Women in the Workforce

From The Economist: "Women in the Workforce - Across the rich world more women are working than ever before. Coping with this change will be one of the great challenges of the coming decades."
The conventional wisdom presented in the following sentence has been sticking in my craw for sometime.
"A growing proportion of married women have also discovered that the only way they can preserve their households’ living standards is to join their husbands in the labour market." I submit the these women (and why not the couple?) are asking the wrong question. It shouldn't be, how do we maintain this standard of living, but is this standard of living necessary and what else are we sacrificing if we both choose to work?
Our current standards are out of whack. You like nice things? Fine. But are those nice things worth the cost of having little parental involvement in the rearing of children? No. I have a friend who is one of three siblings. He and his older brother benefited from having a stay-at-home parent - in their case, the mother. By his account, both performed exceptionally well in the their high school and university studies and have gone on to serve our country (one as a federal law enforcement office and the other as a military officer), and enjoy a modicum of "success." At any rate, one could reasonably argue that both have become solid citizens. The third, much younger, who has been reared by a day-care and a nanny, is described as being much different from the rest of the family and basically a nitwit, not nearly on the same trajectory as his older brothers. Correlation is not causation, but this is clearly not a one off scenario. Mother goes to work to maintain the aforementioned living standards and the offspring suffer and becomes that jack___ who doesn't return his grocery cart to the designated pen, among other social offenses.

Do I suggest that it should be the mother alone who remains at home? Absolutely not. Women in the workforce has become the norm and I believe it is good. Having them in workforce shouldn't mean that unless they stay at home, the child will remain neglected. Maybe the standard of living by which we measure, should be how well we rear our children ourselves, not in the accumulation of the stuff we think we need to do it. And the decision about who must decide not to work, shouldn't there be an equal shot of it being the man?