Recently I had lunch with a professional woman who has a successful career and two small children. The minute we sat down, she said, “I just can’t take the stress any more. It’s too hard trying to juggle everything. I’m going to ask my boss if I can work part-time instead of full-time.”

This woman knew that my own children have always been my top priority, and she expected me to agree that scaling back her career was a sensible solution to her problem.

Instead, I told her it was a terrible idea - a mistake that could jeopardize her children’s security, and one that she herself might regret for the rest of her life. Of course I understood the stress she was experiencing. The conflicts women feel in managing both work and family can seem overwhelming at times, particularly when their children are young. But the most hectic period of child-rearing passes relatively quickly.

A typical nuclear family consists of two children whose ages are two or three years apart. In a family like this, the really intensive period of hands-on mothering lasts for fifteen years or less. And yet these days many women live well into their 80’s and 90’s. Fifteen years doesn’t seem like that much out of an adult lifespan of 60 or 70 years.

But many American women are letting the demands of this finite period of time jeopardize their entire futures, because they’re making critical choices that forever compromise their opportunities — and their income. Most fail to recognize how much they’ve given up until after it’s too late.

For the last quarter of a century, the labor force participation rate of American women grew steadily. But recently this trend has reversed as growing numbers of women quit their jobs to become full-time mothers. At first the back-to-the-home trend was thought to be limited to affluent women, but the latest figures make it clear that this phenomenon is broader and deeper than previously recognized, and that it’s occurring at every socio-economic level.

The implications of this are enormous, but Western society has been very slow to recognize them. In North America and the United Kingdom, the media treat the opting-out phenomenon as if it were merely a lifestyle choice that resolves the stress of the juggling act, enabling women to devote themselves to home and children. But the media coverage of stay-at-home motherhood almost never mentions the long-term risks of economic dependency.

And yet the harsh truth is that women who quit work and depend on a spouse for support become extremely vulnerable to a host of difficult challenges that are likely to arise over the years. Approximately half of these women will get divorced, and mothers typically pay a far higher price for divorce than fathers do. Women’s standard of living drops by 36 percent when their marriages are disrupted, whereas men’s standard of living actually rises by 28 percent.

After divorce, most custodial parents are women, but existing laws do not effectively safeguard their families’ financial security. Nearly 70 percent of American child support cases had arrears owed, according to the latest figures. Twenty-three percent of custodial mothers report that they did not receive any child support payments at all in the last year.

And divorce is far from the only danger. Other women must cope with a husband’s illness, incapacitation, or premature death. The average age of widowhood in America is 55, and by the time women reach 60, two-thirds of them do not have partners. Many enter old age without adequate financial resources. Twice as many women end up in poverty in their later years, compared with men. What’s really striking is that four out of five of those women were not poor while they still had husbands around. It was the loss of a breadwinner that dropped them below the poverty line. Those figures are expected to rise if the current trend of women giving up paid work continues.

Even when women remain married, there is no guarantee that their husbands will remain employed. Today’s labor market is volatile and insecure; many men lose their jobs at one point or another. Families that depend on a single breadwinner are extremely vulnerable to economic hardship.

If you add up all the risk factors, it’s clear that the majority of women who give up their financial independence by dropping out of the work force will eventually find themselves on the wrong side of the odds. The consequences — both for themselves and for their children — are profound.

As one of the experts I quoted in my book put it, Marriage is an economic partnership, but it’s not an equal economic partnership, because women assume nearly all of the economic risk.

If a woman drops out of the labor force for a period of years, she is likely to have a difficult time getting back in. More than 90 percent of women who quit their jobs say they want to return to work after their children are older, and these women are typically confident and optimistic about their ability to do so.

And yet virtually all the studies of opting back in show that it is far harder than most women anticipate, and that the penalties for taking a time-out are severe and longlasting. Unfortunately, by the time women realize the obstacles they’re facing, it’s too late for them to do anything about it. The mistake has already been made.

When women who have opted out try to reenter the work force, most of them have great difficulty, according to studies by the Center for Work-Life Policy at Columbia University. Most of these women are shocked by the barriers they encounter, which include ageism, sexism, overt discrimination against mothers and a strong negative bias against workers who have taken a time out. Female as well as male employers often view women who have been out of the work force for any length of time as out-of-date, out-of-touch, and undesirable.

Less than three-quarters of these women actually succeed in returning to work, and of those, only 40 percent manage to get full time, professional jobs. And when they can’t get full-time jobs with benefits, many formerly affluent women are unable to afford health insurance for themselves and their children.

Even when women take only a brief time-out, the financial penalties are enormous. Women lose 37 percent of their earning power when they spend as little as three years out of the work force.

On a practical level alone, it therefore seems clear that women are sacrificing too much of their own future income and opportunities when they give up paid work. But many stay-at-home mothers remain convinced that such sacrifices are necessary for the welfare of their children. Full-time homemakers typically believe that working women are shortchanging their kids by maintaining a life outside the home.

And yet this simply is not true, according to all available research. Sociologists have spent more than four decades comparing the kids of working moms with those of full-time homemakers, and nearly a half-century’s worth of research has consistently failed to demonstrate that the children of stay-at-home moms turn out any better at all.

“The research on the impact of working mothers on kids shows that there isn’t any,” says Pamela Stone, a Hunter College sociologist who has studied the opting-out phenomenon.But for many Americans, the myths of motherhood remain more powerful than the actual facts. Since my book, THE FEMININE MISTAKE, was published in April, I’ve spent the last four months traveling around the country on my book tour.

I’ve discovered that countless young women believe they will have to choose between career and family. They idealize the stay-at-home life to an extent that is reminiscent of the 1950’s “Feminine Mystique” described by Betty Friedan in her ground breaking book of 1963. Nearly half a century later; today’s young women often say they plan to give up work and stay home after they have children.

Many women of my own baby-boom generation are astonished by such attitudes. After all, millions of us have already succeeded in having interesting careers as well as raising wonderful children. The juggling act may not be easy, but it is emininently possible. We’ve done it, and so have our husbands.

And yet American society tends to romanticize traditional gender roles, in which men work and women confine themselves to home and family. Our girls grow up on a steady diet of fairy tales, from Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty to the Little Mermaid, and by the time they’re pre-teens, they’re reading the popular novels that have been nicknamed “chick lit,” whose plots almost always revolve around falling in love and getting the guy.

Meanwhile our boys are raised to understand that they need to take responsibility for their lives; they know they have to figure out a way to support themselves throughout adulthood. But girls often think they don’t really have to get serious about a career, because Prince Charming will eventually come along and take care of them.

Whether women realize it or not, many of their important adult choices are influenced by those assumptions. The expectation that a woman can stop supporting herself and hand over that responsibility to her spouse always remains as a permanent escape hatch.

Although women who drop out of the work force usually say it’s because they want to stay home with their children, research actually shows that there are deeper reasons. It turns out that women who quit their careers are far more likely to be unhappy with their work. Some chose the wrong career to begin with; they never found work that suited their interests and abilities. Others had encountered frustrations or obstacles, and instead of figuring out how to overcome them, they simply quit work entirely. Meanwhile, women who find meaningful careers they enjoy and excel at are much less likely to opt out.

Unfortunately the ones who quit work are depriving themselves of far more than a paycheck. Research has shown that working women are considerably happier than stay-at-home moms, with lower levels of depression. Moreover, when full-time homemakers return to the work force, their mental and emotional health improves significantly.

What’s even more striking is that working women are not only happier — they’re also healthier. Longitudinal studies conducted over several decades have now shown that women who have jobs as well as families are in better health and are less likely to suffer from a variety of medical problems than homemakers. Despite the negative stereotypes about the stress of the juggling act, it turns out that having multiple roles is actually good for women.

The good news gets even better as women get older.When their children were young, the working women I interviewed often felt quite overwhelmed by all their responsibilities, whereas the stay-at-home moms were very engaged with their children’s lives and felt very much needed. If you look only at that moment in time, it’s easy to conclude that stay-at-home mothers are happier.

But as the years pass, there is a striking role reversal. By the time their children are teenagers, the stay-at-home moms often feel lost and frightened. Their kids are becoming independent, and the full-time mothers start to think about returning to work. Unfortunately they then discover that they can’t find decent jobs. The doors they expected to be able to walk through are now closed to them.

These women often enter a prolonged period of confusion and anxiety. Many cannot return to the careers they had when they were young; others never got serious about a career in the first place and discover that there’s really nothing to go back to. They know they have to reinvent themselves, but this isn’t easy. Entrepreneurial solutions sound like a good answer, but the failure rate for start-up businesses is more than 90 percent, and even among businesses that survive, the revenues are often negligible.

At this point in their lives, many stay-at-home mothers panic. They don’t know what to do with themselves, and their futures look bleak. For those who are still married and being supported by their husbands, this may be merely depressing.

But for women who have lost their breadwinners to divorce or death, it can be downright terrifying. Many discover that they can’t support themselves, and result is a drastic deterioration in their standard of living. They are pessimistic about their futures, and often feel angry and bitter about how much it has cost them to follow the traditional female role of stay-at-home wife and mother.

The working women present a remarkable contrast. Their careers are thriving, they have promising opportunities ahead of them, and their futures are bright. By this time, it’s clear that their kids have turned out fine. These women feel energized and optimistic about their futures. They have options, income, and power, both in the world and in their marriages. They are in control of their own lives.

In writing my book, I interviewed women who ranged from 17 to 80 years old, in a wide variety of circumstances. My own research, along with that of many others, makes it very clear that economic dependency is an extremely high-risk choice for women. It’s equally clear that meaningful paid work is one of the most important factors in sustaining a woman’s health, happiness and range of options at every stage of life.

Sigmund Freud and the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson both defined work and love as the two essential components of a mature, healthy adult life. These days too many American women are voluntarily depriving themselves of many of the things they’ll need to sustain themselves over the long haul. They are giving up far too much.

I began this talk by telling you about the friend who wanted to scale back her career in favor of her family. I advised her to take the long view instead of making irrevocable decisions in response to the stresses of the moment. So she decided to rearrange her schedule instead of cutting back on her job responsibilities, and she started working from home more often.

A couple of years have passed, and recently I asked her how it was going. Her life is much more manageable now, and she’s a great deal happier. Her children are growing up nicely, and her career is thriving. “Thank god I didn’t derail my career,” she said. “That would have been the biggest mistake of my life.”

The benefits of work are intellectual, creative and social as well as monetary. Work gives women leverage within their marriages and power in the larger world. It gives them an independent identity and a crucial source of positive reinforcement outside the family unit. It gives them their own social network, which continues to expand instead of vanishing as their children grow up. It gives them all the options that money can provide, including the freedom to leave an unhappy marriage or an abusive spouse.

And it elevates their family’s standard of living in ways that can substantially improve their children’s futures. In addition to providing their families with greater financial security, working women can offer their children educational opportunities that might otherwise be impossible.

These freedoms and abilities provide a striking contrast with the circumstances of women who depend on their husbands for economic survival. Nearly sixty years ago, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s wrote a groundbreaking book about women’s lives called The Second Sex.

In discussing the importance of financial self-sufficiency, de Beauvoir observed that women’s “civil liberties remain theoretical as long as they are unaccompanied by economic freedom. A woman supported by a man — wife or courtesan — is not emancipated from the male because she has a ballot in her hand…It is only through gainful employment that woman has traversed most of the distance that separated her from the male, and nothing else can guarantee her liberty in practice. Once she ceases to be a parasite, the whole system based on her dependence crumbles.”

Today’s stay-at-home wives might be infuriated by de Beauvoir’s description of them as parasites, but it is hard to argue with the fundamental truth of that characterization. When women don’t work, they must rely on men to support them. Like parasites, they depend upon their hosts for survival.

All over the world, women’s growing economic independence is a major story. As The Financial Times pointed out last year, “Working women are one of the most important engines of the great burst of economic growth in the postwar era. The Economist Magazine has dubbed this feminization of global gross domestic product “womenomics,” and, in a striking analysis, found that over the past decade or so, increased female participation in the paid labor force has contributed more to the growth of the world economy than either booming China or new technology.”

The great irony is that many American women, arguably the most privileged on the planet, are voluntarily relinquishing their own economic independence, even as women elsewhere in the world fight valiantly to achieve the gains that we have already won.

America’s current back-to-the-home trend will ultimately have a negative outcome. We’ve already seen how this scenario plays out. Many of the wives who embraced the Feminine Mystique in the 1950’s saw their lives shattered by the divorce revolution of the 1970’s, which left them without the breadwinners they had counted on to support them. And as the philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

But these problems are neither necessary nor inevitable. Today’s young women will fare much better if they educate themselves about the realities they are likely to face. In the 21st century, it’s very clear that a more egalitarian model of marriage, in which both partners share the breadwinning as well as the child-rearing and domestic tasks, offers the best protection for each individual as well as for the family unit as a whole.

But whatever your views on these issues, it’s vital for all of us to join together and create a more informed debate about the highly charged subject of women’s roles in society. Information is power, and the more we know, the better able we are to make choices that protect ourselves and our children. The result is a better world for everyone.