Well, while we don't have kids yet, this is something I feel very strongly about, and we already know that we'll both continue working. We are both engineers with good salaries, so cutting any of those would roughly mean a 50% cut in income, but most, we'd die staying home with kids all day. Even if I love children, and hope very much we can succeed in having one, staying with them 24h would drive me crazy. While I'm no mean an aggressive career woman, I need the challenge & reward of my work, and the work friendship. It would also be a waste of my degree to stay home, so much effort for nothing in the end. I didn't need an engineering degree to raise kids.
I also believe in the philosophy "It takes a village to raise a child", and daycare is the modern equivalent of that. In the earlier times, some women would take care of kids while others would do cooking , washing, picking fruit. There was no super women cooking, cleaning, feeding, disciplining, stimulating her children. This super kid centered SAHM is a very modern American phenomenon, even 80 years ago the moms would mainly do housework, and not spend much time with children. For me, the daycare worker, the caterer, the cleaning woman are all part of my modern village, and my personal task is to go work on computers! They have their speciality, are trained to do it, and can do a much better job at it than I would.
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