My little girl.
This is a bit off of my beat but it’s the Thanksgiving holiday and one of the wonderful things about the Forbes platform is that we can indulge our impulses and see if anyone cares about what we have to say.
This morning, as my children were eating their pancake breakfast, my 7-year-old daughter turned to me and said, “When I’m a mom I’m not going to get a job. I’m just going to look after my children.”
I asked her why.
“Because James, who I’m going to marry, wants to get a full time job. If we both have jobs we’ll have to hire a babysitter to look after our children,” she said.
Forget for a moment that my child already seems to have her wedding planned out. It was her clear desire not to work that struck like a guilt-tipped arrow right to my heart. Both my husband and I work full time. I’m lucky enough to work from home but that doesn’t make me a stay-at-home mother. My children are out of the house at school and after-school care most of the day and when they are home I’m often peering at them over the top of my laptop as I try to squeeze in extra work minutes throughout the evenings and weekends.
I don’t think there’s a working mom out there who doesn’t experience some degree of guilt about the choices she has made. A part of me wishes I could be there to pick my kids up after school and take them to soccer and help them with their homework. But a bigger part of me is very happy to be sitting at my desk writing or out at a meeting talking to the interesting adults who populate Hollywood.
But at the same time I recognize the professional limitations inherent in trying to have it all. I’m not the world’s best mother but I’m also not the executive editor of a magazine. While this article from our contributor Gene Marks about Why Most Women Will Never Become CEO left my highly annoyed, I also recognized a lot of the points he was making. Particularly this section:
But let’s admit it, when little Johnny gets sick at school who’s the first person that’s usually called? When a child is up at night coughing, which parent is staying up with her? When the plumber has to make an emergency morning visit, who’s generally staying at home to deal with it? It’s usually mom. And even if she has a full time job too.
By working (and working at a career I love) I hope that I’m teaching my daughter that as a woman, she can be anything she wants to be. She can work and be fulfilled professionally and have children. I’d also like to think that by the time she gets old enough to work, attitudes in the workplace will have changed from the above so that both parents will be recognized as equal caregivers and employees will be encouraged to find balance and have lives outside of the office.
That might be a pipe dream but it’s one that can get closer to becoming a reality the more women there are in the workplace.
Which is part of why my daughter’s statement bothered me so much. What if the backlash from all of us strong working moms is a generation of daughters who don’t want to work? What if they want to stay home and nurture their children on their own?
I told my daughter that if she wants to stay home, that’s a good choice because I truly feel that as women we should support each other regardless of whether we decide to work outside of the home or not. But I also told her to consider finding a carer that she can love. That it’s possible to to have both.
I don’t want to ever push her too hard to find a job because I know that leads to backlash and of course, she’s only 7. She’ll change her mind many times throughout the rest of her life. But I hope she’ll want to work at least when she’s a young adult, even if she ultimately decides to stay home with her kids. It will be interesting to see.
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