To think work isn’t compatible with being a mum

[Ori1]

Not until they’re about 6. The system as it is requires women to basically do the hardest job going (birthing/parenting through the early years) and work a job. I do both, and quite honestly it’s a fucking shitshow - I’m permanently tired, I feel like a Jack of all trades & a master of none, I also feel like a fraud at work because I’m constantly comparing myself to colleagues who don’t have kids & who seem to have boundless enthusiasm/energy.

I just think the way society is does nothing to benefit women and everything to complement men. Why don’t women get any slack whilst doing the most important job there is; why haven’t we thought of ways. they can be more supported so they don’t have to work during the early years and raise a family?

It is hard, mine are 14 & 17 now and only now I’m able to start really pushing ahead in my career. It’s tough commuting, paying expensive childcare, doing nearly everything at home. It gets easier, and it’s worth keeping your career going

Society has evolved to expect women to work outside the home ,increasing Taxpayers at a stroke making lots of dosh for Mr J and his govt .Feminism was supposed to be about choices .Now it is very few women who have an option to stay at home .Very sad

Sad for whom?
My DH was supportive and I took 14 months paid ML plus AL for each of my 3 DC.
3.5 years out of

Ill tell you whats sad and thats my wonderful intelligent mother being reduced to a diazepam addicted wreck, unable to do the job she loved, reduced to a housewife against her will as my father wouldnt allow her to work.
Utter tripe that society has evolved so that women have to work out of the home, they always have done with the exception of very wealthy women.
My GM had 3 jobs, there was no credit to fall back on.
The issue is that child rearing and womens jobs/ employment isnt valued its minimised and always has been.
Personally SAH and being the main CC and doing all the boring housework wasnt for me.
It takes 2 to make a child and so 2 parents should be involved in rearing them.
Im afraid just the mother SAH while the DH swans off to work and isnt involved is pretty poor imho not the ideal its made out to be.

What does “more flexibility” mean in this context though?

I work for an employer with the most family friendly T&C I can think of - parents get paid time off for emergency childcare, nativity plays/assemblies/sports days etc etc etc with the expectation that the make up the hours, though in reality that’s not monitored and rarely happens in my team. They get generous maternity and paternity leave entitlements (the paternity leave has had very low take up as the female parents have been unwilling to share their mat leave, so the employer is now considering allowing each parent to have the same entitlement outright). They are entitled to sabbaticals with job held open indefinitely (in theory open to anyone but has only been granted to parents historically due to business needs). They get subsidised childcare and priority leave booking. Now that we’re WFH they also get to refuse to attend any meetings that take place during twice daily school runs.

I’m childless so pick up the slack from all of this (have worked every Christmas for 7 years and haven’t been able to take my full annual leave in 4 years), as well as struggling to get the reasonable adjustments I need for my disability met.

That feels like a lot of flexibility to me but the parents I work with are always complaining about how hard it is to work with kids and how they need more understanding and “give” from the employer. Plenty of them have said they should be paid to stay at home until the kids start school.

Before anyone starts, I KNOW THIS IS AN HR / MANAGEMENT ISSUE. My point is that if you increase flexibility or want to pay people not to work for years, then some thought needs to be given to who then CAN’T have flexibility, or who is going to actually work to pay taxes to fund the rest. Flexibility can’t be given to everyone - someone always pays the price.

I’m childless so pick up the slack from all of this (have worked every Christmas for 7 years and haven’t been able to take my full annual leave in 4 years), as well as struggling to get the reasonable adjustments I need for my disability met.

This isnt the fault of those with children though, its your employer as you quite rightly state,its management/ HR.
Personally I wouldnt have stayed in the same job for 1 year let alone 7!
Im not sure in that case what your post has to do with this thread?
Flexibility still has to work within the service/ needs, someone being a parent is neither here nor there !

I will never understand women who have children and the spend their time complaining about being a mother (or martyring themselves).

There is so much information, statistic, studies, online where you can read/write/talk about parenthood, and all of it pretty much say it’s shit.
And still you went and had them.
That’s on you.

Get over it.

@Snoredoeurve The thread is about what needs to happen to make it easier for women to work and be parents, and I was responding to the frequent posts suggesting more flexibility or parents be given money to not work for years. My point was that you can’t have this without causing problems elsewhere - not everyone can have flexibility (which means people without kids are constantly leaned on) and if every parent stupa working then who will fund this (people without kids). I think my perspective is highly relevant but fair enough if you don’t.

You’re right. There's a difference between “God, parenting and working is hard, I wish it was easier” (sympathy) and “Someone should pay to let me stay home when my children are young” (Err - who? how? Why you in particular?)

Your employer sounds really family friendly and flexible and yet people still complain that working and parenting is hard - that’s because it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s unfair. As parents we chose this.

But you stated that it was a poor management issue.
I work with parents/ non parents/ carers for elderly or disabled family members/ PT/FT and not once has anyone else been expected to work every christmas or not take their AL.
It would cause uproar!
I work my contracted hours and not once have I been "leaned on" nor has anyone else.
In fact my DC are adults and I work PT, no one else is leaned on so I can do that.
Time to look for a new job!

But surely @rainbowmilk still has a point - her workplace is terribly run and not at all the norm, but if parents were granted as much flexibility as they liked then she's right that more workplaces would have to be like this. It's because most (unlike hers) currently balance the needs of all their employees, which means not giving endless flexibility to parents, that it doesn't all fall on those without children.

It is hard. If I'm hand-on-heart honest it would be a bit easier for everyone else at work, including those I manage, if I worked five days a week. I was recently promoted and that'll be more true in my new role, and I am certain that there are people who think senior management shouldn't have agreed that I could do it part-time. But it makes an enormous difference to me; I wouldn't have taken the new job if they'd insisted I went back to full-time and that's why they didn't. But it is a balancing of needs, I can see why it can cause resentment (though in my workplace this is hugely exacerbated because there's a persistent myth that 'they' would never let someone without kids have flexible working arrangements, which is just incorrect - they rarely apply, but it's been granted when they have) and it's silly to pretend that there is no impact at all on other people.

@Snoredoeurve My example was given to emphasise that more flexibility for one group (what has been asked for on this thread) can have consequences for another. It’s great that you’ve not experienced problems where you are. It sounds like your employer is a standard one where flexibility is equalised as much as possible and nobody is prioritised.

Unfortunately if more flexibility is offered to one group over another then you can end up in with an employer like mine, and that was the point of my post. It is a management issue but to be fair the managers probably feel somewhat curtailed by the extremely family friendly policies that have been brought in to tackle the issues raised by the OP on this very thread.

Thank you @Hardbackwriter - that’s what I meant and you articulated it much better than me.

I did say within the needs of the service though and that includes not impacting others.
If management are too weak to be clear about the service needs/ needs of others that again is not the parent/ carer employees issue.

I think you have made a very good point@Hardbackwriter
Other employees perception is that it impacts them and if they applied for something they dont even want or need they wont get it !
For example moaning about me working PT, comments such as " All right for some, clocking off early"
Im afraid I close that shit down very fast and ask if they want to swap my hours and salary for theirs 😂
I do think @rainbowmilk your employer sounds poor and I would have walked by now ...

Even with one DC it's not just the school play, it's sports day and the swimming gala and making Christmas decorations in their classroom. Then times that by however many DC you have.

It doesn't feel that way to me because I'm not "doing it both". Instead my husband and I are "doing it both" and sharing the load. We both work, we both parent. Past the recovery from the birth the roles should be fairly equal. Yes at times only mum will do for a toddler, but there are plenty of other things that can be done by dad's to equal the shares.
I certainly have never compared myself to childless colleagues. I have always worked, so has my DH and we have 4 kids and no family around. We make it work, as a team.
If anything at the moment he is the one holding the fort as I am away half the week for work on a temporary basis.

I found it incredibly tough when the DC were small. Both crap sleepers, oldest ASD diagnosed at age of 8. I did 70% contract so childcare was a mix of grandparents and nursery/childminder. The hardest times were when DD1 was having huge problems at school an I really thought I would have to give up work. Luckily we got through it (not without a fight) and now things are really settled. DC are 11 and 14. We both work 30 hours per week spending loads of time with DC and having a comfortable life. We would rather DC see both of us a lot of the time instead of one parent all the time and the other parent rarely. I made sure I married someone who was not just prepared but eager to pull his weight.

Me working is totally normal and a non-issue as far as the kids are concerned and I am actually enjoying work now. I have no regrets despite the difficult years. I guess SAHP would put their happy family life down to having a SAHP parent and we would say our family life is just as happy but different. I don't believe MH issues in young people are down to working parents, we live a mixed inner city areas with a huge mix of economic situations and the kids with problems tend to have parent/s at home who just don't give a shit about them while working parents ferry their kids to activities and playdates and turn up for every school play etc. I would interested to see if anyone can link to any studies showing poor MH in children of working parents. Hard to assess without a randomised trial taking into account other factors as there are so many things that can influence outcomes in children.

Someone upthread asked about access to after school club. I’m in the south east but I know many others in the same boat.

there is no standard for schools to have any wraparound provision hence many don’t have sufficient spaces if anything. If you have something then honestly you are lucky.
and someone saying we should have planned ahead. Life isn’t really like that?

There are a lot of problems here that are really hard to solve - unfair division of labour, gender pay gap, stereotypical gender roles - but one thing we do have control of is our own expectations. It's ok to cut corners. It's ok to have a work-life balance. It's ok to take a day off if your child is sick. And yes, if you have a FT job, several kids, pets, a busy social calendar and a house reno, then you will be knackered. 🤷🏽‍♀️

My DC are 18, 23 and 25 (don't know how that happened!!) but it was bloody hard! I used to get so annoyed at people who used to say that it was harder being a SAHM - how the heck they figured that out, I will never know!!

There was just DH and me to deal with everything. I was fortunate to have flexible managers but in exchange I basically sacrificed any career progression. We were also fortunate that our DC were rarely ill. Looking back I don't know how I got through it, especially as we also had some sort of activity 5 nights a week so I was picking them up from childcare and going straight to whatever it was they were doing.

I couldn't afford to even go PT because the cut in pay would have been counterbalanced with a pro rata increase in childcare costs, as they were a higher rate for PT places! I also had a commute to factor in of up to n hour each way.

I definitely bore the brunt of it all! DH did some but I did the majority. It definitely wasn't easy but I didn't want to give up work as I like the independence of my own money, and although there were years where I probably was only working for my pension - now that I am nearing pension stage, I am glad I stuck it out.

There was just DH and me to deal with everything.
Who did you think should be dealing with your children - the united nations?

thats a vile comment. No wonder your your name is ‘all alone in this house’

I left my job after maternity leave as they were uncompromising and said I needed to do 40hrs/week or leave. But I was very lucky that DH’s salary covered us. Now I work as a self-employed tutor in Maths. It’s a very different path than I was on before having worked in the corporate world for 8 years. I don’t miss that world, I hated it but I do miss the pay. I earn about half what I earned before and it seems ridiculous when the value of teaching a child is so much more compared to my corporate jobs. I’m not saying that’s the case for all corporate jobs but it certainly was for mine.

I did have a very confusing time of not knowing what I wanted to do, of leaving my job in finance and feeling completely lost. That coupled with secondary infertility which has been ongoing for four years made me feel pretty useless. But tutoring kids Maths gave me a wonderful new direction. I can’t help but feel some days though, I earn a joke amount for my job...Funny thing is that before I did a joke job and earned a brilliant amount; now I do brilliant job but earn a joke amount!!! I wouldn’t go back though unless I had no other choice and it would probably be a massive shock to the system if I now did.

It really does depend on your family dynamics, your job and what support you have.

I work full time and I've not found it particularly challenging but the following has helped:

• my husband pulls his weight and has never viewed his job as more important than mine
• we only have one child
• we both have very flexible jobs and excellent employers
• we had an outstanding nursery in our village and the school has a brilliant out of school club that DS loves

I do appreciate that we are lucky with our situation though.

@Mamaandbub Ironic, as your comment was ten times more vile than the one you objected to.

Sunshine10012 I too was a Nursery Nurse .The children were happy and well cared for.Key workers should be able to give extra care to any children that needed it.Often DC didnt want to come in but also those same ones didnt want to go home !