BOSTON -- Oh not again, not another Page 1 story on work, mothers and children. Haven't we been there, done this? Do we have to stay there, doing this?

This week's news bulletin was the latest in a series of similar studies showing that "mothers who work outside the home are not harming their children." And while I hate to complain about good news, even the author found that "the most shocking result of the study was the overwhelming response."

On Monday, Elizabeth Harvey's voice mail at the University of Massachusetts was stuffed with so many calls from reporters that she stopped counting at around 100. "I knew it was a hot issue and people felt strongly about it," says the psychologist, who is pregnant with her first child, "but this really brought it into my own world."

Substantial research

I'm not disparaging the work itself. This was a bigger and better version of earlier studies and it cleared up some of the old contradictions. The work used the huge amount of data collected in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 12,600 people since 1979. It tallied up information that's been collected since 1986 on 6,000 children between 3 and 12.

Ms. Harvey looked at whether the mother worked during the first three years of the child's life, how soon she went to work and how many hours she worked. She looked at the children in terms of compliance, behavior problems, cognitive development, self-esteem and academic achievement.

And she found that the children of mothers who worked during the first three years were not significantly different from those whose mothers were at home. Moreover, any slight differences faded by the time they were in school.

Ms. Harvey also studied fathers -- their work didn't make any difference either -- though nobody paid attention to that little nugget. It's mothers that still matter in the public's mind.

Studies come and studies go -- leaving the whole subject pretty much where it began. In fact, pretty much where I began.

Long-running debate

For as long as I have been a mother, we have been publicly debating the effects of a mother's job on her kids. Thirty years later, we behave as if there weren't already a sample of young men and women raised by employed mothers.

At one point, I wanted to get my daughter and her friends to do the "perp walk." We could line them up like suspects, give them a number and let the public judge "which kid had the working mom." If there was no visible difference at 30, we could drop the charge and move on.

But I'm no longer that optimistic. Some 70 percent of mothers have paid jobs; 10 million preschoolers have employed mothers. Research does help to lift and lower the anxiety, but the cultural consensus still says that professional mothers should be home with the kids while welfare mothers should be out working -- and all of us should be wildly uneasy.

One reason that the research doesn't alter the debate very much may be that it only offers statistics -- the average, the aggregate, the whole cohort group. Alas, we don't raise children on the average. We raise them one family at a time. We aren't aggregate mothers. We are a sample of one.

Moreover, we don't evaluate the effects on our own children along some psychological table from "compliance" to "cognitive development," but by the murkier standard of, say, happiness. We don't decide to work after calculating whether we are "harming" the kids according to an academic scale, but by looking into our pocketbook and our bag of emotions.

As Ms. Harvey agrees, the statistics don't tell you about the individuals. "Within those large groups there are a lot of variations. What's right for me may not be right for you. We're saying that having an employed mother won't hurt. We're not saying that having a mother at home isn't worthwhile."

For at least two decades, every brief truce in the mommy wars has come when both sides agree -- with or without clenched teeth -- that mothers should be able to "choose." What about a little focus on what makes those choices easier?

Quality day care? A smoother segue back to work after time out? Anyone for decent part-time work? Mothers at the office, mothers at home -- once again the psychologists have found that our child's whole future doesn't rest on this one choice. Now we just have to believe it.

Ellen Goodman is a syndicated columnist.