In this tough economy, Sandra Sanches is like a lot of mothers: She is cutting expenses by shopping smarter and simplifying life for her two young children.

Brand name foods and clothes? No more. Impulse purchases? In check. Multiple trips running children here and there? A thing of the past.

As a one-income family and with her husband's job steady but vulnerable, Sanches is shifting her mothering to fit the times.

"I don't think my children have it any worse or any better," said Sanches of Magna. "This economy? Yes it hurts, but it is getting us back to hopefully not living off credit cards, bank loans, keeping up with the Jones."

After decades of flush times that saw the advent of competitive parenting, many mothers find themselves steering their families through new financial realities.

Steven Mintz, director of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center at Columbia University, said there is no doubt the economic downturn is a family crisis.

"Every time a home is foreclosed, each time a parent is laid off, a family -- and the family's children -- suffers," said Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood . "And even when adults keep their jobs, they worry, and parental stress has many negative consequences for children."

Mintz points to the Great Depression of the 1930s and the lasting imprint it left on children who lived through it.

"As adults, they attached tremendous significance to security and adopted a family-oriented existence," he said in an e-mail.

The era also altered family dynamics as mothers often became the primary parent and children were expected to contribute economically and in other ways to support the family, Mintz said.

'We were poor, but we never realized it'

Betty Pierson, 91, remembers making weekly rounds in her Salt Lake City neighborhood with two siblings to sell their mother's homemade pies and baked goods. Lillian Zabriskie Holladay, Pierson's mother, had a business called Mrs. Holladay's Baked Goods that helped support the family at the height of the Depression after their father was struck by a drunken driver and unable to work.

"She'd sell a nice big cake for 35 cents," Pierson said.

When Pierson entered South High School, she had just one store-bought outfit.

"I wore that every day to school," she said of the pink and gray skirt and sweater set. "I'd go home at night and rinse it out. Everybody's family was in the same boat. Nobody was rich."

She married after graduating and moved with her husband to Dallas, where he got a job as a musician. They lived in a sublet room in a large home.

"Everybody was doing that," she said. Pierson also said she came up with a bare-bones meal plan.

"In 1939, with a $5 bill you could buy a sack of groceries that high," she said, drawing the shape of a foot-high sack with her hands, "and another sack with a boiled ham. I would do that every weekend and we'd have enough to eat.

Within a year, she had her first child.

Within their few years in Texas, Pierson, also a musician, had to sell a new tenor saxophone, an older alto saxophone and her music stands because the couple needed money.

"I hated to sell it," she said. "I got $80 out of that tenor sax and I know I paid $200."

Maurine Christensen of Gunnison was born in 1927. Her father was a sheepherder, which meant her mother, Carla Anderson, now 99, was often on her own managing the family.

"We were poor, but we never realized it," Christensen said. "Mother worked really hard. We never went hungry. She cooked and baked and canned fruit."

Christensen said her mother would get used clothes, cut them apart and refashion them for the children to wear.

Haircuts at home now

All of that might sound familiar to today's mothers.

Sanches has reduced her family's food budget $30 to $40 a week by meal planning, using coupons, shopping sales and buying generic brands. Daughter Kylee, 7, attends a charter school 20 miles away; Sanches often stays in the area until school is over to save on gas. And she recently began tending a child to bring in a little extra money.

"I look at kids now and they want the Chuck E. Cheese birthday party with all their classmates, and I think that that is something at this point you can say, 'You can have 10 or a family dinner instead,'" she said.

Erica Ostler and her husband, Ruben, are both students at Utah State University. Finances were already tight when the economy soured. Ruben's job as a youth counselor was reduced from 40 to 32 hours. When their used car recently broke down, every penny they had went to repairs.

Then spring made its peek-a-boo arrival.

"I couldn't continue putting my 18-month-old in winter clothes, so I had to find a solution," said Erica Ostler, 22, who is job hunting. She was able to pick up a couple summer outfits through Freecycle, an online goods exchange network.

"We went to a secondhand store for the rest," she said in an e-mail. "We went with a $10 limit. Talk about cutting back. Of course, our son doesn't care. The clothes get food on them the same way new clothes do. While the used clothes may not have the new look -- or the price tag -- after a few weeks, no one will know that we bought them used."

Another cost-savings measure: Erica gave William his first haircut at home.

The upside

Mintz said that for a quarter century "anxiety and guilt have been the hallmark of mothering. Mothers worry incessantly about their kids, not just about their physical well-being, but their psychological happiness and their schoolwork," he said. "Many mothers never want their children to be bored and want to enrich their lives in every way imaginable -- through various lessons, tutoring, chauffeuring, and sports, among other things."

With money tighter and stress elevated, "it becomes ever harder to be a perfect mom," Mintz said.

Or is it?

Some moms say the need to scale back their lives is turning out to be a welcome respite.

Kristy Muday of Salt Lake City, who has 2- and 4-year-old girls, now has each child in only one outside activity that costs money.

"It's actually kind of nice, our days are a lot more leisurely," she said. "Before when you are so on the go, you don't realize how crazy it is."

Before the economy receded, Muday felt pressure to keep her daughters' days filled with "learning opportunities."

Now, the mornings unroll more slowly. There is no pressure to get out of the jammies and out the door. Her girls are enjoying the leisurely pace and more time with mom, she said.

Muday is rethinking how many summer activities she'll enroll the girls in. There is no shortage of programs that last several days to a week that cost $100 or more.

"But this summer, I'm not going to pay $100 for the three days of entertainment," she said. "It takes off the guilt. If you can't afford it, you can't afford it."

Sanches agrees.

"For so long so many people have been greedy in a way," Sanches said. "For a simple life, all you need is each other."

brooke@sltrib.com; lesley@sltrib.com

Tribune reporter Lesley Mitchell contributed to this report.