64% of stay-at-home mothers say that not working is not their ideal situation, per Pew Research — only 36% called it ideal. Among all mothers with children under 18, 50% say they would prefer to stay home, according to Gallup. The 14-percentage-point gap puts this in action-dominates territory under Gilovich’s framework, though the underlying pattern is less about action vs inaction than about a forced binary vs a preferred middle.
The counterintuitive finding is the self-assessment gap. Stay-at-home mothers rate themselves lower as parents than working mothers do — 66% versus 78% calling themselves “excellent” or “very good” in Pew’s 2014 survey. One interpretation is that full-time proximity to children exposes every parenting failure in high definition, while working parents compare themselves against a lower baseline of available hours. Another is that the identity cost of leaving the workforce erodes confidence in ways that spill into parenting self-evaluation. Either way, the data undermines the assumption that staying home is the self-evidently superior parenting move.
The strongest signal in the research is that neither full-time work nor full-time homemaking is what most mothers actually want. A 47% plurality of adults told Pew that part-time work is the ideal arrangement for mothers of young children; only 12% said full-time work, and 33% said no work at all. Both rates here are preference proxies, not retrospective regret measures — no large-scale study has directly asked mothers on both sides whether they regret their employment decision. The dissatisfaction on both sides may say less about which choice is wrong than about a labor market that mostly offers all-or-nothing.