourself. The only way it made sense for me to work is if I could work in my field (professional - long hours and travel) so I stopped. It will take longer to pay off the debt and we do not have a McMansion. My car is the newest and it is not a Lexis - I drive a cheaper import. Vacations are to visit family. But I think overall we are still fortunate and at least one parent is home for the kids.

I was surprised to see PBS pose the question re guaranteed minimum income: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/will-guaranteed-income-ever-come-america/

It would be a great idea and I'm sure help young families - and a way to redistribute some of this income that is currently only sitting in a handful of families. I think it's the humane thing to do.

that call at 9:30 that the school nurse has done the lice check and your child is sitting in the nurse's office waiting to be picked up. Then, the child won't be re-admitted until re-checked and cleared by the nurse.

My daughter was 4 when I "retired" so I remember those days all too well. The early days in daycare when they catch everything (remember that "foot and mouth" disease ... lol) ... and the mom always seems to be the one who has to pick them up. I guess it at least gives you a chance to get caught up on laundry but the employers do not take kindly to the time off. It is a never-ending battle in this work-orientated society.

she called me crying......I made her feel better by telling her I had lice when I was a kid (true) - a pharmacist assured my panicked mum that lice like clean hair as much as they like dirty hair

... child.

They don't even start the process!!!

I have no faith in articles on economics with no numbers.

Going by opinion, child care costs are probably the main reason for this trend. If you are spending $12K to $15K a year for someone to watch your kids, there has to be a salary available to justify that.

An awful lot of the jobs that have been created are poorly paid, often part time, and they come with provisions that require you to be available for shifts whenever. That's extraordinarily difficult for anyone who is the primary caregiver, whether for children or the elderly.

I have a friend that is going through a divorce, she receives no child support (the father doesn't have a job and isn't in a hurry to get one either - he'll never pay it). Anywho, her son wasn't in daycare until this year, and she's just shocked about the cost for the summer. Thankfully there's a program in our county to help pay for the cost of daycare, so hopefully it'll get mostly covered.

When will we value and fund issues at heart for humanity?

Back when I had 3 under 6 yr of age, I simple could not afford to work, no matter how much we needed the extra money. By the time I paid for child care, and added the cost of driving to and from work, I would have netted so little that we chose for me to stay home with the boys.

Many women are in similar circumstances, and IF they are "paired up", they too may be deciding that the trade offs just do not meet the math challenge.

Once kids are in school all day long, there is a lot more flexibility but even that is difficult, because kids do get sick and there are school functions that we all like to be involved in.

Children and outside-the-home work have always been at odds, and until recently most women had choices.



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But unfortunately, my husband beat me to it. When we were in the process of adopting her, we looked at what he was making versus what I was and determined it made sense for me to continue working and for him to stay home with her for a few years, going back to,work when she went to school full time. We hadn't even submitted that adoption paper work when he came home from work one day to announce that he had quit in order to find out if he could handle staying home. That was 13 years ago. He found he could handle it just fine. As for me, whenever I take a day of annual leave or a sick day he is in my face demanding to know why I'm home and shouldn't I be at work. Five years ago I had to declare bankruptcy and lost my house to foreclosure because he refused to go back to work. It's worse now because he was diagnosed with diabetes a few months back and now uses that as a reason he can't work. I have virtually no relationship with my daughter as a result. Like I said, I wish I could stay home with her.