Children vs Career: how mothers work it out

MANY mothers struggle to juggle children and a career, and often feel guilty that working means their children are losing out in some way.

However, two high-flying career women with five children between them want to promote the message that families thrive not in spite of working mothers, but because of them.

The pair have written the book Getting To 50/50: How Working Parents Can Have It All to discuss the benefits of being a working parent and to share the secrets for successfully combining career and kids.

And both authors certainly know how hard this can be — Joanna Strober, is managing director of a private equity fund at an investment firm in California and has three children aged seven, 12 and 15. Her co-author Sharon Meers, 47, has two children aged nine and 12, and currently leads global business development and sales for the commerce platform of eBay.

Both women took three months off work for each child they had, then returned full-time. Strober, 45, says: “I wasn’t happy to go back to work — it was hard, but I knew it was the right thing for me and my family.

“We wrote the book because we saw too many fabulous women quitting the jobs they’d worked very hard to get, not because they wanted to but because they thought it was too hard to combine work and family. We wanted to help women like that keep working.”

Strober stresses that she and Meers aren’t saying mothers must work: “I’m not interested in telling women they should work if they don’t want to. But if they want to, they should and they should know that it’s fine.”

She says research, and their own interviews with mums and dads who both work, shows that children with two working parents gain independence, self-confidence, cognitive and social skills, and strong connections to both parents.

Yes, both parents working means childcare is usually necessary, and there are scare stories about childcare damaging children in some way. Strober rejects such notions. She points out that how parents behave and treat their children influences their emotional, behavioural and cognitive development at least twice as much as than any form of childcare.

“In other words, stop worrying about leaving your child with someone else and focus on what happens when you and your husband get home.”

Simple ideas to make a working mum’s home life easier include making simple meals and freezing batches, forgetting about tidiness, accepting offers of help with shopping and errands, and even getting an easy-to-manage haircut.

But the critical key to coping with the demands of a family and work, says Strober, is for the mother to get her partner or husband to share equal responsibility for the home and kids hence the book’s title Getting To 50/50.

Of course, children who don’t have a dad or don’t live with him can thrive too, but this book chooses to focus on two-parent homes, stressing that if mums and dads embrace 50/50, children will benefit from two parenting styles. However, says Strober, it should be a truly equal partnership, where Dad is treated as an equal, without repeatedly having his efforts corrected or criticised. “Try to work collaboratively, and don’t try to be the boss.”

Strober says many women work because it’s important for them psychologically. Working mothers are also good role models for children, she believes. In a nutshell, she says, one part of the problem for working mothers is their mindset, and one part is the relationship between them and their husband.

“All the research shows your kids are going to turn out perfectly fine whether you work or not, so don’t quit your job just because you think your kids will turn out better if you do,” she says.

* Getting To 50/50 by Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober is published by Piatkus, €20.