Edel Coffey: 'Teen-ternity leave', and striking the balance between work and parenting

Picture: Bríd O'Donovan

Now that my youngest child is about to turn seven, I’m hearing a lot of the statement, ‘It’s great to get your independence back’. 

I’m also starting to frequently hear a seemingly opposing comment: ‘They actually need you even more when they get older.’ 

Perhaps children just need parents all the time. 

In the midst of this commentary, I came across an article last week about a new trend of mothers taking ‘teen-ternity leave’, that is, taking a few years off or giving up careers altogether to help their children through the difficult period known as adolescence. 

The subject of teen-ternity has been tipped back onto the agenda by a few high-profile women leaving jobs to spend more time with their children and help them prepare for exams.

I seemed to be seeing the subject everywhere I looked. Later on in the week, I read an interview with Connaught rugby player Cian Prendergast, who said, “My mum gave up a pretty promising career in the army to look after us when we started secondary school”. 

Huh, I thought. So maybe ‘teen-ternity leave’ was not a new trend after all.

Figuring out how to be there for our children, whilst living in a world that generally requires any and all parents to work to keep a roof over their heads, is a hard balance to strike. 

It’s not a new problem but I had been thinking about it a lot since hearing an interview with the author Gerry Hussey on the Síle Seoige podcast last month. 

Hussey made some uncomfortable points about parenting; I say uncomfortable because his comments probably made every parent in the land, including me, feel guilty about how much (or little) time they spend with their children. 

But they were also uncomfortable because it felt like there was a lot of truth in Hussey’s comments.

He asked: “Do we spend enough time with our children? Do we give them what they need? Or have we a world where two parents for lots of different reasons are gone working all the time and we’re outsourcing our children? We live in this crazy society where parents are under so much pressure financially, it’s almost impossible now to buy a house, and parents are under so much stress that they don’t get to spend enough time with their children or if they do they’re highly stressed when they’re with their children and I just think we need to stop and ask what is the society we need?”

Hussey’s comments brought me back to the thoughts I had when I first became a mother, thoughts that mainly consisted of the question: how does anyone do this and work full-time? 

The reality is most don’t but instead cobble together a mish-mash of childcare and end up taking career breaks, parental leave, or even ‘teen-ternity leave’ to fill in the gaps. 

Soon after, when I wrote my debut novel Breaking Point, I was still trying to make sense of this modern reality. I wanted to address how the two-income-as-standard family unit had shaped our society, our families, our choices and lack thereof.

There are other issues at play, of course, apart from financial costs. We have demeaned the status of motherhood so that some women, even if they want to be stay-at-home mothers, don’t feel like they can for fear of judgment. They don’t want to be stigmatised as just mothers.

The confluence of teen-ternity leave and Hussey’s comments had me thinking a lot about how little choice many parents have. 

For most people, the cost of housing and lack of housing support means there is no choice but for parents to work full-time. 

Forty years ago, when I was a child, our family of four lived on my dad’s tradesman’s salary in the council house that my parents eventually bought. I don’t know if a family could afford to do that today. 

In fact, today it seems to be only the very privileged who can survive on one wage and have a second parent at home as a full-time parent. 

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting a return to gendered roles of men at work and women at home. 

Nor is this column supposed to make parents feel bad about working. I work and I take time away from my children to do so and they regularly tell me how much they dislike it but, like many parents, I do it anyway. 

I’m talking about choice and the fact that so few people in Ireland, men and women, feel like they have one when it comes to how they are living and how they are raising their children. 

As our housing and homeless crisis has gotten worse over successive governments, the choices available to people in terms of how they raise their children have narrowed.

When Hussey asked what is the society we need, I thought the society I would like to see is one that provides housing, healthcare, and childcare for all. 

And by childcare, I’m including the option of a parent not working in order to raise a child if that’s what they want to do.