to think it might be better to have your family before starting your career?

[nailak]

I was just reading a thread about a woman who 16 years after her son was born cannot get back in to a field that she has experience in because people would rather hire cheaper newly qualified staff.

So would it not be better to have a family, study while they are young, or before starting a family, then after they are at nursery/school go to work in entry level role?

or am i totally deluded?

i also dont think that someone who has kids in their twenties has spent all their life "just being a mum", tbh I have plenty experience of uni life, having started uni 4 times, have experience of working for a top media firm, of travelling abroad and at home, mixing with different peoples and different scenes etc,

come to think of it, i fitted quite a lot in to my teenage years and early twenties, only stopped all that when i was pregnant with dd1.

bronze cant you do qualifications now?

No way I could have studied my prof quals with small kids.

Plus

Build a career and reputation first, then you get the perks of PT/flexi working drawing the goodwill you have built up.

Nailak
Can't afford to really.
And haven't got the skills either. Never learned the basics such as essay writing. Need to go back to school really not uni. Not sure I look as young as Drew Barrymore

I don't even understand the different UNO qualifications. I feel so dim. Would love to do an apprenticeship but seeing as the government made them official I'm now too old.
I'll find something one day.
Anyway this isn't about me, but go to Uni first!

UNO Uni

I read this advice regularly and it always strikes me as odd.

It's basically - get having kids out of the way so you can move onto the real work of having your career.

It puts pressure on women to plan their entire lives around their (supposed) maximum fertility.

Instead of having children when you are ready, have found a good partner to raise a family with, and are financially secure, it advises you to just do it young, presumably with whomever you happen to be shagging at the time, wherever you happen to be living, and just sort a stable life out as you go.

I'm so glad my life didn't go that way.

I will not be recommending that course of action to my daughters.

bronze - you're a hell of a smart cookie, and you write well. Don't be down on yourself :)

I was going to go to bed but bronze i read your post and i want to tell you that i didn't know how to write essays either and i couldn't understand about qualifications/modules/exams. I didn't have British education and didn't know the system and my English was no good. Still, i did a short course, spend hours in the library, got help from my then employer who sat down with me and explained things and in the end i did my degree.
I just wanted to tell you that you can do it if students from abroad can. Can you ask someone to guide you, i found that many people are happy to do it.

I am about to go back to university to read Law and effectively begin my career in my mid/late thirties. I'll have school aged children when (if) I get my first legal job. I spent ages researching whether this was the right course of action for me and all the women who I spoke to who'd retrained after children said the same thing: they were more focused, happier at work, took less crap, studied smarter and felt more ambitious than they would have done before children.

It is hard to combine demanding job/family life but the women who set out in their career after their children were born seem a lot less bitter about their workplaces than many of the women I know who went back to the same jobs after mat leave. Lots of women I've spoken to really resented their occupation/industry/company because of the difficulties of working around small children - if you come to a career later then this is less likely to be an issue.

Also, there must be a fair few women (like me) who's overwhelming ambition is to have babies. I really wanted a husband and children way more than I could have wanted to succeed in a career and I think that subconsciously this held me back. Luckily, I got my hearts desire but before that I would have struggled to daydream about getting promoted when I was really just fantasising about building a family. Of course, I know they aren't mutually exclusive, I just think that I couldn't focus my ambition.

bronze you can get financial support from open uni, and you can start with simple introductory courses that teach you from the beginning how to write essays like this www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/l185.htm

or you could try to go to local college and do access course?

athing well i guess some people get the shagging and random thing out of their system earlier then others, and are ready to settle down at different times.

sundae i feel like that, more focused, more ambitious, but thats just me. and something i craved my whole life was to have my own family.

Thanks nail and laq. I really appreciate it. I'm going to go to bed as tired and emotional but will have a good look tomorrow. May start my own thread too so as not to swamp

I had DD1 on my 26th birthday, I'd trained and worked for a bit, travelled with work etc...
I thought I would have children much later, but I'm now very very glad I didn't. I kept working throughout having my 2 and have managed to set up my own small business alongside freelance work.
If I'd not had my girls I would still be focussed on the job that consumed my life at 25, and it's turned out that I'm much better and more successful at other things, things that I doubt I would have thought of doing if I hadn't had kids.
It's different for everyone though, there's no 'right' way.
We don't own our house, we probably wouldn't still be renting if we hadn't had children young, but I'd rather have the children than a mortgage.

The problem is that the whole professional world is set up for men, not women, on the assumption that the successful professional has a personal slave (called a 'wife') who does all the domestic work including having and raising the children. Even the starting-out professional is supposed to have a willing slave to do the domestic work (in the 1950s in the USA, women were quite often expected to give up their own college courses in order to work in menial jobs so that they could support their husbands' studies. Only menial jobs, though. It wouldn't do for them to get the idea that they could have proper jobs.)

The problem with babies is that there isn't a good time to have them. You are damned either way. If young, you don't have the maturity, if old you will probably have fertility issues. I found out yesterday that my uncle at the age of 58 and his GF who is 62 just had a baby girl through a surrogate. The family is outraged because of their age. It is only now that she has been able to have a child because of her fertility issues 20 years ago. She retired this year so will be home with her DD. Extreme yes, don't agree with what they have done but that is for another thread and possibly Jeremy Kyle.

I think some of those confident they could continue with study after having kids young have the luxury of being supported by a husband earning well or have family help with children while retraining.

I was Oxbridge educated and would have loved to continue with study but had no means to support myself at that stage. Right now I have children and a lowish earning husband who is away much of the week and no family support. I would love to train as a psychologist but would need to put children into care 7 to 7 to include commuting to do it and then come home and deal with them on my own. I really wish I'd managed to hold a good career before now. At 34 I can return to teaching but it seems to late for anything else.

nailak if you want to train as a teacher now (you mention doing PGCE) then of course it's not too late. Indeed my friend's Mum recently retrained as a teacher in her 50s. And all the experience you've gained that you've listed above will look brilliant on your application.

Teachers working 12 hour days? None of the ones I know I'm afraid. And by 12 hour days, I'm talking bum on seat at the office (and, tbh, in my job 12 hour days were short ones). Not commuting time, not checking blackberries late into the night, etc etc.

with all due respect I think there may be other reasons the OP on the other thread is struggling to get back into work (in fact, reading her posts I am wondering how she ever could have worked in her particular profession)

women have managed all sorts of things:

studied while children were small

studied when children got older

come back into their professions after a break

gone into a new profession after a break

There is no one size that fits all; it's up to individual circumstances.

It depends... if you leave university then start a family immediately, you'll then be looking for work in a few years time with no work experience under your belt. You'll also have a very tough time finding a graduate job that will pay enough to cover childcare costs.

IMO, the best time is with about 4-5 years experience. No longer junior, but well before you reach management or team-leading level. Once you're at management, returning to work is harder because the more senior you are, the more competition you'll be up against per role applied for.

But, like previously mentioned, nothing is impossible and individual circumstances are ultimately what will dictate the path a mother takes.

Having children young does assume that you have a partner to have them with. I and most of my friends were not in stable relationships in our early 20s. So we got on with our careers and have had children later. My sister is now for the first time in a relationship with a guy wanting and ready to have children at 35.

Well that's what I did. Got my degree and postgrad work done while they were young -worked for me, in terms of happiness at least.

My friends of the same age may now be wondering when it's a good time to have babies, or worrying that they might not. Then again they are further on in their careers, and richer than I am. Swings and roundabouts.

Nailak that looks great for
My needs. I've bookmarked it for when youngest starts school. bit worried as I can be quite kinaesthetic or at least need to be shown but it's the most appropriate thing yet and means I don't need to do a levels as I have a reasonable English gcse.

Thanks

I actually think it's easier to establish the basis of your career first, in your twenties when you're young, full of energy and there are no children to plan around. Then, in your early 30s, when you've established a decent career and hopefully with good pay/mat benefits, you can slow down for 5-10 years while you have children and see them off to school. In your 40s, you can then continue on.

I do think it's important to stay working during your 30s, part-time if possible, or full-time in a role that's not in the crazy 24/7 category. It doesn't seem that easy to pick up a career where you left it pre-kids.

Yanbu, I really agree with this.

I actually think it's easier to establish the basis of your career first, in your twenties when you're young, full of energy and there are no children to plan around.

I agree. IME the more senior you are, the more negotiating power you have as well. I'd also agree with keeping your hand in while child rearing if you plan to go back. Working part time, close to home, using good childcare helps in this hugely.

Girl I work with, same field, same age, same qualifications, had her daughter at 18. She started Uni the week her daughter started school. We are now 41, her daughter is at Uni and my DC are nearly 4 and 7 months. She is more senior to me, I think because she never broken her career.

I don't think there is necessarily a "better" it depends on people's circumstances.

Personally, because I find children more important to me than a career I kind of don't get it when people are married but they wait years for kids because they want to focus on career. If I did that I would have felt like im just killing time while waiting for what i really wanted to do, which was having kids. Some family members told me at the time "just work for a couple of years first" but as I had no need to I really thought whats the point?? However if people want to do that obviously its their choice

But on the other hand tbh I am not sure how I would get a career now really, without having to do some extra retraining because by the time my kids are all in school it will have been quite a while since I finished my degree, i think its 5 years already and my youngest still has more than 3 years left to go before starting school, and I still want more kids too so who knows how long that all is going to take! I have no experience in proper jobs, I have only worked in a coffee shop as a teenager, and in a convenience shop so no experience at all of offices, or professional environments etc

I do know people who have gone into teaching at a later age after having children, thats the only career I've really seen people do it with though, or they start their own business.

I do wonder with a very prestigious and long hours kind of job how it would really work baring in mind that school only finishes at 3pm so even 9-5 is too long and the "career" type of jobs tend to have longer hours than that so how can it work? especially if your dh is already in those kind of hours. What kind of career can you really establish on 9-3 term time only?? so maybe working for yourself in own business is a better option at least you can make your own hours?