Advantages of Going Back to Work Early

[Judy1234]

Coming out of several other threads this is interesting. As I said elsewhere with my first child I went back to work after 2 weeks. I always work up until I went into labour. I think the longest I took off was 5 week with any of the 5. You don't often get parents writing about returning to work quickly so I thought just setting out some of the advantages might be helpful for those who can't decide how much time to take off at home. I don't want this to be seen as me saying all parents should both be back at their desks within 2 weeks however; just food for thought particularly with the new paternity leave rights coming in next April.

1. The baby does not have a huge wrench when you suddenly return at 6 months or a year. At 2 weeks she can get used to her good childcare from the father, relative, nanny or whatever so has continuity and no shock to the system of a later return.

1. You don't have time to get out of the swing of work so it's all less disrupting to your life.

1. You can establish a breastmilk expressing system early on without worrying about how to manage breastfeeding when going back at 3 months.

1. Both parents are equally as involved with the children. The pattern at home isn't established that the mother does everything to do with the baby. The mother isn't better than the father at child things. You may get a more involved husband.

1. You only lose 10% of pay in the few weeks you take off.

1. You don't lose touch with work, lose promotion, position etc.

1. If I'm allowed say it, being at home with babies can be boring (not for everyone, I know) so you can skip all that and concentrate on the fun cuddles bit.

1. You inconvenience an employer or your customers less. No one will like me for saying this but in the real world fathers and mothers taking leave is hard to manage. I can say this having had to manage maternity leave for two of my nannies over the years.

1. You may find the physical recovery from birth easier in an office than managing small children and domestic work at home with heavy lifting, toddlers who kick you, heavy rubbish to put out, floors to scrub etc.I certainly found sitting still at a desk, time to rest, relax, get drinks at my leisure helped me get back to normal. Dressing in office clothes too helps get you back to being your normal self. I loved leaving behind the clothes at home covered in baby sick etc.

10. Sometimes it aids mental health particularly if you hate being home with a baby.

This thread rumbles on doesn;t it!

Still interested in the ideas being posted.

I think that women returning to work after 2 weeks in order not to inconvenience their employer, pretending their kids don;t exist (doable if you can afford a nanny, less so if using nurseries) and nursing their maternity wounds in the office are doing most women a huge disservice because they are promoting the idea to employers (which most have anyway) that the only women worth investing in are the ones who are prepared to put their work first 100% of the time and to hell with the family.

And that's just not my vision of how things ought to be.

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"Gender difference - I haven't read that book. I just think a lot of male/female differences are innate and I don't mean in ability to change a nappy."

Xenia - can I ask what gender differences you think are innate?

The only innate characteristic I can think of that men posses is the ability to think with one's willy.

Spot on, FrayedKnot! EXCELLENT post.

Pitc, yes so all we need to do is tackle the guilt and the British press for the last 3 or 4 years seem to have been doing some kind of women back into homes, publish XYZ dubious study, pump Martha Stewart, etc etc at women and they believe this stuff.

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I tink the one that showed group care with lots of changes of carers for babies up to age 1 was not a good idea is probably accurate, although most nurseries do try to give the child a key worker. Other things affect children a lot too like trauma at home, parents rowing, mothers who shout (the nation is full of them, including me over the years) and I'm sure all that stuff is pretty bad for children too.

But it's all political propaganda at the end of the day. In 1939 the Government went around saying "creches brilliant" - because they needed women in the factories.

It's hard to get good comparisons too. If mothers who work earn a lot more and their children go to better schools, nicer houses, more advantages perhaps the income benefits to the children outweigh the fact the mother wasn't around. Has anyone studied it with all those variables taken account of? Has anyone studied fathers at home rather than mothers? Or is a grandparent better than a nanny?

haven't read everything here, so please forgive my ingnorance, but this is such an interesting post. First of all, the phrase stay-at-home-mum only came into existence after the war, when the government decided they'd need to get the women out of the factories so that the men could have their place in the workplace back, so heh, presto, women should be at home. Secondly, before that, women (unless they were aristocrats) always, always would have described themselves as working mums - laundry, sewing, cleaning, field work, with the children with them, or the childcare shared out between them; so the crap that the media flings at women (mostly by sanctimonious female journalists - not much sisterhood there!) is completely misinformed. Guilt is always there, no matter what you do: baby comes out one end, they stamp you with guilt at the other.

Needless to say, I too, am a complete mess of guilt; working, don't want to; trying to give up, compromises all the way.

Xenia - I think that the argument is not DEFINITELY LOST.

OP is entitled "Advantages of going back to work early".

It is clear from here that the number of disadvantages very much outweigh the advantages of going back to work early. It does not take a brain surgeon to work this out.

As for your own personal point of view, I think that to bring the subject up 22 years after having returned to work suggests some very serious underlying personal issues that you yourself feel in having gone back to work so early, issues that you are perhaps still trying to deal with? Maybe it is yourself that you are convincing, not the masses.

Again why so much interest in a topic so many many years after having gone back to work yourself, why is it something that you have such a strong passion about, surely there are other things at your stage of life that would be more interesting?

Correction - should read - DEFINTIELY LOST!!!!!

Its been a long day.

"Which is why women like us owe it to other women (and the men who want to stay home) sometimes to put our own desires to be with our children (if we have them) aside and keep working so employers don't have this correct view that women give up work and men don't."

Do you know what this reminds me of? The equally ridiculous notion popular in certain strands of early feminism that women 'owed it to other women' to be lesbians, even if their sexuality was heterosexual. They had to sacrifice their personal happiness - love, sexual pleasure, even children - to the greater good. It was nonsense then and is nonsense now.

Austen, of course women have always worked, since the dawn of humankind. But they have always worked with their children present, often with the help of other women in their community, but the idea of spending 10-12 hours away from your own small baby is a new one. An experiment, if you like.

I can't even spell any more such are the feelings of guilt at having been away from my son at work all day!!

Oh and in reply to a much earlier post, would I have gone back full time earlier if I had known my husband would have been full time carer, the answer is no. I LIKE looking after my children. I enjoy them. I find it rewarding. I work and enjoy my work, but I miss them and am unhappy if I spend too much time away from them.
I believe my children need me, but I also need my children. I think Xenia is terribly afraid of admitting to needing anything or anyone. I'm not. I also value myself enough to say my feelings, my happiness and my pleasures matter. They are important. I have one life on this earth. It will never come again. So the idea I should sacrifice this one, beautiful, all-too-fleeting life and its joys to the possible detriment of my lovely children and to the imagined 'greater good'of strangers (in someone else's opinion) is just utterly ridiculous to me. And as it happens, I think I'm a rather marvellous role model.

Maybe we should all just throw the cloth in.

Lets admit we are defeated. Go back 100 years.
Men go out to work - women stay at home. That is what we are "supposed" to do. That is what nature "tells" us to do.

There is so much talk about guilt all the time. Maybe this is trying to tell us something. Maybe we are ALL wrong and you SHOULD just stay at home and quit the world of work altogether.

Now theres a thought.

Who knows in 100 years from now the working mother could be history. Something that you read about in the history books. Some kind of experiment that went horribly wrong!

Yes, I read that new-ish book about Mao by Kung, I think and she was writing about the enthusiastic days of early Communist China where loyalty to the party and the new order came above family. Husband (and wife) neglected the children for the greater good. My post sounded a bit like that. Obviously fathers who can bear to be parted from babies and mothers go back to work. Those who can't bear it and can survive don't. I doubt there's much of an issue about damage to the child though and that's the myth some SAHMs like to perpetuate because it makes them feel better. The advantages of going back to work early are huge in my view but that's just an opinoin. Many men don't feel like taking 6 months off after a baby and go back after 1 - 2 weeks. They obviously think there is some advantage to that. I wonder why that is so? Don't they love their children as much? Are they emotionally damaging them?

Austen is right about women and woek. Children were left with sibilings or had to tag along whilst mothers worked in most earlier societies including in the UK and if you're just interested in enough food psychological issues of child damage go out of the window. Most didn't reach age 5 anyway. Then you get this tiny little period when a few richer or on benefits mothers can afford to be home but it won't last, it's a strange blip which is disappearing anyway.

I'm interested in this natural v cultural thing. Let's look at why more women in Scandinavia and France so back to work, want to get their figures back, look sexy and pretty earlier, want their selves and lives back quicker which is something I felt too but many UK mothers don't who are happy to fall into domesticity and childcare. Why would the English love it and the French be keen to get back to work? The English have been known for generations to prefer animals to children, to pack children away etc whereas the Continentals love them and have them about them at evening means - strange contrast. The country that isn't too keen on children has the SAHMs and the countries that love children have more working mothers.

I must get on with some work but this is interesting - Sweden, France, UK... very very very cheap and good childcare. I suppose SAHms who think it's better for children to be at home with mother would think that's bad because then the mothers go back to work and damage the children. So in the UK on that theory we benefit children by charging a fortune for childcare thus keeping mothers at home.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1804390.stm

I think men go back after two weeks fairly happily at least partly because they know their children are being looked after by their mothers! Men who have sole care of their children very often stop working to care for them.

Xenia the reason that families in France eat with their children and have them "out" at evening meals is simply because they eat much later than us.

Also they start school an hour later in the day, and in some regions then have a sleep in the afternoon.

My personal opinion, which I am only applying to myself and my children, and certainly not criticising anyone else's choices, is that I felt my children needed and still need, in the pre-school years, to be with someone who loves them. Before they could talk I would not trust anyone other than close relatives to look after them. I suppose some might see me as paranoid but to me it's just normal motherly instinct, which I do believe in - even animals have it.

I'm saying this because I know that if I was looking after someone else's children I would treat them exactly as I treat my own but I know I would not love them like my own.

Yup, I'm right! A quarter of all single fathers give up work altogether.
here!