Women at Work - The Upside of Working Motherhood

Episode Date: April 29, 2019

There are a lot of reasons women should feel optimistic about having both a career and children. Two professors tell us about the takeaways from their research on working motherhood and from their experience raising three kids each. They give advice about managing expectations, transitions, and difficult times. Guests: Danna Greenberg and Jamie Ladge.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. It's hard to imagine the positive pieces of this story when so much of it is about going to work with clothes that are messed up, your hair undone, worrying about how your boss is going to see you, worrying about how the stay-at-home moms on the playground are going to see you. And that rhetoric makes you feel like you've got to focus on just self-preservation and management. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Nicole Torres. I'm Amy Bernstein.

And I'm Amy Gallo. This episode, we're looking at an aspect of working motherhood that, in my opinion, doesn't get nearly enough attention, the positive pieces. There are lots of reasons women should feel hopeful about having a career and children. We're talking to two professors who, between their academic research and experience raising three kids each, are experts on working motherhood. Dana Greenberg of Babson College and Jamie Lodge of Northeastern University. A lot of the women that have been part of our research over the years are older first-time mothers, so much of their identity is wrapped up in their professional life. And pregnancy and impending motherhood throws a real wrench in that identity.

They've organized their insights and advice into a book. It's called Maternal Optimism. Jamie, let me start with you. What were you seeing in the coverage of working motherhood that made you want to do this work? Well, as you all know, there's no shortage of books about working mothers. And we knew that there were quite a few and we were a little bit hesitant, you know, to get into it. But we were frustrated by a lot of the rhetoric, having it all, and a lot of the negativity surrounding the issues that a lot of working mothers face. And certainly that exists, all the biases and stigma associated with being a working mother. But we really wanted to, first and foremost, try to come at this with a very positive spin. Not that it's all positive, but there are experiences that women face throughout the course of their motherhood transitions and working mother transitions that work out well. And we wanted to be able to share those stories through the stories that we had seen in the research that we've done

over many years. The other thing we were sort of tired of was kind of this one-size-fits-all approach. We know that a lot of women share common ground with their experiences around being a working mother, but we also think that no two mothers and working mother stories are alike, and we wanted to make sure that we shared a wide variety of different experiences in the book. Part of that of no two mother stories being alike is the idea that there is not a start and end to being a working mother. So many of the books out there talk about this idea as if you've returned to work, you've made it, you are a working mother. And that's just the first of so many transitions women experience throughout their careers as working mothers. And we felt like it was really important to help women start to understand this is a long distance run. It's

not short term. It's not just about return to work and their constant iterations going on. And we thought giving them some perspective on that could be really helpful. So in your book, you talk about how working motherhood really starts well before you have a baby in your arms. What do you mean by that? So one of the things that we find is how frequently young women, long before they even have a partner, are starting to ask questions about combining work and motherhood in ways that I don't think we did in our generation. And one of the things that we worry a lot about and we see is that women are making choices early on that are about, will this be a career that I can eventually combine

work and motherhood? And so I'll give you a perfect example. My daughter is a chemistry and women's health major. She's pre-med. And she recently had a family member say to her, why don't you think about becoming a physician's assistant or a nurse practitioner? Because it's going to be much easier down the road to combine work and family. Now, my daughter is really career driven. She's thinking about surgery and specialties.

She is not, by the way, a nurturing primary caregiver practice kind of person. So nurse practitioner is not her thing. But women start to do that as young women, even in college and in those early years. And one of the things that we see and we really advise women is that this is a really important time to build your career, to figure out what you want to do and to use the time and space you have to build up your power, your credibility, your skill sets, your knowledge, so that if and when you have a family, you have the resources to ask for what you need. And as I go back to my daughter's story, as a physician who perhaps someday is in a specialty, there are lots more ways to create a flexible schedule if that's what she wants, or to structure, or to have the financial resources to have the child care she needs

than would be the case if she were a nurse practitioner. But this is advice many young women are still getting today. So Jamie, your research on working motherhood started with this question. Is there ever a good time to have a baby in terms of your career? And you've studied, you know, the effects that the timing of childbirth can have on a woman's career. What have you found? So one of the things I wanted to do, because there had been tons of research done, particularly in sociology, that looked at the effects of timing childbirth on women's wages and also on promotions. And so we knew that was a problem for women that it's much better to wait to have your first child because during those

early years in your 20s, you know, you're building up your educational attainment, you're making connections and you're building up your network and all the human capital variables are just building up for you. And so that made sense for wages and for promotions. But I actually wanted to find out, well, are women happier? Are they more satisfied with their careers? So I wanted to take a more subjective approach. And so we looked at that. And I mean, sadly, I can't say that there's a magic age

for when the best time is to have a baby. I would have loved to have been the one that discovered what that age was. But I have to be like, you know, typical consultant mode and say it depends because it really it does depend. But one of the things we did find that the women that had their children earlier in their careers were actually more satisfied later on. This is taking more of a life course approach. And we surmise that that's because they had more time that had elapsed since when they started their family. So they were able to build their career back up as opposed to a lot of the women that we've interviewed over the years who are

much older first-time moms, well into their 30s, some in their 40s. And they had kind of the sense of, well, I paid my dues at work. And now that I'm having my child, I can kind of take a step back or I can mold my career however I want to mold. So not a perfect age, but if you want to be happy with your career, it really doesn't matter, but it does seem that you can get going a little bit earlier. So I want to talk about the decision to have more than one child. We know that there are penalties to having more than one kid. Your wages will suffer and so forth. How do women who would like to have more than one kid

stay positive? What should they be thinking about? So one of the things we don't think about is how the family structure changes when you have multiple children. One of the things that we know from our own research is that when women have their first child, one of the biggest challenges

is enabling their partner to be a real partner. Particularly if they're in a situation where they've got a maternity leave and their partner doesn't, they start taking on a lot of the child care responsibilities and they don't figure out a way to really share parental responsibilities with their partner and they don't make them a real partner. When you have a second child, that goes out the window because all of a sudden there's a lot more child care responsibilities to have and they have to be shared. So women have to let up. They have to enable their partner to be a real partner to them, to share some aspects of that child care responsibility, which enables them to be more confident, more engaged at work because

they know that there's another person who's equally capable at home. So that's one of the things that happens in the family that can be really beneficial for a working mother. The other thing that we talk about in our house is that having multiples of children, somebody's always happy and someone's always unhappy. We call it the whack-a-mole game. Remember that old game you had as a child and you'd hit them all and they'd pop right up? But one of the things women often do, working mothers, is they add guilt to themselves when something's not working with their child. Oh, it would be different if I were home full-time, if I wasn't working, if I were focused. When you have multiples, you let that go because you start to realize their challenges, their experience, you know, about them as individual people.

And you see one child's having a good day and one child's having a bad day, and it really has nothing to do with you. It has to do with them. So those feelings of guilt that you're causing this really change. So the second and third and fourth and twelfth child give you perspective. They give you a lot of perspective. You've also accumulated a whole level of knowledge. You get to the third. For me, I had three sequentially. You get to the third, and there's a whole knowledge about how to deal with this, how to ask for help. You start to get much more comfortable being transparent about your work life and your family life because you've been doing it

for a while. It's not a question of, am I a working mother? I have to hide it. What are the people going to think of me? This is who I am. So I actually have a colleague, a CFO at Babson. She has five children. She most recently had the fifth child, and the baby came with her to many, many meetings, and we just passed the baby around. This is a woman whose children range from 19 to probably two,

and she is a rock star CFO. There is no question. And you know what? Her childcare broke down and she needed the baby to be there. And the baby just got passed. But there wasn't the sense of conflict or guilt, which she certainly would have experienced having a first child. Never bring a first child to a meeting. But a fifth child, forget it. All is good. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball?

Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Hey listeners, if you want to hear from more leaders to help you answer questions like, should I talk about my anxiety at work? Or how do I claim my leadership power? Then you should listen to TED Business, hosted by Columbia Business School Professor Thank you. how to apply these lessons in your own life. Listen to TED Business wherever you get your podcasts. So what are the positive benefits of being a working mom? It's funny you ask because I just did a study looking at women and asking them very much that

question. After you've returned to work, what do you experience as positive about that? Or what has enabled you to be more mindful? And there are a couple of different things that we're seeing in the research as we're starting to look at the data. The first of which is perspective. There's a sense of, you know what, how important is this? Where does it fit into my day? How much do I have to do all of this myself? Or is 80% good enough? And that can be helpful for women to do their job more effectively. One of the things we see changing in managers is a stopping of micromanagement because they don't have time to do that.

One of the things that women often do is they want everything to be perfect. They want everyone who's working for them to have everything perfect. And when they return to work after having a child, they realize, you know what, that's not what really needs to get done. And that's not helpful for my team. The third thing, which is a really interesting one we're starting to see, is something we're seeing a relational capacity. Women talk about returning to work and having now be in this caretaker role. All of a sudden, I'm better with my employees. I'm more thoughtful. I'm more understanding. I don't always like what they're saying. I don't always agree with what they're saying. But I have a little bit more patience for dealing with people in a way that

maybe I didn't before becoming a parent. So I suspect that these are things where this study, we're looking specifically at women, but I would suspect these are absolutely very similar things for working men when they become fathers and are engaged caregivers. One of the themes I took away from your book is that working moms need to have realistic expectations. I would say lower their expectations, but I'm trying to be optimistic. What are some examples of how you can set realistic expectations? And maybe you could specifically talk about the crappy dinners example. I loved that example in your book. Crappy dinners example. So the crappy dinner idea is a great idea that we've seen written about where people get…

Otherwise known as every night for me was the idea that you get together with another friend during the week, you bring your families together and you serve whatever you can find in your house. No one's allowed to clean up. No one's allowed to buy anything. It's not the Martha Stewart, real simple of the world. It's just let's together and share some friendship and help each other out during these difficult periods of time. And women need to let up. They need to let up at home. They need to let up at work so that they can embrace those more joyful moments, which sometimes are just about connecting and sharing stories of our day. Yeah. I met a woman whose, our kids were in preschool together. I said, oh, our family should get together for dinner. And she said, we just can't handle that. But if you'd like to meet us for a grocery store picnic, you can. I was like, what is that? And

she said, we go to the grocery store, we go grocery shopping, we let the kids get stuff from the hot food bar, and then we sit in the car and talk. And I was like, wow, I'm totally doing that. And it became like a weekly thing we started doing on our own, too, because it was, you got your errands done. The kids were super happy because they got to eat crappy food from, you know, the grocery store. And there was no cleanup. You know, it was just, it was so easy. I actually think the setting realistic expectations is an interesting proposition because there's so many idealistic expectations. And I actually just wrote a paper with Laura Little at University of Georgia about this very topic where the expectations very much become our reality. And we subscribe so much to what we think we should be doing or what other people think we should be doing in terms of being an ideal worker or an ideal parent that we don't even have time to figure that out for ourselves or that influences what that turns into or what that looks like for us. So our identity is very much shaped by

this whole idealistic expectation. So I wish we could have realistic expectations. And I think that women need to really figure out what that means for them as opposed to what it is at a more societal level. It strikes me that being a working mom is really just an extreme exercise in prioritization. And you just have to decide what you're going to prioritize at the moment because your life is full, as is everyone's, whether you're a mom or not. And you just have to decide what you're going to prioritize at the moment because your life is full, as is everyone's, whether you're a mom or not. And you just have to decide what you're going to do and what you're not going to do. And that's not about necessarily sacrifice. It's just about prioritizing.

Also, what I'm hearing is what you're going to care about, what you're going to let get to you. Right. Because people are really judgy. They always have been. They always will be. And some of those people are the people that are closest to you. Yeah. I also think, Amy, your point about what are your priorities at the moment is a really important one to figure out, right?

Because those priorities are going to shift and change. And that's part of the story, right? And so you make those decisions. This is right for me at this moment. And that can be really easy enough for a working mother versus this is the choice I'm making and I'm locked into it versus I'm doing this now. It's right for me today. In six months, in a year, in five years, it's probably going to look really different. And that's good. Right. Well, and I think when you look at kids, how much they change from infancy

to teenage years or even a young adulthood, you have to think about how as a mom, you're going through the same evolution, right? And as many changes, I remember thinking, you know, I want to work part time while my kid is really young. And then I realized I hated fighting about nap, right? When she was giving up her nap, one of her naps. I was like, no, this is a great time for me to work and someone who's a professional to handle this nap transition. So and then, you know, six months later, it's different. I had I had the luxury of making different choices about how to handle my work life and go full time or part time because I was working for myself. But, you know, I think we think there's going to be a plan for the 18 years and really, you know, really the plan six months

at most. Right. But how do you deal with, how do you make yourself okay knowing that priorities could shift at a given moment, a given day, when if you're working in an organization that is not very flexible and is not going to accommodate your shifting priorities? There are a couple of different ways to think about that. It's not an easy situation, right? Organizations don't make it easy for us and our shifting priorities. And also, as you point out, as your children change. And so thinking

about some of that in advance can be really helpful. Preparing for yourself about, okay, my children are going to be going to elementary school or middle school. And what might that look like? Or who in my organization can I talk to who's parenting older children and what advice can I get from them about how do I manage this next stage what am I going to do differently keeping your professional network up is absolutely critical because at the end of the day if you're if you can't make it work in your current organization having a strong professional network means that maybe you can find choices outside in different organizations. So both of you write in your book, you talk about the importance of new mothers developing what you call child care bench strength. What is that?

So bench strength is a term that we adopt from athletics, right? When you think about a really strong athletic team, you're thinking about not just having that first string player, but having a really strong second string player and that that first string player but having a really strong second string player and even a third string player because at some point the first string player something's going to happen and they're going to be out of commission and you have to rely on the second string when we talk to women about childcare we find they spend a lot of time thinking about what I call that first string childcare what's the best childcare I can find that works for my child, works for my job, and works for our financial situation?

And that's great, but that child care is going to break down. It's going to break down because your child's going to get sick. It's going to break down because you're going to have an emergency meeting first thing in the morning and your partner's going to be traveling. It's going to break down because the child care provider is going to be sick. It's going to break down in my case because we had to fire a child care provider suddenly, right? It breaks down. And so those are the moments that women often panic. They're also the moments where women who always thought they were going to work may decide not to work. If you've got bench strength, it helps ease the anxiety about that. So figuring out in advance, when my child care situation breaks down, what am I going to do? What's it going to look like? And we've seen women do a

lot of very different creative things on this. It can be anything from obviously family members. It could be an elderly, if you don't have family members in the area, an elderly neighbor that you're close with. It can be another stay-at-home mom, somebody who's staying home and can take your child and help you in that particular way. It can be formal backup care programs. But figuring out that in advance, having those phone numbers, being ready to dial so when the child care situation breaks down, you're ready to figure out what comes next because it's going to break down. It's just a part of being a working mom is you're going to have days where the child care isn't there. One of the stories I really

liked in the book was a woman named Martha who was a single working mom and befriended another working mom. And they essentially ended up co-parenting, right, even though they didn't coexist in the same household. Can you talk about how common that is? I actually don't think it's common enough because I think women are so worried about asking for help. I do it. I don't do it as much as I probably want to do it because you do feel like you're leaning on someone too much. But it's really challenging. I mean, there's a lot of people who don't have families around them. I mean, not everybody has the luxury of having grandparents

and whoever around to fill that bench strength. And so I would just, this might be digressing from your question, but just to add to what Dana was saying, it's not only the woman or the mother building up that bench strength, but also making sure, you know, in terms of people, physical people that are helping you out, but also making sure that it's OK. Like the example you gave of the professor or the faculty member who brought their their child to a meeting, that making sure you're surrounded, you're surrounding yourself with people at work that are perfectly fine with you doing kooky things like that. Or, you know, even I'm just reflecting back on when I was in my PhD program, I started that program and I was with three single men. And I just stated right up front, we're having any group meetings at my house. I mean, fortunately, I live right near the university, but every group

meeting is going to be at my house. And they were perfectly fine with that. They loved that. And my baby was there and they would play with the baby. And so there's a different form of bench strength that also goes beyond, you know, the child care aspect as well. I want to be clear that we are strongly advocating for more babies at meetings. Yes. All for it. So the challenge of finding supportive childcare doesn't stop when the kids go off to school. So talk to us a little bit about the stress of the after-school pickup on women's careers and how people deal with it. What are some creative strategies? So when we're talking about after-school stress, one of the things there's been a lot of research actually done on this topic. We know that when working parents feel a lot of stress about is their child well taken care of

after school or in this out-of-school time, it affects their engagement at work, it affects their work stress, it actually affects the quality of work they're doing, as well as their overall psychological and emotional well-being. So the impact of after-school stress isn't just on us at home. It's on us in our workplaces as well. So one of the things that really happens for working mothers in that first transition is when your child leaves whatever traditional child care arrangement you figured out for yourself, they transition to elementary school, typically a kindergarten in the United States. And all of a sudden, you're shocked. It's a shock to a family system because kindergarten or any elementary school situation is usually about six to seven

hours. It runs 10 months of the year, and about 30 of those days are not covered, Right? So you've got huge gaps in the care situation you have. And while we've done some work to improve quality child care in the early years, we've done very little to improve quality child care in those those later years. So again, thinking about that in advance can be really helpful for working families. One of the things that we talk to families about a lot is this idea of how do you think about the community you're going into? And to what extent is this going to be a community that has systems in place that are going to help you as a working mother? So people make decisions about going into a community based upon typically what kind of house, how big a house I can afford, what's the quality of the school system.

But they don't think at all about is is there before-school care in the system? Is there after-school care? Is it an after-school care program that my kid's going to have to get bussed to? How does busing work in the system? Will they pick my child up at the end of my road, or will they pick them up at the end of my driveway? That creates a really different context. Are there other working parents? You can use that from census data and available data. Does the recreation system, is it set up in a way that their summer camps and their vacation camps,

and are those things that are actually used by parents in the community? Doing some research on that can help you figure out, how do I get into a community that's going to be able to be a place where I can be authentic about who I am and have the supports I need and be more comfortable asking for those supports versus feeling like I've got to hide a little bit either either side of my life. programs and even in a community where there's probably predominantly fewer working mothers, but you feel guilty about being the last one to pick up your kid in an after-school program that goes until six. You feel guilty about dropping your kid off at seven in the morning when you don't see any other parents or kids around. There's this emotional struggle having to feel like you have to downplay your work or you have to sacrifice your work to be there. And so the

stress is not just the financial stress, but there's also the psychological stress associated with feeling the guilt about, you know, utilizing these programs that are the very programs that are supposed to alleviate the stress to begin with. So I think the community thing is an interesting one, not just in terms of what resources are available, but also what people, you know, you surround yourself with in those resources. And I also tell people to really try to find partners in your organization, other working families that you can switch off or trade off with. So I really advise our junior faculty at Babson. They struggle with those vacation weeks because we're teaching, we're in the classroom. And so find another faculty member who's got kids maybe around your same age, maybe not,

and maybe you can trade off one day for one day, that kind of a model. Or you can trade off pickups. And so that community support can be at your home community, but it can also be in your work community too. Our neighbors, we have a text chain that whenever school vacation's coming up or snow day, it's like, who's going to be home? Where can the kids go? It's okay if they watch TV all day, but will anyone be home? And it's great because it's, you know, I can still go to work if I need to.

Right. And it sounds like you live in a neighborhood where you have a lot of dual career working parents, right? So being in a neighborhood where you know sending that text out or also knowing on the other hand that you're sending the text out and there might be a stay-at-home mom who's happy to help and pitch in because there are going to be other ways you're going to be able to support her too. So part of the networking community is also building relationships between those who are currently working and those who aren't. Yeah, I have, there's a stay-at-home mom at my daughter's school who is like the uber stay-at-home mom. And I know if I send her a text and say, I can't get it to pick up, can you pick up my daughter? She will text back within 30 seconds. She'll list the snacks she has packed.

Are there any food out? I mean, it's insane and so comforting because you know she has your back and there's no judgment about it at all. She's amazing. I want to move to your neighborhood. So, Jamie, your twins are 12. My daughter is also 12. So I'm particularly interested in what you have to say about how work changes for women when they're mothering preteens or teens.

I understand from your research that workplaces sort of forget that women have caregiving responsibilities at this age. How do women advocate to still get the support they need when they're mothering older children? I think that's a great question. And one I think about all the time, I hate saying this, but I know it's true. You know, little children, little problems, big children, huge problem. And I think people forget that. But I think one thing is figure out what your best approach is for how you deal with your work and family challenges. There's research that shows that people often either make a choice between whether they segment

their work and family or integrate their work and family. I think as I know I've gotten older and accumulated more work and family knowledge, I've become more of an integrator and I'm not afraid to show people. So what is integrating? So in other words, when I was starting out having kids, I didn't have pictures of them on my desk. I didn't talk about them at work. And I feel like I am confident enough in my ability as I've gotten older through the years and as my children have gotten older, I'm less worried about any stigma that I may face as a working parent because I've already proven myself, or at least I feel as though I've proven myself to others. A segmenter would not have pictures on there. An integrator would bring their child into work and not have any qualms about it. And I try to signal that preference to people.

And hopefully I'm a model to others that will do the same because I think that there's a real positive aspect of being able to show and highlight to people that work and family are important. Is it harder to talk about parenting challenges of older children than younger children? Absolutely. The conversation about I'm leaving early because they're little or sick. Right. There's an assumption that older children are very self-sufficient and in our society, good or bad,

even in high school, they're not yet really self-sufficient. And so there can be needs to be present there that just aren't articulated. And they're not comfortable being incredibly transparent about what are those needs. The other thing that shifts is how interested are you in filling those needs? I don't love big children. Again, maybe my children are listening to this. I'm not as good in the teenage years. It's not my strength, right? I'm lucky. I have a partner who's as good in the teenage years. It's not my strength, right? I'm lucky. I have a partner who's really good in the teenage years. And so one of the things that we've actually flopped a little bit,

I'm much more active and engaged at work, and he's much more the call, the go-to when they have those particular problems. And in a certain way, I think it's easy for him to respond because he didn't respond when they were little, right. So it's new and it's different for him. So it is really hard in organizations to say and advocate. I think it's also hard for women if they've worked full time their whole careers and all of a sudden are saying, you know what? My kids are teenagers. They're in high school and I want to be a little more present.

How do I advocate for myself now when I never advocated for that before? But I do think it's easier to advocate when the children are older because there's less fear that there's going to be some kind of bias involved. I think one of the real challenges and what we've seen in our research for pregnant women or new mothers is that if I ask for something, if I advocate for something, that's going to set the tone for my whole now life as a working mother in this profession or whatever. And like I said before, if you have the confidence in yourself and you know you've proved your value, then advocating things when your children are a little bit older, I think, becomes slightly easier to a large extent. But I think the challenge, what Dana's pointing out, is the challenge of having older children doesn't necessarily get easier. So Dana, your kids are, as you said, a little older than Jamie's. One's in college, two others are 16 and 18. You're entering a new family stage. What transitions are happening to you professionally? What feels positive to you about this period?

So all of a sudden for me, there's this energy to engage in my research, in my writing, in leadership in the college in a way that I just didn't have before. And so it's a really exciting phase. There's also a lot of positive feedback that starts to come from your young adult children that you don't get from a toddler or an elementary schooler, right? When you're dealing with little children, there's often can be more angst and tension and things that they say that make you realize or think, oh my gosh, they're upset I work, or why do you work, mommy, or those kinds of questions that cause you angst. When they're older, they're excited about your working.

And Kathleen McGinn's done some great research on this looking at how working mothers impact both their daughters and their sons careers and I see it in my household all the time my daughter's studying chemistry and women's health and she's done research and done research projects and she calls me for help my sophomore came home one day from his honors English class with 20 some odd kids in it, six boys, and the six boys got on a conversation that all six of them noticed they had working mothers in a community where there are not a lot of working mothers. And so they start to see ways in which your life has impacted them positively. And that has really exciting repercussions for

working mom. I can imagine that has really exciting repercussions for a working mom. I can imagine that being really rewarding. have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work.

So, you know, as your kids are getting older and more independent and they're going off to college, you know, there's a lot more coming your way. You've got more bandwidth, you have more opportunities, You have more experience. How do you figure out what to do with your time? How do you sort of sort through all of the options? I think it comes back to the same thing you do early stages, which is you have to hear your own voice. The options that come your way are exciting. They're flattering in a lot of ways. And it's very easy to jump in and say, yes, yes, I'll do that. Yes, I'll do that. And we hear a lot from women at this stage that all of a sudden, instead of being overwhelmed with home responsibilities,

they're overwhelmed with work responsibilities. They're overwhelmed by board responsibilities. They're overwhelmed by community engagement responsibilities. So taking some moments to think about, again, I don't have to do everything at the same time. What's my priority? Where do I want to engage? What's going to be rewarding and fulfilling in this moment? And where am I going to say no? Because just like in your early careers, you've got to say no to some things. And so making those decisions based upon what I want, not what everybody else is expecting or asking of me is really important to do. And so we hope that by this point in your life,

with all of these other balls you've had in the air, you figured out which ones you really want to catch, right? Is that the idea? Or which ones you want to catch now, right? Something, a ball that wasn't important to you five or 10 years ago, may all of a sudden be really important to you and you're going to want to run with that. Yeah. I loved the line in the book about having a proud, engaged mother being more important than a big backyard. Why do you think women lose sight of the positive impact their working has on their children? I think they lose sight for a couple of reasons. The first of which is the rhetoric we've talked about that we're all told. I think the other reason you lose sight of the positive is it is hard. The day-to-day responsibilities of loving your job, wanting to

be successful in your career, in your work, wanting to be there and be present for your family and be an active and engaged parent and partner, if you have a partner, it's not easy day to day. And I think like anything else, we lose sight of the big picture. We lose sight of the joy in those really small moments that happen and we lament what we didn't do. And so giving up a little of that rhetoric, giving yourself a little bit of space and looking for the joy in the day. What is that joyful moment? It might be just the cereal bowl and what happened over that conversation, or it might be one thing that you do during the day that has an impact on a colleague or a client, but focusing on the joy changes the story you're telling yourself.

And that's what we need to help women do is change the story we're telling ourselves. And we need more positive stories. We need women to feel good about, we need ourselves to feel good about the choices we make as opposed to, like Dana said, lamenting over decisions. And we shouldn't look back. We shouldn't always feel like we have to look back and say, I wish I had done that. I wish I had done that. We need to own and feel confident about the choices that we make.

And if they don't work out the way that we intended them to, okay, they didn't work out, but at least we know that we can move forward from that and maybe the next choice will work out. And just because so-and-so down the street did this or my colleague in the office did that, that doesn't mean that's going to work for me. It's good that I have that model. It's good that I have that guide to follow, but I'm going to chart my own path. Jamie, Dana, thank you both so much for joining us and talking to us today. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So do you, Amy G., feel more optimistic about this? I mean, you're kind of entering this new phase of working motherhood. Harper are at odds and that it's more about compromise on both sides so you can make it work.

And I like that they sort of talked about them actually feeding one another in a positive way. And I've definitely seen that in my own life. And the transition I made from Harper being sort of a young child to being this tween, that was a very optimistic transition for me because she was more independent and she was observing me working in a way that she hadn't before because she was completely self-centered. So I'm curious. So you just said that being a mother and working, that the two sides of you fed each other. What was that? How did they feed each other?

Well, I think the way that Dan and Jamie talked about it was that, and this is what's felt true to me, is that I'm better, I'm more efficient with my time because I have greater demands on my time than I ever have before. I use work, particularly research we find or tactics I use, time management, I use those at home. So I think I'm much more empathetic with other people. You know, having a kid, trust me, you get frustrated and mad, but you realize it's not their fault. And I think I treat people like that at work more often. I see them all as like the child whose needs aren't being met rather than the adult who's being a jerk to me in this meeting. I'm sort of more emotionally grounded than I was before I had Harper. Like Dana says, working motherhood isn't just return to work. It's a long distance run. But returning to work is the start. I decided to take four months off. This is my third child,

but it's my first time going back to work full-time because my other two children, I was self-employed and I worked from home part-time. That's Hannah, a listener who's been in touch with us over email. Hannah first wrote to us after hearing our episode, Managing Parental Leave, Yours or Someone Else's. She was on leave at the time after having her daughter, Greta. As the three-month mark was approaching, I was feeling so unprepared, and I wasn't ready to leave Greta, and I just had so much guilt about being away from her for so many hours during the day.

Hannah said the stories our colleague Erica Truxler shared in that episode helped her feel like she could manage the challenges of returning to the office full-time after leave. A few months later, Hannah offered to tell us how it's been going for her, and we thought it would be great to get Hannah and Erica on the phone together, and it really was. Well, Hannah, I just wanted to start by saying thank you so much for emailing us

after our episode from last season. You know, I was very vulnerable putting myself out there and how difficult I had a time getting back into work and hearing that you found comfort in my story really honestly helped me too. So we were helping each other from across the country. So I just wanted to know how things are going. And I don't know if you could go maybe just into a little bit more detail about maybe even just your first month back at work and how that went. And really, yes, just an update on

how things are going on your end. Yeah. Yeah. So I had a positive outlook, but I think, I mean, I tend to be a little bit type A, so I think I took it like to the extreme a little bit. And I was just, I went back to work with this attitude of like, I'm going to do it all and I'm going to fit it all, everything I want to do in one day into a day. And I'm going to, you know, do all this self-care. And I, I had this, you know, I had this crazy schedule of like, I'm going to wake up at 5am every morning and meditate and work out and do all these things before the kids wake up. And I was kind of doing it on some weeks. Um, but I had like such a frantic energy going from one thing to the next. And even though I was trying to practice all this self-care, it like was not really self-care because it was more of like a

stressful thing to complete it. And so then it was like this crazy roller coaster. Like within two weeks of getting back to work, our whole family got hit with a stomach flu. Oh, then I got strep throat. Oh my goodness. Yes. I had exactly the same experience. I was going to mention this was my first winter daycare germ filled winter with my one-year-old now Claire. And truly it was almost like back to back. We also had, I think it was like two or three stomach flus, the flu, also pink eye, hand, foot and mouth, double ear infection at the same time as hand, foot and mouth. So anyways, all of this is to say I hear you and I feel that it's one of those things where, you know, you kind of go in and you're like, I can do this. I set myself up for success. I'll even carve in some me time before babies wake up. And then the reality hits. Yeah. And it's hard to figure out

like, what is like the best perspective to have. And I know that you gave me the advice to just be gentle with yourself. And I feel like that's a really good thing to focus on. But sometimes like I know for me, like I had to go through that curve of like having all these expectations and having them backfire and then being like, oh, okay, this is what it means to be gentle with myself, you know? Yes. Yes. And Amy is, Amy Gallo is careful to say it's not lowering our expectations. It's setting expectations for the moment that we're in in our lives. Yeah. I work with a coach through my work that was actually like a leadership coach to start, but she kind of morphed into my like maternity leave coach. Yes. So and we were working on all these things like, OK, don't expect to do

everything in one day. Like, let's stretch out the time. Like maybe it's just you're trying to complete those things in one week or two weeks. And the other thing I did, which was crazy, but I stopped drinking coffee and I feel like that really helped my frantic energy. And even though I was like sleep deprived and tired, I think it was better to be in that state than it was to have that kind of like buzz going all the time. Yeah. So, um, like I said, I'm, I've always been kind of like a go-getter exerciser every day, that type of thing. And I just was like, you know what? I'm not even going to exercise. I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to go to work and be with my family. And I feel like taking it way down, I finally

like accepted it. And I feel like that was like that was a huge, huge, yeah. It's huge. And I do feel that there is positivity that we often miss in the rush and the bustle of going back and forth and rushing to daycare and doing deadlines and work. And I was just wondering if there are any moments that you can think over the past few months where you really did feel happy at work and you came home and you felt happy at home and you realized, like, wait a second, I wouldn't have this my first two children, I think, and of course, this is something that's so different. And there's such a personal thing for everybody. But I really like working outside of the home. It's really nice having that. I mean, it is like a little bit of a break, you know, and when you're a parent, and you're working so hard, and it's such a demanding role. Sometimes it's nice to step out of that. And I think if you're not working outside of the home, it's a little harder to orchestrate that

as frequently or have it be as effective as working outside of the home. So I think that that was something that was really a positive thing this go around. And the other thing about that is, you know, I was so worried about all the hours I was going to be away from Greta. And in the end, like that was probably like one of the least challenging things for me. I mean, of course, I missed her at work, but I don't feel like I have a deficit of time with her. Yes. You know, what's funny is I've noticed on Sundays when I'm with Claire all day and I'm there, you know, starting at 530 in the morning by like 945, I'm starting to get very tired and I start to check my phone and I start to go on Instagram

or something while she's sitting next to me. And I've had this realization that when I pick her up from daycare, it is like such a happy moment for me. Like literally yesterday, I was in her, they have a little playground and I was talking to one of her teachers and I didn't see her right away. And then all of a sudden I hear like, mama, mama, and she's like running towards me. And it was just like the happiest moment, honestly. And then we come home and we have about two hours. So it's not much. But those two hours, I make a point not to have my phone in front of me. And we are playing.

And I value that time so much. And when I've had a good day at work, I often think I've been able to kind of accomplish, you know, edit that article. And I came home and I had a great evening with Claire. And I feel very positive about it. And often those positive moments do get overrun by the illnesses. And so I've been trying to kind of note the positive moments more when I can as well. Yeah. And I think that's something that for me, when I slowed everything down, it really helped me to have more of that

kind of attitude and really recognize what I was accomplishing. Right. Thank you so much, Hannah. This has been such a great conversation. Thank you. That's our show. I'm Amy Gallo. I'm Amy Bernstein. And I'm Nicole Torres. Our producer is Amanda Kersey. Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz. Maureen Hoke is our supervising editor. We get technical help from Rob Eckhart. Erica Trexler makes the show's discussion guides. And J.M. Olajars is our copy editor. And one more note. We've heard from a lot of our listeners about the discussion guides. I was actually at an event in California a couple weeks ago, and someone stopped me at the sink in a bathroom to tell me that she uses the discussion guides with her women's group at her organization.

That is fantastic. We also got this email saying, and I'm going to quote here, the guides are having an impact on how we talk, act, and lean on each other in the office. If you want access to the guides, you can find them on our website at hbr.org slash podcasts on the Women at Work page.