to wonder if men can 'have it all'?

[ICBINEG]

Is it possible for a man to combine a professional career with the demands of having a family?

How can men go about balancing late meetings or foreign business trips with having to pick children up from school or nursery?

What challenges do men face when going back to work after having a family? Are employers reasonable when men apply to go back part time, or need to take leave to look after sick children?

AIBU to think that there is something wrong with a society for which all of these questions are essentially meaningless in their current form but are apparently very much still a source of topical debate when you switch the gender?

I definitely dont think women are wired for guilt and worry.Its a middle class daily mail construct.If where you live most women work then you dont worry at all about it ime.

re ICBENIG post Tues 12.44pm last paragraph
That is probably right.What I am wondering is,right then, how long is the woman expecting to carry on working to,and the same for the man.And who would end up earning the most in that time?

adv that is exactly what is annoying...when women get asked how they cope with kids and men by and large don't. It is unfair on the women and of course just as unfair on the men.

I went to a course some years ago aimed at encouraging women's careers. One of the speakers was a professor who did numerous trips abroad. How did she combine this with children? Simple - money.

One child only, child at a local private school with boarding facilities. If she needed to go abroad, child could board for a couple of nights. Problem solved....

Can't remember if she had a husband or was single, but either way the answer for her wasn't to have someone at home facilitating her trips.

Beebee, every woman in my family, going back to great grandmas, has always worked, whether in farming or in industry.
But, they lived in extended family situations, with the maiden aunts/grandparents etc taking care of children while the mothers worked.
It is not at all a "middle class" issue, it affects all women if they don't happen to have relatives at home who can help out with childcare, which fewer people really do now, whatever social class they belong to.
The point is, the problem of " managing work and kids" is still very much seen as a womans problem.

Bang on the money yet again now

Dh and I both have senior roles in our careers. We have both adapted how we work. We now both start work about 1.5 hours later than we used to, and, finish (in the office at least) many hour earlier than we used to. It means we both spend a couple of hours with the kids in the morning and an hour in the evening. It is unusual to miss bedtime although it does happen occasionally. Both our jobs involve travelling but we never travel at the same time and I have curtailed mine so that they are mostly European trips which can be done in the day.

We have a nanny. I don't regard it as outsourcing and I didn't have my kids as a status symbol . We both earn well and therefore we are able to use money to buy us quality time with our children - so we have cleaners, gardener, handyman and ironing lady as it makes our lives easier. It means that our weekend is 100% focused on the children and we have plenty of time to do lots of arts and crafts, bake, do activities etc.

I think we have the quality of life that we do probably because we are committed to it, I have a lot of energy (I need less sleep than dh) and I am exceptionally organised. Yes, it's hard work but sometimes you read threads on here and it sounds like having a dual high flying career is impossible. Unusual? yes. Bloody hard work? yes. Impossible? No. Having said that, I fundamentally disagree with the concept of "having it all" and think it's a sexist phrase that is primarily used to heap misery upon women as whatever path that they take in life is never going to be good enough. I don't think that anyone (male or female) can have it all because it would literally require you to be in 2 places at once. As I am never silly enough to measure myself against what really is the impossible, the result is that I am happy with what I have. I think everybody would be (male or female) if they just ignored the "having it all" concept.