Childcare inevitably plays a huge role in women's decisions about working after they have children. How could it not? You have a baby and when you go back to work you want to make sure that child is being taken care of as well as it would if you were at home. But has our society placed too high of a standard on women's responsibility of taking are of children? Joan Williams in her book Unbending Gender talks about commodification anxiety as a guilt women feel about women leaving their children in a childcare center as it is viewed in a economical market perspective. People don't want to feel like they are paying someone to take care of their child in the same way they would pay for any other consumer item, which makes mothers in particular feel guilty about leaving their children in daycare while they're at work.
How much does this anxiety really exist? Although childcare necessarily remains an important aspect of the work/stay-at-home decision, are women actually keeping themselves out of the workforce in response to this dilemma? If so, is it the childcare system we need to reform or the way we view our standards of maternal caregiving? I think it's a little bit of both, but am not sure how mothers view the matter.
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Yes, as I wrote in my comment to your first blog post, I do think mothers struggle with this guilt. And I think you're right, that what needs to change is both how our culture views the standards of maternal caregiving (the impossible "ideal" needs to be addressed) and also the childcare system (e.g. away from depersonalized centers towards more personalized care).
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