Teens getting pregnant: bad. Teens having babies: good. If this makes no sense to you, wake up and smell the Enfamil. It's 2008! The hot movie is Juno, a funnyquirkybittersweet indie about a pregnant high school hipster who gives her baby up for adoption. The hot celebrity is Jamie Lynn Spears, 16-year-old sister of Britney and star of Nickelodeon's Zoey 101, who's pregnant and having the baby because she wants to "do what's right." The teen birthrate, after falling for fourteen years, is up 3 percent, a phenomenon perhaps not unrelated to the fact that abstinence-only sex ed, although demonstrably ineffective at preventing sexual activity and linked to higher rates of unprotected sex, is the only sex ed taught in 35 percent of our schools. (Although maybe teens are having babies for the same reasons grown women are--the birthrate for adults is up, too.) 

On September 20, 2005, The New York Times published an article that reported many of the highly educated women of Yale just wanted to be housewives. This trend was touted as an example of the "opt out revolution" first floated in the '90s: women who rejected the life of a modern career women and chose instead a return to the traditional life of a wife and mother. Supposedly, the women of the country's elite universities were not making it to the top because they "chose not to."

Was it possible that the new millennium generation of women college students would decide to walk away from the doors their professors, mothers, aunts and older sisters had opened? If the article's findings were true, the results were chilling to those of us who had battled our way into the workforce.

Over the past several months, we surveyed women from the Wellesley College classes of 2007, 2008 and 2009 to find out their expectations for work and family.

Having watched older generations struggle to be perfect, opt out or put off starting a family, these young women are at the forefront of a changing definition of womanhood in American society. They believe that employment will be part of their life's fabric; motherhood will not prompt them to choose between family or work. They want family and work.

If the typical stay-at-home mother in the United States were paid for her work as a housekeeper, cook and psychologist among other roles, she would earn $138,095 a year, according to research released on Wednesday.

This reflected a 3 percent raise from last year's $134,121, according to Salary.com Inc, Waltham, Massachusetts-based compensation experts.

The 10 jobs listed as comprising a mother's work were housekeeper, cook, day care center teacher, laundry machine operator, van driver, facilities manager, janitor, computer operator, chief executive officer and psychologist, it said.

The typical mother puts in a 92-hour work week, it said, working 40 hours at base pay and 52 hours overtime.

A mother who holds full-time job outside the home would earn an additional $85,939 for the work she does at home, Salary.com.

Last year she would have earned $85,876 for her at-home work, it said.

Salary.com compiled the online responses of 26,000 stay-at-home mothers and 14,000 mothers who also work outside the home.

I choose not to take a position with either side. Personally, I am not yet at a stage where I need to make that choice. Also, I truly believe that each woman makes the choice for herself based on the situation that she is in, and how best she can handle it, at that point in time.

However, I do believe, that women (and men), by positioning the debate as between SAHMs Vs Working Moms, are doing a huge disservice to themselves. Each individual's choice is important to herself and her family, but if we are to examine the phenomenon as a whole, we need to take a step back. We need to step back at the larger picture and understand the whole background of where these choices spring from, what enables these choices and whether all choices are truly choices.

To do this, we need to look at a couple of things. Lets first look at work itself. How do we define work? If we define work as a service that is provided by someone, in return for a measurable compensation, that leaves out all work at home which may be compensated by love, security, internal satisfaction -- but is not measurable as compensation. On the other hand, if we define work as any service that is productive, i.e. "it occupies the person's time", it is too vague and includes leisure activities as well. Perhaps then it could be defined as any activity that occupies your time, but is useful to one other person at least. Looked at this way, home making becomes a service like any other, since cooking, cleaning, child-care and education, care for the elderly, paying bills are all services that offer great value to other people.