San Francisco, CA — In today’s society, the mother who works outside the home has become an irreproachable icon. But despite fervent attempts to protect the supermom image, a new study about the status of motherhood reveals that children themselves possess a marked ambivalence on the subject of whether one parent ought to stay at home.

Report Card on the New Providers comes from the Whirlpool Foundation, the charitable arm of the home-appliance giant. The study surveyed 2,000 mothers and children about their attitudes, experiences and feelings. Though it tries not to pit working mothers against those who stay at home, underlying value judgments tip the scale toward working mothers.

For example, the study reports that the children of working mothers clean their own rooms more often than others and that their moms are more likely to be involved in their children’s education. In fact, the Whirlpool news release proclaimed the children in their study “[put] an end to the contention that working mothers have a negative impact on American families.” But another question revealed a much greater ambivalence.

The children were asked to anticipate the division of labor in their own adult lives. While 93 percent of teenagers said they expect to work as adults, 50 percent of girls say they would stay at home to raise their children and 60 percent of boys say they would have a wife who stays at home with the children.

Any child listening to the signals from the culture at large would have gotten the message that work is, if not essential, at least a fundamental part of adult life regardless of sex. And yet a large number of teens think having a stay-at-home parent is so important they see it as part of their own future. This is a paradox which clashes with the radical individualism of modern feminism, and it’s one the people behind the study were certainly not interested in highlighting.

There are demographic reasons to make sure working mothers feel good about themselves. The percentage of women with children under the age of 18 who work outside the home jumped from just under forty percent in 1970 to almost 67.7 percent in 1997. Of course, many women work because they need to and do not have the luxury of choosing to stay at home. Still, the poll finds that working outside the home is preferable for many mothers. Though money was a major reason for working outside the home, the majority of women polled would not leave their jobs to care for family responsibilities even if they had enough money to live comfortably.

The point is not that mothers who work outside the home are somehow bad mothers, but that we should be looking a little more closely at the value judgements we make about mothers who stay at home. Perhaps the home-appliance company does not want to be perceived as pushing any June Cleaver archetypes and so they bent over backwards to promote the icon of supermoms.

Nonetheless, the children’s response to their future household arrangements indicates a greater ambivalence about working outside the home than the conventional wisdom allows. Until we begin looking honestly at the cost and benefits of staying at home or working full-time, we do a major disservice to all those mothers who parent full time, despite the daily pressures to do otherwise.

— Katherine Post — Director of the Center forEnterprise and Opportunity