I don't have kids yet, but when and if that will happen I'll try to make sure that the mother of my kids won't ruin her career and her sense of self-worth by becoming a stay-at-home-mother. That's how I grew up, with both my parents having full-time jobs, if it was good enough for me as a kid seeing my parents happy and all I hope it will be good enough for my children.

I think characterizing mothers (or perhaps all parents?) who choose to work rather than stay home to care for children (and taking the consequential career hit) as "Keeping up with the Joneses" is a pretty blinkered view of human motivations, quite reductive, and frankly insulting.

It's often a choice for parents to both work. But many parents choose to stay in the workforce because they derive meaning from work and a career, not so that they can enjoy entertainment, restaurants, single-use items, and excessive travel. In fact, some parents are forced to leave the workforce because childcare can cost more than their after-tax income (think an infant and two kids in daycare / with a nanny).

As a kid, my mom was a working mother -- a terribly unpopular choice in rural Michigan where we lived. My mom drove 30 minutes away from home to get me to a suitable child-care provider. She didn't pick the place because it was close to work -- she was a traveling sales-person -- she picked it because it was the closest available (located at a church because commercial daycare was non-existent where we lived). When I started looking for a partner in life, one of my "absolutes" was to find a woman who would be OK with one of us staying home with our children (I was and still would be perfectly fine with being a stay-at-home Dad). As a result, my ex-wife stayed home with the children (and my current wife does the same).

The tables have turned in my adult-hood. It's unusual to have a parent stay home. The job is as hard as it was when I was a kid (if not harder due to social pressures that make women feel badly for not pursuing careers). As a society (in the US anyway), we're setup for both parents to work full time. When my wife and I chose not to enroll our children in pre-school most of our friends thought we were out of our minds and holding our children back. As parents we felt it was unnecessary to hire a professional educator for teaching our children the ABCs/123s and were surprised at the reaction we received even from families who didn't have two working parents. As a child, preschool was purely the domain of families of working parents and enrollment was considered an unnecessary expense when mom or dad was available.

Personally, I don't have strong feelings about stay-at-home vs. work full-time parents. I knew I didn't enjoy my experience as a kid but I knew that a lot of that was due to jealousy since nearly all of my friends had moms that stayed home. Our kids are school-age, now, but we're still a single-parent earning family by choice. Having children is a lot of work and I personally don't think we could handle raising them the way we desire if we both had priorities outside of the home. Don't read that as me saying that it cannot be done -- I'm sure it can, as my parents remind me "you turned out just fine"[1] -- I just don't know that I could do it.

[1] People get very touchy about parenting choices. When I told my family that we had no intention -- from the beginning -- to have both of us working, they assumed that we were calling them bad parents for choosing differently. I know the situation my family was in when I was young. They had little choice but to both work in order to keep the lights on. And I'm not the least bit upset with how I was raised, but the added time we get to enjoy our children and the reduced stress that I experience knowing that our home life is taken care of while I'm working is worth the loss of income, especially since we live in a place where we can comfortably get by on my salary.

If you look at the numbers, around 1/3 of families have one stay at home parent.

If you just look at families with kids too young to stay at home by themselves after school, it’s even higher.

The number of stay at home parents of both genders has been growing since the late 90s.

Well if both parents are fairly career driven, it's pretty hard to stay at home for 6+ years until full day school starts, and that is only for 1 kid.. could be 8/9 years with 2 kids close in age. Since it's usually the woman, she is basically giving up any solid career having that kind of work gap.

And you say 'work at home' but you can't have a fulltime working at home job with very young kids. You could manage it to some degree at age 4/5+ but before then you would hardly have any time to actually focus on a job at home.

I like my kid significantly more now that I see him evenings and weekends.

And if there isn’t you can’t work from an office anyway.

The current world abuses schools as whole day care institutions so that both parents can be exploited and worked to the ground, and when parents and children are home they are so tired they lack the energy to do anything meaningful besides eating some kind of processed food, play a round of video games, and go to bed.

In an ideal world, a full working week with a living wage would have 20 hours so that both parents can work four hours a day and then enjoy life with their children in the afternoon.

I have to disagree with this one. My wife has been a domestic engineer almost since we were married. I wouldn't do her job (actually, I would if she died and I had to).

She does everything around the house. She makes all of the baby food, cooks all of the breakfasts, lunches and dinners and educates our children who -- at their young age -- have three settings: histeric laughter/screaming and yelling.

She doesn't have to commute, but in order to keep the children sleeping through the night, she has a more rigid schedule than I do.

When the kids are older, I'm sure it gets easier, but it's no picnic when you have two under age three.

Women leaving the workplace to raise kids should be seen as a victory, not a "problem" that needs to be fixed. It's definitely not easy though and all of this media broadcast negativity surrounding being a parent instead of having a career can't make it any easier.

That finances thing is a pain... same situation here :-)