I'd rather be home parenting

The woman on TV is weeping, with exhaustion and frustration

The woman on TV is weeping, with exhaustion and frustration. An IT manager, she has a three-year-old daughter, an inflexible employer, a partner who earns less than she does and a mortgage on a house they can't sell (this is England). By the time Penny - one of the women featured in a recent BBC Panorama programme - gets home from work, her daughter is exhausted after a long day in the creche and ready for sleep. Does Penny mind that she's hardly seen her daughter all day? Yes, she says, her voice breaking.

Back in Dublin, youth and community worker Fran McVeigh says she has had a smile on her face from ear to ear since she stopped work a year ago to mind her two children, aged two and seven, full-time. And it's not because she was unhappy in her job: "It was the job I'd always wanted, as a senior youth worker with the City of Dublin Youth Services Board." Fran (41) was managing a youth programme and had the opportunity "to put into practice what I had always talked about".

Her employers were flexible, supportive and caring - "I could bring my baby to meetings and breastfeed." But when the wonderful neighbour who had minded her eldest child for five years decided to take work outside the home herself, it was a turning point for Fran and her partner, who also worked full-time.

After looking at various childminding options, including creches, "I just thought, this is not worth the anxiety. In my work, I enjoy children and young people - why not stay home and enjoy my own?"

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She realised "if I could give up this job, the one I'd always wanted, then it was the right thing to do".

A couple of months ago (before that Budget debate blew up), Education & Living looked at the issues facing the growing number of women working full-time in the home who are deciding whether or not to take up jobs in a workerhungry economy. The flipside of that is the dilemma of women working outside the home wondering could they, should they, stop paid work to stay home full-time.

The Panorama programme, Back to the Kitchen Sink, illustrated vividly the problems ambitious working women can get themselves into: Cathy, a marketing executive with a major London publishing house, described getting home from work at 8 and 9 p.m. to a frazzled partner and a resentful five-year-old who would complain "I hate you Mummy", to cap a stressful working day. The couple, who'd waited until their late 30s to have a child while they concentrated on building up their careers, had appeared just a year before in a glossy magazine showing how modern couples can have it all. By the end of the programme, Cathy was quitting her job to go freelance, because she couldn't play the corporate game any more and have any semblance of family life.

She and the Panorama team blamed problems faced by people like her on inflexible, unsympathetic employers. But though most parents would agree that more flexibility is needed, it's not quite as simple as that, as Fran McVeigh's experience shows.

Women genuinely do face a dilemma when it comes to reconciling demands of work and children. You could hear the distress in Cathy's voice as she described how hard it was to give up a job she had worked so long and hard to get. No doubt she'd been fooled by glossy magazines like the one she appeared in herself into thinking that balancing work and children and home life wasn't really all that difficult. And, like many of us, she really wanted both her job and some kind of life with her child.

It can be managed, of course - most mothers working outside the home aren't suffering stress this extreme. Yet a generation of smart, ambitious thirtysomethings are beginning to wonder if they want to go on "managing" - if, after all, their jobs and careers are really so important. Patricia Lee, programme manager of NOW (New Opportunities for Women), an EU-funded initiative, says that she hears more and more women in their mid to late 30s saying: "I have to work because of my mortgage." According to Lee, "they're locked in a cycle where the choice is not there - and it's not just women with children who feel this. You get to a point where you don't know if you want to struggle up the ladder; you're stuck in traffic, in an office all day, stressed - and you realise `this is not fulfilling me'."

This is almost certainly the point to sit down with your partner and decide if you can change your lives. If you're a single parent, or your partner is out of work, choice may truly be a luxury you can't afford. But at least while the economy keeps booming, a decision to stop working isn't the either/or proposition it used to be.

It's worth seeing just how far you can push your employer - if you're lucky, you may work in an industry where they need workers so badly they'll meet your demands for flexibility. (Unfortunately, a downturn in the economy may leave you vulnerable, since employers may take away that flexibility as quickly as they now give it. Equally unfortunately, employers are slow to provide the one concession that would be of most use to parents - term-time working only.)

Just as times are good for older women returning to work, the time has never been better for women (or men) quitting full-time jobs to find part-time or short-term contract work.

This may just make your decision financially possible, once you balance loss of income against childcare expenses and the like. (And despite the hysteria over McCreevy's Budget, it seems unlikely that anyone would base a decision to work/not work on the changes in the tax system, since in practice, no one will actually have less money than previously.)

Fran McVeigh finds she is being offered more pieces of work than she can handle, and will only take on jobs that fit in with minding her children. She has no regrets whatsoever about the decision she and her partner took for one of them to stay home full-time: financially "there were certainly reductions", she says, but they were lucky that their mortgage, acquired some years back, was manageable on one income.

And there have been immediate benefits, for her and her children: "I'm more relaxed. I thought I'd get cut off from the adult world, but it's not so. I go for walks all the time, I can stop and talk to people, I'm involved in a school committee, do some voluntary work as well as my freelance work."

Despite working in a very flexible environment before that, she found "with two people working, it was all rush - getting home, getting the tea, no rest, no luxury time. We did have a good quality of life as a family, but now I have a great quality of life too. Before that, it was just exhausting."

It probably is true that no one can have it all: stopping and starting your career will generally hamper your chances of promotion, "Visibility, being available to work all hours, is generally an important part of staying on the promotion ladder," Patricia Lee says. (There are heartening exceptions: Supreme Court Judge Catherine McGuinness started her law career around the age of 40.)

It's a cliche, but nonetheless true: the parenthood years pass pretty quickly. Parents who find combining work and childcare a struggle have to ask themselves: will we turn around in 10 or 20 years and wonder "was it worth it?"