Zachary Gray is calmly driving a plastic motorcycle across the carpet, engrossed, it seems, in making motor noises with his lips.

But then his mother looks away.

Danette Gray doesn't have time to protest before the 3-year-old has bounced out the door of her West Jordan home and is loping, gleefully, across his parents' well-manicured lawn. "This is why I have a lock on the door," says a breathless Gray as she lugs the little boy back indoors. "Zach's a little escape artist."

The stay-at-home mom gets tired sometimes of chasing the little tyke around all day but not often. Reading children's books, playing cars and cleaning up spit-up is the career Gray has dreamed of since she was a little girl.

"It was just born in me," she says.

Gray is not alone in Utah. With just 53 percent of married mothers in the workforce, Utah has the highest percent of stay-at-home moms in the country. But as a 38-year-old, middle-class white woman, Gray doesn't fit the national profile for the job, based on a new U.S. Census Bureau report titled "America's Families and Living Arrangements: 2007."

In a first-ever analysis of stay-at-home moms, the U.S. Census Bureau found that, nationally, career mothers are more likely to be younger, Hispanic and living in poverty. In Utah, however, demographers report stay-at-home moms, though still typically younger, are simply more likely to be members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"This is Mormon culture region," said University of Utah research economist Pam Perlich. "The reason we have more moms staying home is not because we have more Hispanic women, it's because we have more Mormon women."

The LDS Church, in its 1995 "The Family: A Proclamation to the World," announced that mothers are "primarily responsible for the nurture of their children."

Cami McQuiston, a 35-year-old mother of four, interpreted that guidance as, "be a mom, first and foremost." She dropped out of college after she started having children.

"We've always been taught that being at home is good for your children," said the Kaysville mother, adding that her decision was also heavily influenced by her own experience growing up with a working mother.

"Maybe someday I'd like to have a career," she said, "but not while my children are young."

National data indicates many stay-at-home moms don't work because they lack the education or skills necessary to secure a job. For most Utah women, though, that's not true, said Cheryl Wright, chair of the family and consumer studies department at the University of Utah.

"In our state you see women staying out of the labor force because they can afford it," she said. "This is a conscious decision."