As a kid, my mom was a working mother -- a terribly unpopular choice in rural Michigan where we lived. My mom drove 30 minutes away from home to get me to a suitable child-care provider. She didn't pick the place because it was close to work -- she was a traveling sales-person -- she picked it because it was the closest available (located at a church because commercial daycare was non-existent where we lived). When I started looking for a partner in life, one of my "absolutes" was to find a woman who would be OK with one of us staying home with our children (I was and still would be perfectly fine with being a stay-at-home Dad). As a result, my ex-wife stayed home with the children (and my current wife does the same).
The tables have turned in my adult-hood. It's unusual to have a parent stay home. The job is as hard as it was when I was a kid (if not harder due to social pressures that make women feel badly for not pursuing careers). As a society (in the US anyway), we're setup for both parents to work full time. When my wife and I chose not to enroll our children in pre-school most of our friends thought we were out of our minds and holding our children back. As parents we felt it was unnecessary to hire a professional educator for teaching our children the ABCs/123s and were surprised at the reaction we received even from families who didn't have two working parents. As a child, preschool was purely the domain of families of working parents and enrollment was considered an unnecessary expense when mom or dad was available.
Personally, I don't have strong feelings about stay-at-home vs. work full-time parents. I knew I didn't enjoy my experience as a kid but I knew that a lot of that was due to jealousy since nearly all of my friends had moms that stayed home. Our kids are school-age, now, but we're still a single-parent earning family by choice. Having children is a lot of work and I personally don't think we could handle raising them the way we desire if we both had priorities outside of the home. Don't read that as me saying that it cannot be done -- I'm sure it can, as my parents remind me "you turned out just fine"[1] -- I just don't know that I could do it.
[1] People get very touchy about parenting choices. When I told my family that we had no intention -- from the beginning -- to have both of us working, they assumed that we were calling them bad parents for choosing differently. I know the situation my family was in when I was young. They had little choice but to both work in order to keep the lights on. And I'm not the least bit upset with how I was raised, but the added time we get to enjoy our children and the reduced stress that I experience knowing that our home life is taken care of while I'm working is worth the loss of income, especially since we live in a place where we can comfortably get by on my salary.