We, like a lot of other breadwinner-mom families, live this way because the opportunity arose to have a parent at home with our young kids, and we think it's good for them. To call this move entirely intentional would be going too far. Yeah, me neither. We started out in equal-career couples and things just happened. Like, women got enough earning power for men to be able to make spontaneous career decisions.
Men now have more freedom to drop off the corporate fast track, go freelance, start new careers.
Sometimes the choice is planned, and mutual. When the demands of two jobs and two kids added up to zero quality of life for the director of my daughter's school, she and her husband decided to put his work on hold. But winning bread is not always what some of us expected it to be. In fact, I'd say some of us never expected it to be at all. My sister remembers her guidance counselor telling her to forget about architecture because girls can't do math.