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Interesting..
Where we live it's practically unheard of to SAH. The cost of living requires that two parents work, in most cases. Although we don't make as much money as our peers, I feel fortunate that my husband has made it work with his jobs so that he can spend half the day time with DS and we only need to put him in preschool for a half day.
Now, could he find a full time job that pays more? Sure. But we'd then be paying more for preschool and he'd lose that time with dad.. I don't know. There's pros and cons to both situations.

Right now I work a full time job in an office that's very understanding of family needs (sick days, appointments, etc.). I also get to work in a creative position where I truly enjoy the work I do. Could I make more money somewhere else? Probably. But I might not have the flexibility or satisfaction that I do now.

Another thing: we rent. We LOVE where we live and could never afford to buy here based on our current salaries. We could move and it would add a commute and my husband might not be able to work in the way he does now. So do we make a decision to purchase a home somewhere we don't want to live and that would make our work days longer and more stressful, less satisfying? Probably not.

Probably the biggest leap I made was from full time SAHM to full time grad student and part time teacher. Then I had another baby and now I'm back to full time SAHM while also taking some online classes, until this fall when I'm back to work/school at the equivalent of a full time schedule. The experience taught me that I definitely prefer being outside the home to being a stay at home mother full-time, but it also taught me how not to put too much of my identity into one thing, because motherhood, work, and academics all come with their drawbacks. Probably the best balance was when I was taking online classes, working two days a week, and had my older son in daycare 3 days a week. That was the best for everyone I think, except financially it was a stretch, thus why I have mine at home full time now.

Not related to work/life balance, the biggest leap I made was to go to a therapist. One thing we work on is how to acknowledge how something may be "best," but is not always best for us as a family. For example I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to have family dinner every night, but this was too taxing on my youngest, who goes to bed around 6:00 so right in the middle of dinner. So we acknowledged that family dinner is ideal, but not now realistic, therefore we can let it go, even grieve the loss of the "ideal" and instead move toward something more realistic. So now my youngest eats leftovers from last night or I roast him some veggies. Now he's 11 months and he can stay up a little later and he eats more of what we eat. This approach of acknowledging perfection, grieving that it isn't possible, and then moving toward a healthier standard really came in handy last week when I missed an important deadline in my grad program. It was sobering because I usually don't make mistakes like this. But that same week we closed on a house and I have been working on my relationship with husband and kids and trying to put more time into that, so I sort of had to acknowledge that I had truly put other things above school, and that was the cause of my oversight...it truly was my fault, not my "plight," but also not something to beat myself up about.

For a long time I put my kids over myself and my marriage. After about two years of that, I started to realize that wasn't manageable. So now the order is: me, marriage, kids. I can feel myself get depleted and I try to correct it fast. Because if I'm depleted I can't do anything for anyone else. So my number one priority is emotional regulation for me, and everything else flows from that. No one expectation-- homemade dinner, sex 3 times a week, no screen time, weight loss...whatever else the world demands--comes before that one for me.

@Mrs. Sketchbook: I love your way of gaining perspective! I'm going to try it out.

I guess DH and I are just really intentional about planning our careers around our family life. Maintaining a health spiritual life, marriage, and family come first for us. Careers and jobs are important to us, but only to the extent that they serve our family's interest.

DH and I got married at 30 as I was finishing up law school and he was still unemployed and looking for work a year after graduating from law school. We spent a hungry summer while I studied for the Bar Exam and extreme couponed to get by while he applied for a zillion jobs.

We spent a lot of time talking that summer about how we wanted to structure our life and family because 1) we were starting from scratch, and 2) law school had actually been a career change for me as a means of finding something more stable and structured from the zany 100+ hours a week I'd been working in politics. I went into law school looking for a lower-paying, but very steady government job that would allow me to have security and flexibility for the family and future I wished to have. DH was just looking at dollar signs because we had 2 sets of law school loans to pay back and thought the only way we could get ahead was to land a big-firm job working heinous hours. But I questioned whether that would really work for us in the long run and we sorta brainstormed what our "ideal" would look like and took intentional steps to try and reach that.

Looking back, that summer was extremely valuable and we were lucky in a lot of ways because we didn't start our marriage in a place where we had existing careers to work around. Instead, we set goals and ideals of what we wanted our family life to look and and endeavored to accomplish them systematically. I found and started at my ideal government job, which gave us a small but steady paycheck and cheap health insurance while DH started his own law practice in our spare bedroom. He eventually also took a pseudo-legal crappy government job that required 4 hours of commuting a day, but we weren't willing to let go of my job, which had incredible benefits and the ability to work part-time down the road. The hours and pay at DH's job were bad, but it gave us some extra money to put towards our student loans, it didn't conflict with his law practice, and it allowed him to convert his years of military service to federal retirement credit and buy airtime for a pension later in life. It also gave us a fallback in case I got pregnant and needed to take time off work. In the meantime, DH worked nights and weekends to diligently build his business.

DH even took on a third job teaching paralegal and criminal law courses at a vocational school for a year and a half on top of this. His work hours were insane, but we did it because with his RA/TA experience and journal publications from law school, it allowed him to apply for teaching jobs at other colleges. This eventually led to him teaching business law at a 4-year university while also running his practice. This would give him the ability to work from home several days a week and give him school breaks off - ideal for a small business owner and eventually a dad. DH's business grew, but we lived super frugally in the meantime and dumped all our spare money into our loans. I had several health problems during this time, so having my secure government job was invaluable, since I didn't have to worry about losing my job.

DS is 19 months now, and while I'm due with our 2nd in a month and I'm nervous about how the balance is going to work out after he arrives, we're overall very pleased with how our current family life has played out. I took a full year off for maternity leave for my first under my job's benefits, and we were able to afford a largely unpaid leave it because we'd learned to live so frugally the first 3 years of our marriage. I was able to return to work 3 days a week and we can afford that because we paid off my law school loans. That extra time allows me to take on a lot of household chores to balance my husband's work hours and be more present for both DH and DS.

DH still works long hours between his business and his teaching, but he has the summers and winters off and since he only has to go in to teach 2-3 days a week, he's at home the rest of the week to help pitch in with daycare pick up and drop off. Having his own business means he can schedule things in his private practice around our family schedule when needed, even if he has to make up for it later. He often works several hours after DS is in bed for the night, but stops to eat dinner and go to the park with him in the early evening on most days. And we're able to enjoy Sundays as a family with church, lunch, and play time.

We're constantly still planning and tweaking things to try and support and improve our family ideal. We have regular conversations about next steps for our careers and job opportunities and we're always trying to be more frugal. For instance, one tough thing since DS was born was that DH has been getting his Executive MBA on nights and weekends. But we were able to get the degree for really cheap with his remaining GI bill benefits and we knew that while it would suck to do this with a newborn in the house, in the long run, having a JD/MBA would open up more job opportunities at other colleges for him and there wouldn't be a better time for our family. (Sounds odd, but he's been turned down for business LAW positions in the past because he didn't have an MBA!) Currently, the school he teaches at is 75 miles away from home and while he only has to go in 2-3 days a week, those are still 12 hour days where he's spending 3+ hours driving. Obviously, that's just a lot of time wasted, so he'd much prefer to teach closer to home at any one of several colleges near us that have perfectly good business programs.

We still live frugally for the most part and are working hard at trying to pay off DH's law school loans in the next few years and bought a much more modest house than we could have afforded to continue to give us the flexibility we value as a family. I'm extremely grateful that I'll be able to take another year off with my second child and will be returning to a part-time schedule after that as well.

The trade off here has been that I'm obviously not contributing a lot financially to my family, both on a day-to-day income basis and from a retirement standpoint (my pension working half-time is accruing sloooooooowly). That's a lot of money stress to put on my husband, since he's basically gotta support all of us, save enough for retirement for 2, and keep our kids' college funds growing while paying off our student loans. It goes without saying he's always thinking about profits and maximizing our tax and savings potential. But we think of it as a team effort - I help him with his business building and he knows could never do all this stuff with his career and schooling without me having his back, doing the behind the scenes things to keep our household running smoothly, and providing the stability, cheap health benefits, and flexibility my job affords. Overall, we are happy with the situation the way it is since our marriage is stable and we get to spend time with our son every day. It just takes a LOT of planning and forethought and a lot of prayer and luck!

I had a hard time with my career after having kids. I teach (elementary/preschool) and that job is so easy to get "lost" in. Late hours, weekends, meetings, etc. I wanted to pull back after my first child and the principal at my school didn't understand that & gave me a difficult time about it, so I called her bluff and I left. Originally I thought of transferring to a different school, but I decided to teach preschool instead. I'm happy with that choice, although I miss the teacher perks (vacations, being salaried, etc). I'm so much less stressed and it's allowed us to financially afford a 2nd child (daycare discount!) I know I'll eventually return to public school but my kids will be older so I think it'll work better as far as balance.
For everything else, I do what @Mrs. Sketchbook: does and see a therapist when things are stressful. My big things are learning to relax, communicating better with my husband, and not feel guilty about saying "no" or causing "trouble". I can say no, but it makes me feel so bad I almost never do! I think counseling is a huge support in the increasing demand on people to do "more" or "better" like you talked about. But also, prioritizing is just a fact. Some things have to fall to the bottom of the list & we need to take the pressure off ourselves and say it's okay (for me, it's housework. I hate that our place is a cluttered disaster, but it's not filthy & that's got to be enough for me)