Ask Me to Work When My Kids Are Grown

The era in which mothers cheerfully left their kids and trooped off to full-time jobs is looking more and more like an aberration. Plenty are still trooping, of course, but the “cheerfully” part is often missing. A survey by Redbook adds to the growing evidence that stay-at-home motherhood is reasserting its old primacy as the ideal for women with young kids.

Let’s start with the most telling numbers in the poll: 35 percent of mothers who work full-time said they envy stay-at-home mothers, while 15 percent of the latter said they envy working mothers.