Is this the end of the stay-at-home mother?

Forty years ago, mums who raised the family instead of going out to work were the norm. Today, they are the exception. Viv Groskop talks to mothers who still choose to stay at home, others who are glad that they did - and those who regret having done so

Tina Downham, a former headhunter, has been a full-time mum to Holli, 10, and Daisy, four, for the past six years. And she loves it. "To be in a situation where you can enjoy your children and not pay somebody else to look after them is great," she says. "Looking after children is the biggest job you will ever have. If you put them in nursery you get the worst of them - at the beginning and the end of the day. How do you ever do any bonding?"

But Downham, 37, has seen things from both sides. In her old company she managed a team of 10 people, working full-time while Holli was in nursery as a toddler. She was so stressed and harried that she remembers trailing an ambulance through rush hour traffic to get to work on time. One day she picked her daughter up from nursery at the 6.30pm cut-off time and Holli, then three, said, "Mummy, do I have to be the last one here?" She realised it was time to quit. "It makes me feel sick when I think about what I had to juggle."

She and husband Clive, a power tools executive, downsized to one salary and moved from Buckinghamshire to Taunton. She blames materialism for the fact that few women want to do what she has done. "I don't know why there aren't a few more mums going without a few things - because what you get back is so much more."

But Downham's views are increasingly rare - and she is one of a dying breed. Around seven out of eight mothers now work. According to a report published last week by YouGov, the number of stay-at-home mothers has dropped by a quarter in the past 15 years. In 1993 there were 2.7 million full-time mothers in the UK: the new research estimates that the0 figure will fall below 2 million by 2010. The survey concluded that most parents cannot afford for one of them not to work: couples think they need an income of £31,731 before they can afford for the mother to stay at home and the average male income in the UK is £28,464. This is proof that a stay-at-home parent is a logistical impossibility for most households.

These conclusions are fascinating - if slightly questionable. As anyone who lives in an affluent middle-class suburb of London will tell you, in some areas there is no shortage of full-time mothers - if anything, their numbers appear to have increased in recent years. Part of the YouGov research is based on a survey of only 4,000 people and almost all of it is heavily weighted. (How do you define "stay-at-home mother"? What if you're on maternity leave or a short-term career break?) The overall picture nationwide, however, is undeniable: there are now fewer stay-at-home mothers than ever. And the credit crunch is only likely to send more mothers back to work. Interest-only mortgages and fixed-term rates coming to an end are a powerful motivation to return. I know of several full-time mothers who have started job searches in recent weeks.

This is what is sad for the current generation of mothers, says Mary Aston, 57, who left her job in a bank in 1977 to be a full-time mother to to William, now 31, Libby, 30, and Kathy, 26, in Bruton, Somerset. Her husband Mark is a crops specialist. She did not work again for 10 years. "I feel very sorry for parents nowadays who both feel they have to go out to work," she says. "Mothers miss out on a lot if they're not with their children between nought and five.

I was lucky that I didn't have to work. We didn't have any money - I remember having £10 a week for everything. But we didn't mind. I felt bringing up the children was the best roleI could have. Nowadays, parents feel guilty about not going to work. In those days, I would have felt guilty if I did go to work."

Until as recently as the 1970s it was assumed that to be anything other than a full-time mother was damaging to children - but the non-working mother is a purely 20th-century construct. Women have always worked (whether they were paid for it or not). In what my four-year-old son calls "the olden days", children were brought up not by one woman but by an extended family. It is only in recent history that we have started to worry about things such as whether your parents mess you up by working or not working.

The stay-at-home mother was born in the 1920s and 1930s as domestic service died, says Professor Pat Thane of the Institute of Historical Research. "By the end of the second world war, mothers had to look after their own children because they couldn't find other women to do it," she says. "This coincided with the growth of a middle class who could afford for a woman to stay at home." Crucially, at the same time, news of an exciting new science - psychology - was reaching a mass audience. "Lots of women listened to childcare experts influenced by modern psychology, whose work was available in cheap paperbacks in the 1950s." This new thinking, most of it under the banner of "attachment theory", put a new onus on the mother - and the mother alone - to form an exclusive bond with her child.

Women in this postwar period already suffered from exactly the same double bind that mothers have today. In the 1940s, many women of child-bearing age found themselves well-educated and newly equipped with work skills. But they were also living in a culture where it was considered best to stay at home with your children. Surely it had to be if psychological experts said so? This view has persisted to this day. Many mothers cite financial necessity as the reason they work, implying that if they did not need the money, they would do the "right thing" and stay at home.

At least, though, we now have the choice. In the first wave of feminism many women began to question their roles as wives and mothers, some virtually walking out on their families (the daughter of the feminist author Alice Walker has recently spoken of her mother officially "resigning" from her maternal role). In provincial Britain, however, this radicalism passed a lot of women by.

In the early 70s, Joy Gower, 57, from Norwich, gave up the job she loved, as manager of a hair salon, to stay at home for 10 years with her sons, Gareth and Lee, now 36 and 34 respectively. "My husband did not approve of his wife going out to work. He thought that if you had children, it was your duty to stay at home. I did enjoy bringing my sons up, but I also wanted to be me. I was glad that I could be there for all the sports days, but I do look back now and see that I was oppressed. There is some sadness and regret. I was capable of a lot more."

Despite feminism, she says, it was everyone's expectation in the 70s that a woman should stay at home: "I didn't know any women who were working at that time, unless they were childminding or starting up a nursery. I did as many things as I possibly could to keep my mind occupied, including an Open University course, but a lot of us had husbands who would say, 'Well, if you are going to work, you still have to do all the housework anyway.'" It was easier, she says, to take the housekeeping money and keep quiet. Eventually, she trained as a manager for Avon and later as a hypnotherapist once her boys grew up. (She divorced and later remarried.)

Choice, though, has brought a pressure to bear on today's stay-at-home mothers: they are made to feel they should justify their existence. As Erika Sales, 43, full-time mother to Oscar, two, and Francis, four, in Twickenham, south-west London explains: "You do get this feeling sometimes that you're not good enough any more - in that workplace sense - that maybe people think you're not as intelligent any more. You remind yourself that isn't true, but it does knock your confidence. There are times when I think I should look for a job, but then I have to remind myself that it's not what I want to do."

She left a career in marketing to stay at home. Her husband Adrian is an accountant. Luckily, she says, she has a lot of friends who are in the same position. "A lot of the mums at the school gate are stay-at-home. Those who do work, work part-time or from home. So, no, I don't feel unusual. Several of my friends are the same age and in the same situation - we feel that we've had our careers and we don't have to go back." Like many older mothers, after two decades of work she feels that she has achieved everything she wanted and now this is her family time.

"I do think I would have a different relationship with the children if I was working. I would probably feel that I would have to spoil them more to make up for not being there. I just like them knowing I am there for them all the time."

Sales also wanted to replicate the experience she had with her own stay-at-home mother. Over the years, this has been a common motivation. Faith Quance, 68, from Sheffield, married at 20 in 1960 and had a daughter and two sons over the next six years. Trained as a medical secretary, she did not go back to work for 20 years. "I just wanted to be at home with them and do the things my own mother had done for me," she says. "There were times later when I regretted it on a personal level, but not from the family's point of view. I didn't resent being at home with my children - I enjoyed it, although we could have done with more money."

Having watched her children bring up her four grandchildren, however, she sees now that things can be done differently. And she has re-evaluated her views on nursery. "Some of my anxieties to do with not being the principle carer have been rebutted by seeing how well nursery children do. They gain all sorts of social skills that the child who was at home with mum doesn't seem to have. One of my grandchildren was in childcare from six months and he is a very extrovert, sociable child and has gained a lot from it. I don't condemn people who send their children to nursery, but I didn't want it 40 years ago. I don't know if I would be different now." She does not envy her daughter's generation: "The cost of everything is so enormous and people's expectations are unrealistic: they want to have these beautiful homes, and it just isn't possible to do that and have contented children."

If the financial situation is complex for a lot of families at the moment, there is at least one positive development, says Jill Harris, 45, mother of Tom, 10, and Olivia, seven, from Warlingham, Surrey: flexible working. Last year, she went back to work after six years at home. "I didn't intend to become a stay-at-home mother and certainly not for that long. I just didn't believe that there were genuine part-time flexible jobs out there. Things have changed considerably in the past five years." A former communications executive, she now works as a schools manager with Women Like Us, a London recruitment firm that links up companies looking for highly qualified candidates for part-time positions: they explicitly recruit full-time mums who have dropped out of the job market.

The rise in flexibility has to be one of the main factors in the decline of full-time motherhood. But the real nail in the coffin has been the housing market. "I feel quite strongly that this generation was fed a bit of a lie," says Francesca Todd, 33. "The practicalities of bringing up children and running a house have not changed. If anything, it has got harder because the price of property has gone through the roof." The mother of Jemima, four, and William, one, she and her musician husband Nick moved from south-east London to Welwyn Garden City, Herts, and "downsized" so that she could give up her office job in the civil service. But they still need two salaries: she works from home two days a week.

Full-time motherhood was not an option, she says, because she enjoys her work too much, and if childcare were less expensive, she would work more. (The YouGov survey also found that the cost of childcare has risen by 33% in the past six years and will rise another 10% by 2010.) "What I'm doing now is the right thing for the children but it has been really hard and at times extremely lonely and dull," Todd says. "But when I was both working in an office and looking after the children, it was the hardest time of my life.

I would have to put on this professional mask in the morning and pretend to be cheerful at work when I had been up all night with the children. At least if you're a full-time mother you can hide away, be grumpy and not have to pretend that you're having it all and doing it all."

Pippa Menzies, 33, also embodies this new kind of working stay-at-home motherhood. She and her husband Rory, 37, do not have any childcare for Jake, three, Jamie, 16 months and Archie, five months. They look after the children themselves, but they also run Riverdale House, a B&B in Alfriston, East Sussex. She left her career running an MP's office to spend more time with the children. "Politics and family life do not mix. It's impossible - it's a 24-hour job," she says. "Then there's the money element. As soon as you have two children, it's not financially worthwhile and work becomes a luxury. Now the children have full-time parents, but we're working as well."

One thing has been completely lost, she says. "We have got a lot more family time together, but there is no time for yourself at all because it is relentless. It's either the kids or the business or both. You have to make a sacrifice, though, no matter what you do: sometimes it's money, sometimes it's career, sometimes it's the children." She has days when she doubts herself. "Yesterday, Jamie poured a pot of hot tea over himself and I found myself thinking, 'If I was a proper full-time mum, would he have done that?' But that's the state of modern motherhood. I think you feel guilty whatever you do."

At least to her children, she says, she has the appearance of being a traditional mother, while for herself, she still maintains an income and a career. Perhaps, rather than disappearing, the stay-at-home mother has reappeared in a more creative, entrepreneurial form. Even Tina Downham in Taunton, a staunch supporter of full-time motherhood, is starting a second career as an artist: she has just sold her first painting, for £300.

Meanwhile, though mothers now face numerous pressures and difficult decisions, there will always be a small army of stay-at-home mothers who love what they do and don't want to change it for the world - and to hell with social trends (as long as you can afford it). As Sales puts it: "The thing is, I do absolutely adore being at home with my children. That's what gets you through when you're thinking that maybe you should go back to work or that you're not good enough. You are there for every moment when they do every little thing for the first time. And I just love that. That is the reason you do it".

· This article was amended on Wednesday May 28 2008. We inadvertently changed the gender of Professor Pat Thane of the Institute of Historical Research from female to male during the editing of the article above. Apologies. This has been corrected.