I had a meeting the other day with my male boss, in my bathrobe.

No, it’s not what you think. I was at home spooning cough syrup into my 10-year-old, who was suffering from a cold. But I was also taking part in a morning editorial meeting with my boss and several colleagues some 30 miles away, in Reston, Virginia — via telephone.

I am a telecommuter — one of an estimated 40 million Americans who use modems, fax machines and telephone lines to reach out and touch their employers from home.

It’s the perfect way to combine parenthood and profession — to have it all (or most of it, anyway). If we can believe the pollsters, telecommuting is becoming the work/parenthood balancing act of choice for the new millenium.

Though balancing career and children may seem a long way off to the average college student, it’s not too soon to know your options — especially in light of what you’re telling pollsters. One large insurance company just completed a study called “Generation 2001: A Survey of the First Graduating Class of the New Millennium.” What do members of your generation see in their future? Kids! Ninety-six percent say they plan to marry, and 90 percent hope to have children — three on the average.

But the same survey also reveals that 82 percent of your age cohort believe that “two-income households are going to be important” — which means male and female college grads alike expect to work after children come along. The upshot is that even though you have yet to finish college, marry and have children, it’s not too early to start thinking now about how you’ll reconcile these two goals.

So what are your options? For starters, take a close look at telecommuting parents. At the Christian non-profit I work for, all four editors in my department — two men and two women — work from home offices spread out across Virginia, Maryland and Connecticut. Three of us have young children and the primary responsibility for their care. My colleagues and I keep in close touch by telephone, e-mail and fax, and over the years, we’ve become accustomed to phone conversations punctuated by the unprofessional sound of “Sesame Street” and the racket of children asking questions, asking for juice — or asking for a spanking.

In a sense, we’ve gone “back to the future” — back to a system of balancing work and childrearing familiar to past generations of parents.

A Blast From the Past

Nancy Pearcey, executive editor of Chuck Colson’s BreakPoint radio program and a telecommuting mother herself, says telecommuting is helping parents “return to a more humane style of work” — a pattern of work reminiscent of how parents in generations past integrated work and family.

Think back to the colonial era. As Pearcey notes in “Rediscovering Parenthood in the Information Age,” “It was a rugged life, yet one conducive to strong family bonds. With rare exceptions (e.g., sailors, soldiers) men worked in the home and its outbuildings or the surrounding fields. Husband and wife worked together in a common economic enterprise [and] trained their children in the diverse skills needed for survival in a pre-industrial society” (from The Family in America).

But thanks to the Industrial Revolution, this cooperative lifestyle began to disintegrate. Productive work began to be carried on outside the home, which led to “an inherent tension … between the two fundamental tasks of making a living and raising children. The 19th century solution, Pearcey writes, “was to split these tasks between the sexes: Fathers began going out to work in factories and offices” while mothers stayed at home to raise the children.

“By the close of the 19th century, Pearcey writes, “most of the traditional female occupations — such as weaving, baking and brewing — had been removed from the home and transferred to the factory.” Women at home were reduced from active producers to passive consumers, leading to a loss of a sense of self-worth.

The response of early feminists (like the feminists of today) was to urge women to join their husbands in finding work outside the home. “The opposite alternative, of course,” Pearcey writes, “is to bring work back into the home” — to return to the pattern families commonly followed for thousands of years.

That’s exactly what modern parents are choosing to do. A recent study (by Find/SVP) found that in 1990, some four million people worked from home. Today, according to the Washington Times, that number has skyrocketed to an estimated 40 million, and is growing by about 20 percent a year. Fifty-three percent of these telecommuters are women, many of them mothers.

Do these folks long for the collegiality, the bustle and excitement of a real office? Don’t make them laugh. A survey conducted for Telecommute America revealed that these modem moms and dads are “extremely happy with their jobs.” So happy, according to another survey, that they say “nothing would make me give it up.” Except, possibly, a doubling of their salaries.

Even the Bible Endorses It

By integrating productive work with childrearing, telecommuting mothers are mimicking, not just their colonial forebears but a woman much more ancient: the celebrated working mom of Proverbs 31. This is a woman whose life is balanced between her home and the outside world. She tends her children and keeps her house in good running order. But she also goes into the community as a businesswoman, selling clothes she’s manufactured at home and buying real estate with the proceeds.

This woman’s income, it seems, is no mere pin money to splurge on a new bottle of myrrh. It’s a valuable contribution to the family economy. We’re told that “she sees that her trading is profitable”—so profitable that she can “laugh at the days to come.”

It appears that modern mothers are longing to follow in her ancient footsteps. The polls repeatedly tell us that huge majorities of moms would prefer to stay at home with their children if they could afford to, or at least exchange their fast track jobs for part-time, “mommy track” employment. It may be that they’re influenced by the slew of studies confirming that children raised at home are better off than children raised by unrelated daycare providers.

To anyone who reads the Scriptures, it should come as no great surprise that mothers wish to make child nurturing their top priority. We know God intended mothers for this role in part because the Bible’s most powerful images depicting God’s nurturing care and concern are those of mothering. In Isaiah 66:13, for example, we read: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.” 1 Thessalonians 2:7 says: “But we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children” (RSV).