We've ragged this past year on flimsy "research" reports in the New York Times and other places that have attempted to argue there's an epidemic of women leaving the marketplace to have kids. In one egregious case, the Times attempted to argue that there were boatloads of young women whose entire life plan was to get an Ivy League degree, then get married and become career mothers. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se. What's wrong is that such stories often get picked up by conservative pundits, who use them to argue, Backlash-style, that the majority of American women should follow suit. It's an issue that's close to my heart. As the husband of a wonderful woman who stayed home with the kids for five years before restarting her career, I know that moms need the freedom to strike the balance that will make them happy.

As the San Francisco Chronicle points out, most of these stories are based on informal surveys - not the meticulous, long-range research needed to establish an actual trend. The Chronicle points to two high-profile anecdotal stories about new moms fleeing the workplace that turn out not to be bolstered by the statistics.  In one case, a story entitled "The Opt-Out Revolution" in the times was touted by some pundits as proof that  women should skip that expensive "college and career" step and just look to their husband and children for ultimate fulfillment. As the Chronicle observes, however, the story's focus on eight women obscured the fact that most women were balancing career and family just fine, and that the so-called "child penalty" was on the downswing.

Bottom line: It's all about choice - and no one should be using rhetoric to bully moms into limiting those choices.