I thank the reader who asked me to write a column about stay-at-home moms. It gives me an opportunity to present what I believe are some common misconceptions.

Mothers who choose to stay home for the explicit purpose of devoting themselves to raising their children deserve recognition. They take their role of parent so seriously that they willingly forego a career or job that would provide extra income, and to my mind, it is an act of sacrifice. They want to do the “toughest job in the world” and they are willing to commit their lives to it.

Other moms have myriad reasons for staying home and not always happily so. If they are discontented they may have less to give of themselves to their children. So it is not just about mothers being there with their children; what matters more is being there for their children. Do children benefit more from moms who stay at home than children of working moms? The answer depends on the mom. While it is true that stay-at-home mothers have an advantage of seeing more of their children each day, that alone does not qualify as good parenting. It is the quality of care that matters whether we’re talking about the mother who stays home or goes to work.

Working mothers also deserve praise for taking on the double duty of work and home responsibilities. These women role model for their children that fulfillment can be found both within the home and outside of it. Are there rights and wrongs here? From my vantage point, what is right for each family has to be measured by how their decisions affect their children. If the choice to stay home was not the mother’s, but was dictated by circumstance – what matters is how she handles the day in and day out demands of motherhood. By the same token, the issue for working mothers is how well they manage their struggle to juggle both jobs. Contented moms seem to manage quite well.

What children need most is their mothers’ attention, their willingness to take the time to know them, to have compassion for them, to role model every good quality they wish their children would develop to become the best persons they can be. The presence or absence of these factors determines whether staying home is right or wrong

More about this later. For now, let’s go back in time to see where the controversy over working vs. stay-at-home moms originated.

I married two years after the Second World War ended and had my baby boomer daughter in1948. I stayed home like all the women in my circle of friends and relatives. None of us needed to go to work, or even thought of it; we were, after all, doing what we were expected to do back then. A few women in my neighborhood gathered together every morning in somebody’s kitchen for a coffee klatch. We swapped information and outlandish opinions about raising children. We were content in our roles as wives and mothers. And then came 1963 and the Women’s Liberation Movement.

Betty Friedan’s book, “The Feminine Mystique” spearheaded the movement and set off a tidal wave of discontent among millions of mothers at home. She objected to the mainstream media image of women (as in “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best”) presenting them as “limited in their possibilities, horizons, and a mere waste of their talent and potential.” In essence, Ms. Friedan claimed that being “just a housewife and mother was degrading.” (Some women were so intimidated that they found themselves apologizing for not doing “more with their lives.”) So more and more women were going out to work. Now we had equal opportunity guilt with at-home moms feeling guilty about not going out and fulfilling themselves while at-work moms felt guilty about leaving their children.

A word about guilt. Who needs it? On the one hand, a little well-earned guilt serves a purpose – we make a mistake, guilt makes us feel bad about it, it signals us to change what needs changing, we learn the valuable lessons therein and we move on. On the other hand, excessive guilt – the kind that continues to plague us long after the mistake is forgotten has no purpose but to torment us. What’s worse, it can also torment the people around us. It crowds our inner space and robs us of patience, compassion, understanding, and contentment and it blocks our ability to enjoy our relationships with our children. Like I said, who needs it?