The entry of women into the workplace in ever-increasing numbers is usually hailed as a great progressive victory. And indeed, the lowering of the barriers that prevent women from choosing to work is a very good thing.
But the fact that there has been no corresponding move of men towards spending more time childrearing has ended up placing huge pressures on families. And as Neil Gilbert blogs at the Institute for Family Studies [1], many women are responding by choosing to stay at home. 
Analyzing government data, the Pew Research Center has discovered a reversal of a thirty-year trend in the labor force participation of mothers. After continuously declining for more than three decades, between 1999 and 2012 the proportion of all mothers (married and single) who are staying at home increased significantly from 23 to 29 percent. If this rate of change continued, by 2032 the proportion of mothers staying at home would be almost as high as it was in 1970.
Gilbert isn’t saying that this trend will necessarily continue – merely that women’s priorities have changed. He outlines some of the reasons for this, including that many women prefer to follow a “sequential” model of childrearing, with more time devoted to childrearing and paid work respectively at different stages of life.
As US Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren illustrated in her book The Two-Income Trap, the price of housing in particular means that families are often forced into a situation where both parents have to work. But even on a financial level, having both parents work full-time can often be of limited benefit.
There’s a lot of evidence [2] which suggests that in the aggregate, women are more likely to want to work fewer hours and spend more time with their children [3] when compared to men.
I don’t see anything wrong with this preference – in fact it seems to me to be eminently sensible. But I’m not at all bothered about how an individual family decides to split the work. I was raised by a stay-at-home Dad, and myself vastly prefer the idea of working part-time in order to spend more time with my eventual family, circumstances allowing.
What matters is that the two-earner model is not an ideal one for all, or even most, families. As Gilbert writes:
Material considerations aside, there is the social fact that it’s exceedingly difficult to harmonize work and family life when both parents work full-time. Here ‘harmony’ is a euphemism for just surviving the pandemonium of a daily schedule that has parents up at sunrise feeding, washing, and dressing their children before sprinting out the door to the day care center; then, after a full day’s work, dashing back in rush hour to pick the kids up by 5:30 and hurrying home to make dinner in order to feed, undress, bathe the kids, and put them to bed by 7:30. In such households, much of parents’ little free time is devoted to shopping for food, buying kids clothes, cleaning, laundry, doctor visits, haircuts, and coping with pink eye, strep throat, and monthly ear infections.
Some dual-earner families manage all this better than others. It helps to have actively involved grandparents in the vicinity and a joint income well into the six figures. But those families will always be a small minority. As the next generation of young parents awake to the reality of the work it takes to nurture their young, we may yet see the dawn of a new era of family life, in which an increasing number of parents opt for the sequential model of work and care.
In line with this approach, as an alternative to subsidized public daycare services in support of two-earner families, a number of European countries have introduced an allowance to parents who provide in-home care for their preschool children. These policies balance some of the financial incentives for pursuing the concurrent and sequential models of work and care.
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