"OK, books away, it's dinner time," Barrie Silberberg told her two children as they settled down at the table in Silberberg's California town house.
Annsley Rubino, 8, read a few more lines, then put her "1001 Cool Jokes" book down on the chair beside her.

Silberberg placed a steaming dish of garlic curry chicken in the middle of the table next to a cluster of artichokes. She then sat, placed a napkin on her lap and asked her son about his school day.
"We watched 'Finding Nemo' in fourth period," answered Noah Rubino, 11.
"There's a Nancy Drew movie coming out!" volunteered Annsley, munching on an artichoke leaf.
Moments like these are the reason Silberberg insists on being a stay-at-home mom, although it's difficult for a divorced mom.

"It was so vitally important, I was willing to do anything legal to make it work," Silberberg, 46, said. "I am so against day care. Parents need to be raising their children, not a bunch of strangers."
Other moms, such as Linda Baker, 48, believe day care gets a bad rap. Baker and her husband chose to put their three daughters in day care from age 2 until kindergarten so that both parents could work. Baker is vice president of a medical management company. Their oldest daughter is now 17 and her twin sisters are 13.

"We outgrew the house, and to get into something larger meant we would both have to work," Baker said. "The other piece is I like to work. I enjoy having my brain challenged."
That question, to day care or not to day care -- often called the "Mommy Wars" -- continues on the home front.

Whenever it settles into an uneasy truce, more studies and statistics emerge to fan the flames. A study by the National Institutes of Health released in March suggests kids put in day care early in their lives may have more behavior problems later in school.

In April, author Leslie Bennetts' book, "The Feminine Mistake," hit the shelves, pregnant with evidence suggesting that mothers who stay at home are putting both themselves and their children at financial risk.
"Marriage is an economic partnership, but women assume almost all of the economic risk," Bennetts wrote. "If they get divorced 20 years later, the man walks out the door with the family's major asset, which is his career."
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, a number that remained steady in 2006. That compares with 1.2 million stay-at-home moms more than a decade ago.

The number of working mothers in America rose for 22 straight years, hitting an all-time high in 1998 with 59 percent of American mothers with infants (under age 1) choosing careers outside the home. That number dropped to 55 percent in 2004, marking the first decline in working mothers with infants since the Census Bureau began recording the information in 1976.
"If a growing proportion of American women is opting out of the labor force, increasing numbers of American women apparently believe that depending on a husband for support remains a viable long-term way of life," Bennetts wrote in her book. "Given the economic, social and actuarial realities of 21st century America, this alone is a stunning fact, albeit one whose significance is almost universally ignored."

Bennetts said she doesn't want to tell moms what to do, she simply wants them to make choices armed with knowledge of the realities of the 21st century, such as widowhood, longer life spans, disappearing pensions, a shaky job market and changing divorce laws.
"Women were making this choice on whether to drop out of the labor force and stay home based on grossly inadequate information and grossly misleading information," said Bennetts, who is a 57-year-old working mother of two who has been married more than 20 years.
Many stay-at-home moms entered angry reviews of the book on Web sites such as Amazon.com.

"She comes off as elitist, condescending, insulting, and ignorant of stay-at-home women in general," was an example of one angry review.
An NIH study led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill psychology professor Margaret Burchinal showed that children who had been in day care before kindergarten were more likely to have behavior problems by the time they reached the sixth grade.
Working mom Baker said she has nothing but respect for stay-at-home moms but believes she is a better mom when she is keeping her mind vital by working. And her daughters seem to be fine, she said.