NEW MINORITY MOM : Sociology: Stay-at-home mothers once were the majority. Now they’re rare. But Janis Kerker, a former career woman, decided full-time motherhood made sense.

Janis and Harry Kerker of La Canada Flintridge are, without apology, living “in the slow lane.” For kicks, he referees their daughter’s Saturday soccer games. She is a Brownie troop leader and second-grade art docent. Living it up for them means take-home pizza or chicken.

In go-go-go, up-up-up Los Angeles, their life style would seem to some quaintly anachronistic.

But the Kerkers are an anomaly for another, more important reason: They are part of a vanishing California social institution.

They are an honest-to-goodness traditional family, consisting of a father who is the sole breadwinner, a mother who is a full-time homemaker and two children.

As a statistic, families like the Kerkers represent about 15% of all households nationally and only 13% in California.

Although the idealized household portrayed in films and television in the ‘50s remains imprinted on the American consciousness, it is largely a fantasy as the ‘90s near.

The reality is that, with wrenching implications for society, the California family has undergone watershed change.

According to a report this year by the state Joint Select Task Force on the Changing Family, married couples with children compose slightly less than one quarter of all Los Angeles households. Another third of the city’s households are adults living alone; slightly less than a quarter are homes of childless, married couples. Cohabiting couples are 8% of Los Angeles households, while 11% are headed by a single parent, usually a poor, minority woman.

And, what is clear now is that the upheaval in family life is not an isolated, single-effect phenomenon. Rather, it is linked directly to growing poverty, rising school dropout rates, crises in child care and elder care, juvenile crime and drug and alcohol abuse.

Today, most mothers--62% nationally and 63% in Los Angeles--work outside of the home. For most, a paid job is an economic necessity.

At the same time, however, polls show that most Americans feel something has gone wrong. Many women combining careers and motherhood are so stressed out that life is little more than an endurance test. Dual-income parents often say they feel guilt or sadness over the death of a way of life that included sit-down family dinners, shared games and shared confidences.

Families like the Kerkers represent values largely pushed aside when women, some of them admittedly driven by either a need for self-fulfillment or by a desire for luxury consumer goods, began to flee home and hearth for the office.

Now there is the negative fallout from the age of the “super mom.” Can women have it all and do it? What is the toll on their children? If they opt out of the workplace while their children are young, will there be jobs for them as middle-aged career women?

The Kerkers consider themselves lucky, as Harry’s income as a vice president for HDM, a large Los Angeles advertising agency, makes it possible for Janis to stay at home with their daughters, Schuyler, 7, and Holland, 5.

He laughs and says, “My accountant refers to my wife as a luxury item. My friends have Porsches. We have a mother at home.”

He adds, “I do very well. But if I had a wife who was a working professional, we’d be doing terrific.” And even at the higher end of the salary scale, he says, “it’s hard to make it on one income” in Los Angeles.

The Kerkers did not spend long, agonizing hours debating whether Janis, a fashion designer, should return to work after Schuyler was born.

She recalls, “I worked up until the day I had the baby. I just thought I was going to have this baby and go back to work. When she came, it was a rude awakening. I didn’t realize they were up every two hours during the night and you were grouchy and irritable.”

One day, while she was still on maternity leave, the office called. There was a crisis that needed solving. As she spoke on the phone, the baby started crying. “At that moment,” Janis says, “I decided, ‘I don’t need this.’ ”

Harry was totally supportive of her decision. When he was growing up in Upstate New York, the oldest of four boys, he recalls, “Everybody had a mom at home. Everybody had a dad who went off to work. I don’t know what it would have been like not to have my mother at home to take care of me, put Band-Aids on my knees.”

For his children, he says, “I want it to be as close as possible to what I had.

“Janis always wanted to be a mom,” he says, and, if they can afford for her to stay home, he asks, “Why would I want someone else to raise my kids?”

The Kerkers are the antithesis of Los Angeles flash and glitz. As an ad agency executive, he is in the business of persuading people that they need to consume.

But he says, smiling, “I don’t buy it. I encourage my kids not to fall for those commercials.”

Janis drives a new-ish (1985) Volvo, but his car is a 10-year-old Chevy Blazer.

Their house, a 1920s Spanish they bought in 1986 for $330,000, is comfortable rather than chic. The living and dining rooms are nicely furnished and there is a collection of whimsical folk art. Beyond these rooms, Janis says, showing a visitor around, “it all falls apart.”

The huge yard, which she mows and waters, is a haphazard tableau. The kitchen, which she describes as dating “from the Year One,” is cut-up and ill-planned. The cluttered garage is Harry’s hobby room, where he makes wood furniture.

If she were a career woman, Janis says, “I’d probably have a housekeeper. (She has half-day cleaning help every two weeks.) My house probably would be finished. I’d have a new kitchen. We’d probably have two new cars.”

She doesn’t dwell on these things. At 37, Janis, a friendly, outgoing redhead, is a homemaker by choice. She would rather talk about her daughter’s Brownie troop, which is learning to ice skate. In her view, “there are a lot of rewards to just being a plain old mother.”

She recounts some of them: “I get to see my daughter’s teacher, to know whether or not she’s a good teacher. I can meet my daughter’s friends, get a feeling for what kind of judgment she uses. If Schuyler wants me to read a book, I’m there. If she needs help with homework, I’m there.”

At the doctor’s office, filling out forms, she doesn’t search for fancy words to describe her occupation. “I always put down ‘mother,’ ” she says, “because that’s what I am, and I’m not embarrassed by it.”

Not once, she says, has she longed to resume her career--”I don’t miss it at all. I love being home.”

She laughs and acknowledges, “There are times when I want to sell this house and give half to my husband and leave my kids and go somewhere and hide.”

Janis says her close friends, almost all of whom work outside the home, “can’t understand how I do it and stay sane.”

Sometimes she, too, wonders.

There are days, Janis says, “when my husband will come home and there’s no dinner and the children have totally destroyed the house. He will say, ‘What did you do today?’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t know. The day just went.’ ”

“Sometimes she goes bonkers,” he says affectionately. “When I come home at night, she’s like ready to kill.”

Janis’ days are frustratingly fragmented. She gets up at 6 a.m. and has a quiet hour with a cup of coffee and the newspaper before waking the girls, feeding them, packing lunches for Harry and Schuyler and driving Schuyler to La Canada Elementary School.

Harry takes care of Holland until Janis returns to dress her and drive her to Parents and Children preschool. At 11:30 a.m., she picks Holland up, they have lunch together, Janis cleans the kitchen, then she and Holland read or play a game. At 1:50 p.m., she picks Schuyler up at school.

Those are just the basics.

Then there’s the extracurricular.

Mondays are fairly typical. At 3 p.m., Janis and another mother drive 10 Brownies of Troop 200 to a Pasadena ice rink. “We have half an hour to get there, get their skates on and get them on the ice,” she says.

She takes two of the Brownies home before returning to make dinner, a meal the Kerkers eat as a family around the kitchen table.

Before her daughters go to bed, Janis reads to them--a young readers’ book for Holly, a chapter from a children’s novel for Schuyler. Then, she says, “Schuyler will read me a book. That usually takes a good hour. Then it’s bedtime. I’m usually in bed by 9.”

And, she admits, she is often “maxed-out.”

On weekends, Harry helps.

If he isn’t refereeing Schuyler’s soccer game, he may take both girls to the Rose Bowl to catch polliwogs or take them for a hike.

“Most people at the office think I live a really boring existence,” Harry says. “Their wives all work,” he adds, and they have trouble understanding the Kerkers’ life style. “But they also think it’s unusual I’ve been married for 17 years. They don’t know anybody who’s been married for 17 years.”

He eschews office parties and gatherings that exclude Janis; he limits out-of-town travel. He dropped out of the Advertising League’s softball team because it took two week nights and one weekend day. The Kerkers do not accept last-minute invitations and rarely entertain, almost never for reasons of advancing his career.

She says, “I don’t feel real comfortable having people I don’t know come over for dinner.”

He says his colleagues “are spontaneous L.A. and we’re the Cleavers. Ward and June couldn’t just get up and leave the kids.”

It seems almost inevitable that the Kerkers would have found a place like La Canada Flintridge, a city of more than 20,000 that Harry describes as “so middle America, it’s corny.” High school football games and town picnics.

Janis is a Bostonian. She met Harry in Boston when both were working for a mail-order catalogue house. He had gone to Boston University, she to Boston College and then to a fashion design school. Fleeing the weather, they moved seven years ago to California when he was offered the art director’s job with the agency that is now HDM.

Schuyler was then 3 months old and Janis, after working 12 years in the design field--for companies that included “Faded Glory” jeans and a leading maker of maternity fashions--had decided to quit.

She was 30 and, she says, “I was ready. I’d tried to make a name for myself, but I never became a Calvin Klein.”

It had been an adjustment. As a working wife, she says, “I’d think nothing of going out and dropping half a paycheck on clothing. And we used to eat out a lot. We stopped that.”

Her salary, about $30,000 a year, made it possible for them to vacation in Nantucket and Bermuda, keep horses and belong to a local hunt club.

They had bought a house on 14 acres in suburban Sherborn, Mass. When they moved West, they kept the house for a year, unsure whether they would stay. That house turned out to be a splendid investment, on which they doubled their $50,000.

The move to California was accomplished typically Kerker-style. Janis says, “My husband drove a U-Haul truck to save money. I left practically everything I owned behind.”

Los Angeles was a shock--$1,200 a month for a rental house. As soon as they could, they bought a house in Silver Lake to get into the real estate market.

But when Schuyler was entering kindergarten, they started looking for a more family-oriented neighborhood. They found La Canada Flintridge. Profits on their first two houses made it possible for them to buy up.

“Los Angeles never really felt comfortable to us,” Harry says. “Los Angeles is a really hard place to raise a family.”

Says Janis: “There is a real sense of community in La Canada. I know all our neighbors and they know our kids and we look out for each other. My neighbor across the street took my tonsils out.”

But even in suburbia, she has found, she is a rarity among her contemporaries.

Few of the mothers at her daughters’ schools are not working outside the home and as a result, she says, “you get real pressured” to volunteer for activities ranging from a Girl Scout boutique to a pumpkin patch sale.

“People get real insulted when you say no,” she says. Their attitude is, ‘What else are you doing?’ ”

Until last year, she says, “I never said no. I did, did, did, did, did. I even thought of lying and saying, ‘I’m going back to work.’ ”

Sometimes, she admits, she resents the career mothers who never say yes. “There must be something they can do,” she says. “They can’t expect it to be the same people all the time. You get really burned out.”

There are times, Janis says, when she wonders where she went wrong.

Those are the mornings when “I haven’t put on my makeup or washed my hair and I’m wearing these paint-spattered jeans and I see this woman who is impeccably dressed, silk dress and heels, and she looks at me like I look like a bag of laundry. And she’s right. I do.”

Even worse, Janis says, is “if I do get dressed up and people don’t know who I am.”

She is quick to say that spending most of her waking hours with 5- and 7-year-olds is not the most intellectually stimulating activity.

“When I do go out, and I put my adult clothes on, it can sometimes be difficult for me because I’ll have the tendency to start talking about my children,” she says. “So I’ll talk sports to the men and with the women I’ll talk clothes.”

Still, Janis emphasizes, she would not change her life except out of economic necessity.

“I see these women in Flintridge,” she says. “They live in mansions. He has a Mercedes and she has a Jaguar, plus a Jeep Wagoneer on the side.” Both husband and wife are professionals, working 10-hour days.

“I don’t understand why they’re doing it,” she says. “They’re going out to dinner every night, to the theater. You just wonder when they’re with their children.”

Sometimes, Harry says, it seems as though “the whole city’s children are being raised by people from Mexico. They’re really the children of gardeners and maids,” many of whom can’t speak English.

Basically, Janis says, “They’re being baby-sat by the TV.”

And, in many instances, they observe, they are being reared by well-meaning care-takers who are afraid to say no to the child for fear of losing their jobs.

Says Harry: “My kids enjoy having a mother at home, someone who can tell them ‘yes’ when ‘yes’ is in order and ‘no’ when ‘no’ is in order. You’ve got a little kid looking for some guidance who wants you to say ‘no.’ ”

Earlier this year, when she had her tonsils out, Janis had to put the girls in day care.

They hated it. “They were really monsters,” she says. She spoils Schuyler, Holland and Harry in non-material ways, she acknowledges--they even turn their noses up at food that comes out of a can or a jar.

Harry does not denigrate Janis’ contribution to the household.

“It’s a real hard job,” he says. “I don’t know how she does it. I have to give Janis credit. She gets involved.”

Their life “sounds real corny, I suppose,” he says, “but a real American family, what families are supposed to be like, is really corny. I think part of the reason families have fallen apart is money, getting wrapped up in the rat race, having to have the new car every year, having to have the 5,000-square-foot house.”

One result, he says, is the “just throw money at them” school of child rearing. He adds, “Janis is my dose of reality and common sense. She’ll say, ‘You don’t really need that. What’s wrong with you?’ If she were in the same world I’m in, we’d be wrapped up in it, too.”

Janis thinks too much of today’s parenting consists of affections bought. She doesn’t care, she says, if every one of Schuyler’s second-grade classmates is head-to-toe in designer labels like Guess? and Reebok.

“We don’t buy those,” she says firmly. “I’m not going to spend $200 on an outfit. I just hope she has enough self-esteem that she’s not going to buckle with that pressure.” She believes children “should have to want things. It’s perfectly normal to want things.”

And, she says, if she were working to buy all those things, “When would I see my children?”

Janis believes her own upbringing fortified her desire to be a full-time mother--”I want something better for my girls than what I had.” She was the older child in a family she describes as dysfunctional and in which alcohol, she says, was a problem. Today she is estranged from her parents.

To her, being a full-time mother means more than just not having a paid job. Although her own mother was not a career woman, she says, she was a “club animal.” She sees today’s counterpart in women who leave their children with sitters to go to lunch, shop or play golf or tennis.

If Janis were offered a good job today, Harry says, “I wouldn’t be real happy about it. I may feel differently when the kids are in school full-time.”

Once in awhile, she muses about taking in-home work to supplement their income but is afraid that would claim too much of her time and defeat the purpose of being home. As it is, she says, there aren’t enough hours in the day and she has so much to do she has to write everything down.

“My children call her ‘Mommyforgetful,’ ” Harry says. They even have a little song, ‘Mommyforgetful forgot to buy milk. . . . ‘ “

At the ad agency, whose accounts include Federal Express International, Hewlitt-Packard and Westin International, Harry has made it clear that his career must accommodate his family. For two years, he says, he fell into the trap of working 14-hour days.

Then, about six months ago, he had a long talk with himself and decided, “That’s enough. It’s time for me to go out and ride bikes with my kids.”

So much for the rise up the corporate ladder.

When he talks about the future, he ponders the possibility of being able to live in a small city in the South or East, a smog-free, child-friendly place, and being a computer commuter and he wonders if he would miss the “cutting-edge” creative energy of Los Angeles.

“I don’t think about living here forever,” he says. “I don’t think we can afford to live here forever.”

Janis doesn’t talk about “when” she goes back to work. “As children get older,” she says, “they need you just as much as when they’re younger, I think more.” She mentions in the same breath absentee parents and teen-age drug abuse and drinking.

She knows, too, that she can’t have it both ways, that “I’m going to have to give up some things for myself for my children, if I want them to have the best possible upbringing. Say I don’t go back to work until my kids get out of high school,” she says. “I’ll be nearly 50. That’s tough to get back into the job market.”

FACTS ABOUT FAMILIES

* A language other than English is spoken in one-quarter of California households and almost one-third of homes in Los Angeles County.

* Forty-five percent of Los Angeles County householders own the dwellings in which they live, compared to 65% nationally. The county’s homeless population is estimated at 35,000-50,000.

* The number of single-parent families has doubled in the last 20 years and is close to one-quarter of all households. Nearly half of the children born today will live in a single-parent home during their lives.

* The number of Californians age 85 or older will increase 81% by the turn of the century. In 2015, one-third of the population will be 65 or older. One-third of the elderly, the fastest-growing population segment, live alone.

* Almost one-quarter of the state’s children live in poverty--1.78 million children--double the number 20 years ago. Almost half of single-parent families live in poverty.

* The median income of two-paycheck California families is $38,346 annually, that of two-parent, one-income families $25,803. Two-thirds of all working women are either their own or their family’s sole support or are married to men earning less than $15,000 a year.

* Licensed child care in California serves about 600,000 children, while an estimated 1.6 million children under age 14 need care. The greatest need is for infant care and after-school “latchkey” care. More than 60% of mothers with children under age 18 hold jobs.

* There were 18,575 births to mothers age 19 and under in Los Angeles County in 1986, the last year for which statistics are available. These births are increasing in number while fewer of the mothers are receiving adequate prenatal care.

Sources: City of Los Angeles Task Force on Family Diversity, California Joint Select Task Force on the Changing Family, Los Angeles County, the Family Diversity Project, Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.