Census offers snapshot of stay-at-home moms

Posted 14m ago
By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY

Nearly one-quarter of all married-couple families in the USA had a stay-at-home mom in 2007, according to a U.S. Census report released today.

This analysis, the first by the Census to offer characteristics of stay-at-home mothers, finds that the 5.6 million women who said they stayed home to care for children and family while their husband worked full time were younger and more likely to be Hispanic and foreign-born than other mothers in 2007.

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The Census defines "stay-at-home mother" as one with a child under 15 who stays home to care for children while her spouse was in the labor force all 52 weeks the previous year. The Census offered the following reasons for staying home: ill or disabled; retired; taking care of home and family; going to school; couldn't find work; other.

Any married mother who either worked part time, full time or at least some weeks in the previous year or whose reason for staying home was other than caring for a child or whose husband didn't work the full year is included in the "other mother" category, says Rose Kreider, a Census family demographer.

Among other findings:

•More stay-at-home mothers had an infant: 28%, compared with 21% of other mothers; 57% of stay-at-home mothers had a child under 5, compared with 43% of other mothers.

•Stay-at-home mothers had less education: 19% had less than a high school degree, vs. 8% of other mothers; 32% of stay-at-home moms had at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 38% of the others.

Because the data were collected during spring 2007, Kreider and others say the recession could alter the picture.

"I'll bet a significant number of those in 2007 are no longer in that category," says Joanne Brundage of Elmhurst, Ill., who in 1987 founded the group now called Mothers & More. "Today's at-home woman is tomorrow's working mom and vice versa."

Demographer Kathryn Yount, an associate professor of sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, says that has been the case with struggling economies around the world.

"Women are forced to go into the labor force and become the primary breadwinner," she says. "It may lead to temporary shifts in norms about family roles, and it may lead to permanent shifts as well."

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