At-Home vs. Employed Mothers: Who's Happier At-home mothers are more likely than employed mothers to report feeling sad or angry and to have been diagnosed with depression, according to a new report by Gallup. Women who are employed also express about the same emotional well-being whether they have a child at home or not. The results are based on surveys of more than 60,000 American women between the ages of 18 and 64 interviewed from January through April. The categories for employed mothers and at-home mothers refer to women who have a child under 18 at home. Respondents were interviewed about feeling any of the given emotions "yesterday," and their answers showed that employed mothers were slightly more likely to report positive feelings, too. For example, women who worked for pay were slightly more likely to report having smiled or laughed a lot and experienced happiness "yesterday." These are of course potentially inflammatory results, given continuing cultural debates about gender roles. It's not clear, though, what causes this differential. You might suggest income differences between the two groups could play a role. But the researchers sliced the data by household income, and for the list of negative emotions, at-home mothers at all income levels reported being worse off than their employed counterparts. The same was not true for the experience of positive emotions like happiness, however; at-home mothers with lower household incomes (under $36,000) were slightly worse off than employed mothers of comparable means, but at middle and higher incomes, mothers at home experienced about as much positive emotion as did their employed counterparts. So income explains only part of the story, and none at all for negative emotions. The takeaway from these numbers probably isn't that all mothers should work even if they prefer to stay at home (although that subject did seem to occupy the political debate for a while last month). Rather, the authors suggest that "more societal recognition of the difficult job stay-at-home mothers have raising children would perhaps help support them emotionally," and that more affordable child care options could help ensure that the mothers who are at home are in that role by choice.