A Mother's Place: Taking the Debate About Working Mothers Beyond Guilt and Blame.

By Susan Chira HarperCollins, $25

Do mothers who work do so to the detriment of their children? Can toddlers who grow up with full-time, quality day care do as well as their peers who had full-time moms? The debate is nearly as acrimonious as the argument over abortion. And as in that argument, each side in the working-moms debate appeals to emotions, insisting that the issue is clear and obvious, if only you see it from their side.

Susan Chira, an editor with The New York Times and a mother of two, sets out to add an authoritative voice to the working-mother side. Her arguments are most compelling when she speaks with a mother's voice, painting an emotional picture framed by popular culture and its images of working motherhood. Her reporter's voice is more nuanced and less riveting, but she uses the combination to tackle a daunting breadth of issues: popular culture, fatherhood, public policy flaws, biased studies, the role of poverty in motherhood and child care issues, the morale of women who stay at home and how that affects their children.

Chira opens with an intimate autobiographical prologue, taking us quickly through her lifetime highlights of angst as they relate to work versus relationships. When Chira's two children are born she delves into the reality of day care. (She and her husband hire a nanny, who is still with the family after seven years.) Throughout the book, we meet working women, mainly blue-collar, who share their schedules, their economic need to work, and their guilt.

Section one focuses on what popular culture tells us about motherhood, from movies like "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "This Is My Life" to Benjamin Spock and Penelope Leach, authors of the baby care books her friends recommended. The message is insistent and without subtlety: Work, and your child suffers.

The next section is rich with data and social science. Chira dissects "attachment theory," which professes that mothers who work early in their child's life threaten that child's self-esteem and sense of trust. She challenges studies that do not probe all factors before linking children of working mothers to lower achievement. She may, however, be overstating her case in this section. She asserts that day care is under "a stepped-up assault," but offers four examples, each at least a decade old, as evidence. Then she cites a landmark and ongoing study by the National Institute of Child Health, which has hopeful news about children of working mothers.

By the end of this section, the message about day care still seems confusing. Children of working mothers can do fine, some prominent theorists insist, but their colleagues disagree. Much hinges on quality day care, which is hard to find.

Enter part three, which delves into public policy. If good day care is what it's about, why can't we as a nation create better day care standards and funding? Here Chira takes on a bevy of public policy issues, from custody battles that are progressively tougher on working women, she argues, to welfare reform and family tax relief. She must be applauded for addressing nearly all issues that touch working mothers and day care, but the book also loses a feeling of focus here.

Lastly, there is a chapter about the future and where the author hopes society will take its vision of fatherhood and motherhood. Again, we hear more of Chira's own voice. "My bond with my children endures although I am not the good mother of song and story," she writes. "Countless other mothers have learned that, too. So why can't we refute with more passion and conviction the distortions of the Jeremiahs around us? Because they speak to that deep, dark place where the ideal of the good mother lives inside all of us."

Sprinkled throughout the book are interesting thoughts, quotes, and anecdotes. For example, Chira describes in the heart of the policy section how her colleague Nathaniel Nash, a father of young children, died in a plane crash while she was writing the book. Another colleague, whose own father had died when he was an infant, eulogized Nash, saying his deceased father had lived on in his mind, shaping his ideals and leading him to his career. "We allow fathers this power from a distance, even death," she writes, "but we say that mothers forfeit it if they spend eight to ten hours a day apart from their children." Even when the book becomes too dense or complex, such nuggets pop up to keep you reading and thinking.

ANN O'HANLON is a "Metro" reporter with The Washington Post