Around the world, more and more women are working outside the home. In the United States, over 70 percent of women with children under 18 have another job besides that of mother an... Around the world, more and more women are working outside the home. In the United States, over 70 percent of women with children under 18 have another job besides that of mother and homemaker. Most are employed in traditional fields for females, such as clerical, sales, education, and service. However, a growing number choose a career that necessitates spending many hours away from home. These women are engineers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and scientists, and a few have begun to occupy executive positions in business, government, and banking, breaking through the so-called glass ceiling. Monetary factors influence women to work. Some are employed full-time, some part-time, and some seek creative solutions such as flextime work schedules and job-sharing. Many are single mothers raising children by themselves. But in most cases, one income in the household is simply not enough, so both parents must work to support the family. A backward glance from this side of the new millennium reveals that the role of married women in the U.S. has changed radically since the 1950s and 1960s, when it was taken for granted that they would stay home and raise children. This is still the image so often portrayed in American movies and advertising. In fact, the traditional combination of the husband as exclusive breadwinner and the wife as a stay-at-home mom caring for one or two children today accounts for only 7 percent of the population in the United States. Who, then, is taking care of the children? When extended families - children, parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles - lived in the same town and sometimes in the same house, a relative of the working parents took care of the children. But beginning with the Industrial Revolution, people moved away from farms and small towns to find better job opportunities in larger cities. Now, most often, the family is just the immediate family - mother, father, and children. Or, it could be a single-parent family, with either the mother or the father living with the children. Another variation is the blended family, the result of a marriage between a previously married man and woman who combine the children from their former marriages into a new family. So who watches the children while the parents work? Answers to this question are varied: 1. Some parents put children in day-care facilities. 2. Some parents put children in informal day-care centers in private homes. 3. Companies and hospitals are realizing that providing day care at the workplace makes for happier and more productive employees. 4. Individuals or couples that are wealthy enough have a nanny, a woman who comes to care for the children in their own home. Many of these child-care workers are from other countries, e.g., England, Jamaica, Poland, or the Philippines. A trend that has emerged recently is the sharing of child-care responsibilities between husband and wife. Young couples will try to arrange their work schedules so that they work opposite hours or shifts in order that one parent is always home with the children. Since child-care is expensive, this saves money for the young couple trying to establish themselves and provide a secure environment for the family. Husband and wife may also share household chores. Some fathers are just as capable as mothers at cooking dinner, changing and bathing the baby, and doing the laundry. In some cases, the woman's salary is adequate for family expenses, and the father becomes the 'house husband'. These cases are still fairly rare. One positive trend, however, is that fathers seem to be spending more time with their children. In a recent survey, 41% of the children sampled said they spend equal time with their mothers and fathers. 'This is one of our most significant cultural changes,' says Dr. Leon Hoffman, who co-directs the Parent Child Center at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In practice for 30 years, Hoffman has found a 'very dramatic difference in the involvement of the father - in everything from care taking to general decision making around kids' lives'. Read more