Women in Utah fit right in with a growing national trend: staying home to care for children instead of working outside the home.
Last year there were nearly 10.6 million children whose mothers stayed at home, up 13 percent in less than a decade, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey of 50,000 homes across the nation.
Experts credit the increase to the economic boom of the late 1990s, the cultural influence of America's growing Hispanic population and the entry into parenthood of a generation of latchkey kids.
Of the 41.8 million kids younger than 15 who lived with two parents last year, about a fourth of them — 10.4 million — had mothers who stayed home, according to census estimates based on a March 2002 survey.
In 1994, about 9.4 million children lived in that situation, or about 23 percent of the total, a bureau analyst said.
Regaling in baby's first smile, first tooth, first words, first steps is as much the reason stay-at-home moms in Utah give as the high cost and lack of day care in this state.
"I just didn't want her to be in day care all day; it didn't seem fair," said Rebecca Oyer, the 33-year-old Salt Lake City mother of 2 1/2-year-old Zola. "I just wanted to have a solid foundation for the rest of her life, and supposedly having a mom at home will do that. We're suffering for it financially living on my husband's income," said Oyer, from Sandy. "But I didn't think having her in day care all day was fair. And day care is expensive. It's cheaper to stay home."
Lindsay Bishop, mother of 14-month-old Alexandra, agreed.
"I just don't want somebody else to raise my child, teaching her things I don't want her to learn when society's morals are constantly changing," said Bishop, a 23-year-old on-call LDS Hospital nurse.
Full-time stay-at-home dads took care of 189,000 children in 2002, up 18 percent from 1994.
Another trend pollsters are tracking is women who are the primary wage earner in the family, with men making less or becoming stay-at-home dads. According to the most recent Census Bureau figures, nearly 3 percent of women in married households were reported to be the primary wage earners in families with children under 18 years of age.
And according to research and a cover story by Newsweek last month, 54 percent of Americans reported knowing a couple where the woman is clearly the major wage earner and the man's career is secondary. While the number of families is small, the magazine reports that "many economists think it's growing."
Pam Perlich, a senior research economist at the University of Utah Bureau of Economic and Business Research, said such a trend likely also exists in Utah. She suspects the reasons are fallout from the national recession and the end of the state's restructuring boom.
"The labor market has become more complicated than in the past. There is a wide distribution of experiences out there for men and for women," she said. "With layoffs that have occurred, it is very possible that the woman is working and the husband isn't.
"Heavy construction, in addition to manufacturing and high-tech, traditional male professions, is done. We finished with I-15, the Olympic venues are done, the church Conference Center is done. And those all were nonresidential projects, and they're gone, and heavy construction is a male-dominated profession."
Additionally, with unemployment low in the late 1990s, many companies offered more work-from-home options or extended leave as enticements to retain qualified female workers, said Joanne Brundage, executive director of Mothers & More, an organization for mothers who have adjusted their careers to raise children.
But Brundage said the recent failing economy may have forced more women back into the work force, either because their husbands have been laid off or companies have cut back on benefits.
A decision for a mother to quit work has its economic impact.
About 16 percent of kids with stay-at-home moms lived in poverty, four times the rate of those with working moms, according to an analysis by the children's advocacy group, the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The group also found 14 percent of kids with married stay-at-home mothers lacked health insurance, compared with 8 percent of those with working moms.
The growth in the number of Hispanics may also have influenced the trend, as some Latino cultures place more emphasis on women staying home to raise children, said William O'Hare, a researcher at the foundation.
Many younger women who now have children grew up in day care or as "latchkey kids" with no one at home after school, says Susan De Rittis, spokeswoman for the Family and Home Network, based in Fairfax, Va. FHN represents stay-at-home parents.
"Those children that were in day care growing up are now becoming mothers themselves, and now they don't want their kids to become day-care children," she said. "Their mom may not have been home when they got home from school, so perhaps they want something different for their family."
Then again, sometimes circumstances leave no choice. Take Sandy Brewer, 37, of Salt Lake City. She's the mother of 12 children and a former meat-wrapper for a grocery store. Working outside the home is simply not an option.
"Where would I find the time?" she asked.
Contributing: The Associated Press.
E-mail: nwagner@desnews.com