Should Mothers Relegate their Children to Maids to Advance Their Careers?

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"I think I will be taking six months off from my job," said an expectant mother, due to deliver in a few weeks. "After that?" I posed. "Well..I have to entrust a maid/nanny with the task. What else can one do anyway?" she confessed, a bit ruefully. Today, in this rapid age of scientific progress and informational overflow, individual careers have clearly trumped relationships in terms of priority. So much so that some individuals even go to assert that the choice is not even a matter to be considered anymore. I can't speak for other countries, but in India, parenthood is clearly an entailment of marriage. When a couple gets married, it feels obliged to procreate in the subsequent years - the duo may even think they owe their families one. Resultantly, you see increasingly less women willing to make that sacrifice which would furnish their children with the constancy of maternal warmth and care critical to an infant in its most vulnerable and significant years of development, but what must come at the expense of their ambitions. Now, I can understand in cases where both parents need to work, probably to make ends meet, but what about the rest - the privileged and the provided? Do you think it too harsh on a mother to have to give up a few years of her competitive spirit for the sake of her own offspring? Or would you take a feminist U-turn and say it is the father's duty - regardless of what society or law thinks - to babysit his progeny and relieve its mother of her "obligations"? Or do you have some other alternative that might address this deplorable habit of dropping kids at playhomes. Do share. :-)