I must say I am amazed at some of the remarks posted here! It seems a witch hunt against SAHM and unless your are in paid work you are lazy.
How dim can you be!!! Yes, in my job I managed large teams and no, not everybody pulls their weight. A lot top managers will tell you that the most challenging staff are women with young children. You never know if they turn up (child may be ill and they are unlikely to have somebody arranged to come in and look after their sick child). They as a result cannot be relied on to meet their deadlines, so you always have to have a back up plan to shift their work to another team member at short notice. I know that this is a generalisation and there may be exceptions (yes, exceptions, in the majority of cases this is how it is). There is no doubt that women with young children take more time off or 'work more often from home' or call in sick themselves, because their child is ill.
Furthermore, I have noticed as a parent helper at school what a problem can be caused to the school with both parents working: a kid is ill, vomitting its guts out, possibly fever and it takes the parents three (!!!) hours before they arrange for the kid to be collected (yes, I was called in by the school to sit and console this child, because its family was nowhere to be seen, you should be dammed grateful that there are people like me who take care of YOUR kid when it is in such a state). Then there are all the parents running late in the afternoon and arriving up to 30 minutes after lessons have finished resulting in the teacher being stuck with their kids.
I don't say that working and having a child cannot work, you may be able to make it work by muddling through, but it is not an ideal solution and I have not the slightest doubt that the children suffer as a result. Look at all the other threads with mothers not coping, feeling stressed, shouting at their children, not being ablt to get things properly organised in the morning, well, doesn't come as a surprise to me. It is not for nothing that our mothers used to stay home and look after children and the home. Nowadays we want to have it all, we are terribly materialistic, obsesses with money, obsessed with ourselves. Maybe children don't fit well with this attitude? Children don't ask to be born, we put them in this world, so to try to be less selfish and actually properly look after them would be a good start I would think.
You may have high opinions about yourselves, but you won't fool me - the fact that you go to an office has nothing to do with whether you work hard or not ...