Yesterday, I shared a Harvard Business Review blog post to my network on LinkedIn about how our careers and, importantly, how we feel about our careers, affect our children. In the 24 hours since I shared that post, it has received almost two-thirds the engagement that my best performing piece of content has achieved on LinkedIn—the announcement of this very blog two weeks ago!
Many of the people who deemed the post worthy of an icon are current and former colleagues with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work. Many are also peers in terms of age and rungs ascended on the corporate ladder.
Several of my peers, like me, came to parenthood later than most—in our early forties or late thirties. While the circumstances that drove us to start our families later than most of our cohort varied (be they biological or financial, for the most part), we were all very focused on our careers and felt driven to achieve a certain level of corporate seniority. All of us worried that having children prior to achieving our goals—or sustained momentum toward the fulfillment of our ultimate career goals—would distract or hinder us from those aspirations.
And we weren’t alone in that fear. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in October this year, Guardian Life Insurance President and Chief Executive Officer Deanna Mulligan revealed that she was anxious about taking a break from her march up the corporate ladder. She recalled, “I was 41. This is supposed to be the prime of your career. At the time, taking a break was considered a really strange thing to do. People said to me, ‘You can’t take time off. You’ll never get back on a career path.’”
Like many new parents (mostly mothers, but increasingly more dads, too) I took the first three months of my daughter’s life off from work—(unfortunately, my time off was unpaid). Also like many new moms, I was racked with guilt about the prospect of leaving my baby with a stranger for nine hours per day while I went to work.
Although I felt like I was the most selfish person to ever take oxygen into his lungs the entire subway ride to work that first day back, I reveled in the guilty pleasure of going to the bathroom by myself for the first time after a couple cups of coffee with no one crying about my absence! As the days went on, I also got tastes of the adrenaline rush of solving a complex problem with colleagues and getting a couple of points on the board for our firm. In short, I was enjoying my work.
That’s why I think my LinkedIn post about Drexel University’s Jeff Greenhaus and the Wharton School’s Stewart D. Friedman’s research resonated with my peers. In his HBR blog post, Dr. Friedman writes, “Our research went beyond matters of time… and looked, in addition, at the inner experience of work: parental values about the importance of career and family, the psychological interference of work on family life (that is, we are thinking about work when we are physically present at home with our family), the extent of emotional involvement in career, and discretion and control about the conditions of work.”
Their research about “the inner experience of work” and its influence on their subjects’ children provides data that helps dissipate the fog of guilt many of us often feel about our conflicting desires to work and take care of our kids. Reassuringly, their research indicates, “For both mothers and fathers, we found that children’s emotional health was higher when parents believed that family should come first, regardless of the amount of time they spent working. We also found children were better off when parents cared about work as a source of challenge, creativity, and enjoyment, again, without regard to the time spent.”
When I returned to work after my paternity leave, I remembered that I enjoy applying my creativity to help solve complex challenges—and I receive feedback that I’m good at what I do, which reinforces my positive feelings about my work. The good news here for working parents is that we can have happy, well adjusted kids if we spend quality time with them, i.e. be present when we’re with them, and by modeling our values about family and work.