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.

I am very interested in my children and obviously in 19 years of marriage we talked a lot about them. External work and interests however are good for everyone and I think it can help marriages if you have some work things to talk about. The other problem sometimes is one person comes home from work tired and would like to sit mostly in silence in the evening and the other at home hasn't spoken to a single human being all day and that's their chance for 2 hours of constant talking. Of course lots of SAH parents aren't like that but it's a factor people might like to consider in weighing up the pros and cons of going back to work early.

Actually my whole thread title is sexist and judgmental. you ought all to have castigated me for it because it's based on an assumption that there is a normal going back to work time and that 2 - 6 weeks is something we should comment on rather than saying parents decide things best and we should leave them to make their own decisions as adults.

Oh great if both go out to work then they can both feel tired in the evening and not want to talk after a day of work!

I just don't see the point of answering this thread really - if someone doesn't experience a bond with their baby that makes them want to care for them as newborns, then they are never going to understand it from other people's point of view. It's either in your soul or it isn't, and if it isn't then I guess it seems perfectly reasonable to say "But dads do it!!"

And someone like that is never going to know what that bond is like, so there's no way of telling them really.....at least, I don't have the words.. they are going to think they were bonded and I'm sure were to a degree. But it's like they've stopped short of opening a door and walked past, and they don't know that when this door is opened, the hugest room in the world full of the most magical, profound stuff is in there.....

ssu, very well put. It's like I have perfect pitch. I hear a key in music and A major sounds completely different from A flat major. Or someone is colour blind and can't recognise colours. You don't know what you don't have.

But I'm not sure working mothers are unbonded. I don't think it's black and white - that we have some mothers who return to work and don't bond and others that stay at home full time and bond. I adored my babies. I remember all that close loving and breastfeeding, the smell and feel of their gorgeous warm milky bodies against mine, the love, the love I feel even though a good few of them are now grown up, the feeling you'd die for them. I'm not sure those feelings really are that different from what those SAHMs feel.

I was able to bear to be apart from them in working hours just as fathers are but I still felt and feel very attached to them. I certainly missed them when I was at work but I just adjusted to that, they were happy and I was happy. I can't understand parents sending children ot board at 7 so I suppose it's a similar issue - I think how can you love that child and send it away; just as SAHMs might say how can you love that child and return to maternity leave after 6 months etc.

So we have to stick with facts - that most children with good child care or good mothering from SAHPs do fine in either set up particularly if their parents are happy with it. With that in mind people should then do what is right for their children partner and themselves.

that was beautifully put sunny

i can't imagine not wanting to be around my babies, when i was working when dd was little every second away from her killed me and i spent hours after i got home quizing dp about every little detail of their day, equally when dp was working when she was tiny he hated being away from her all the time (he worked night so didn't see much of her when he was home either)

yes the housework is boring, but that the price you pay (and lets face it few WOHM can afford cleaners and have to do housework on top of a job) and yes somedays i wish i had more adult conversation but neither of those reasons would be nearly enough to drag me to work if it weren't financially necessary.

I think that there is a huge yawning gap in all these debates on going back to work, and that is financial incentive/control over work.

If I could earn 10 times as much as my nanny and domestic help, and be sure that I can pick the absolute best, trust them to form an attachment to the baby, structure my working day around expressing breast milk. If I enjoyed work and found it so stimulating that I couldn't bear to be away from it.

If working made a huge difference to my finances, and took me from living in a flat with local state school provision etc etc to living in a mansion, with a cleaner, the pick of private schools etc.

If I was reluctant to lose the job that provided me with all these priveleges, then it is possible that I would consider going back to work at 2 weeks.

As it is, I would be searching around for a local childminder prepared to look after a 2 week old, while they looked after a host of other children of different ages, doing countless other school runs etc., with no way for me to check their track record (other than Ofsted registration).

I would be doing this to make a marginal difference to my standard of living. The difference between stat maternity pay and my salary is significant, but not a life changing incentive to go back before I absolutely have to.

If, on the other hand, my salary was so low that it made no economic sense to go back to work, to basically cover the childcare costs or not even that. If my husband earned enough to support the family comfortably, not just in the short term, but to give us long term options.

I believe that all of these reasons are behind the real decision faced by women. SAHM does not equal "earth mother". WOHM does not equal "heartless b*tch who should never have had children".

The choice is much starker for many of us. We cannot follow instinct, but allow head to rule heart. And if Xenia's posts provide consolation to any of us like that, then I am all for it.

xenia, I agree - most children do fine as long as their childcare is warm and loving; my point is just about what is missed if a mum doesn't experience that fierce need to be with her baby.

It's horses for courses really; what is important to the individual. To me, work (pt) was an absolute financial necessity but not something I wanted specially when ds was a newborn. It all seemed to me so achingly shallow and unimportant compared to the job of being there so my son could experience the love and care of his mum.

And I accept that to others, this seems boring or like being 'stuck in' with a baby. We're not all the same, for sure!

And of course you love your kids and have a bond with them. And those who were out of the house FT as soon as baby was born, will never know whether their children would have been different people because of it; that's what I mean about the thread being impossible to answer!

xenia, I agree - most children do fine as long as their childcare is warm and loving; my point is just about what is missed if a mum doesn't experience that fierce need to be with her baby.

It's horses for courses really; what is important to the individual. To me, work (pt) was an absolute financial necessity but not something I wanted specially when ds was a newborn. It all seemed to me so achingly shallow and unimportant compared to the job of being there so my son could experience the love and care of his mum.

And I accept that to others, this seems boring or like being 'stuck in' with a baby. We're not all the same, for sure!

And of course you love your kids and have a bond with them. And those who were out of the house FT as soon as baby was born, will never know whether their children would have been different people because of it; that's what I mean about the thread being impossible to answer!

Amazing assumptions that being a working mother means:
a Having a nanny
b Working in a quiet office, sitting down all day wearing nice clothes while others run around after you
c That expressing is the same as breastfeeding and easy and convenient to do
d Not doing any housework
and
e being inherently more interesting and worthwhile as a person.

I am truly astonished that there are people out there with so little life experience, understanding or empathy to realise that these things are true for the only an extremely tiny, statistically insignificant proportion of the population.
Huge numbers of people work in physically demanding jobs and run around other people all day. These include teachers and nurses.
Only around 4% of the population employ nannies (though frankly, sometimes you read MN and think it is closer to 80%) - roughly the same proportion of families where the father is a full time carer for the children. And housework doesn't miraculously disappear when you go out to work - and I should know! The huge majority of working women and their partners do it on top of the daily grind, in the evenings or at weekends. The costs of a nanny, au pair and cleaners is so far above the average even reasonably well paid worker's entire salary as to make you absolutely irrelevant as an example to us all. Do you truly not understand that or are you just being deliberately provocative or simply showing off? Just because you can charge, say, £250 an hour doesn't actually make your work more inherently valuable than that of a teacher, whose working life usually involves quite a lot of boring housework, very little sitting down in an office while other people bring her drinks, and a daily struggle to get out in time to pick up her kids from the childminder. Personally, I am very glad that there are working mothers in most fields. It is fantastic to feel your child's teacher understands six year olds because she has or recently had one of her own. Or a paediatrician understands how to comfort a child in pain and a terrified mother because she's one herself. But to suggest your immensely privileged lives bear any relationship to 'real life' as it is lived by ordinary working women is just ridiculous.
And this completely leaves aside the emotional aspects of leaving very small babies, which the vast majority of women simply don't want to do.

Thanks Dara, you have summed up my thoughts exactly.

Xenia: why do you assume that a SAHM "hasn't spoken to a single human being all day"?

Aside from the glaringly obvious fact that a child is, in fact, a human being, why do you think there would be no contact with other adults?

Are you perhaps getting the role of a stay at home mother confused with that of Burt Lancaster in 'The Birdman of Alcatraz'?

magenta

Excellent post Dara.

For Xenia:

2 WEEKS AFTER GIVING BIRTH:

• YOU WILL STILL BE BLEEDING
• YOU WILL NOT HAVE SLEPT YET AS NEWBORN BABIES ON THE WHOLE DO NOT SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT
• YOU WOULD BE MENTALLY EXHAUSTED.
• MOST MOTHERS ARE STILL CRYING AT THIS STAGE.
• YOU WOULD BE JUST GETTING INTO THE SWING OF BREASTFEEDING.
• YOUR HORMONES WOULD BE UP THE WALL.
• IF YOU HAD STITCHES THEN YOU NOT BE ABLE TO SIT STILL LET ALONE WALK FURTHER THAN YOUR FRONT DOOR.
• YOUR BODY WOULD BE PHYSICALLY EXHAUSTED AND STILL RECOVERING FROM LABOUR.
• YOU CAN HARDLY STRING A SENTENCE TOGETHER.
• THE MAJORITY OF MOTHERS HAVE SUCH A STRONG EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT TO THEIR NEWBORN THAT TO LEAVE THEM FOR 5 MINUTES IS COMPLETE TORTURE AND YOU EVEN GIVE UP SLEEP JUST SO THAT YOU CAN WATCH THEM, LET ALONE LEAVE THEM FOR HOURS ON END AT A TIME.

Does anyone else smell a rat???

for dara

opinionsrus, I don't agree with going back after just 2 wks BUT none of the things you describe applied to me at 2 wks, so I guess not to others either

Spot on, dara, as well as your other post about how some people believe that if what you're doing isn't generating money, it's worthless.

What a sad way to go through life!

thats bf apparently floating, another mother and i were discussing it recently we were both relieved it wasn't just us who was paticularly whiffy while bf!

Xenia, I am getting my head around the logistics of going back to work after 2 weeks. I imagine you were fortunate to have straightforward births and babies who slept through the night from quite early on?

Even if babies do not sleep through from early on, I find that cosleeping and breastfeeding even with a frequent waker does not leave me a wreck - so do-able. Which was how I managed going back to work with a baby that still woke every hour all night long.

Plus co-sleeping extends the cosy cuddly time I had with dd, even if I was at work for most of the day.

And having worked in a high pressure job in the City, in a lot of ways, it IS easier and less tiring than being with babies all day long. So what Xenia is saying about her recovery being aided by being at work is not far fetched.

Also, this bonding thing is a red herring. It is not something that women are magically destined to experience from birth arising from carrying the baby for 9 months and giving birth. The feelings grow over time. If my dh (who returned to work after 2-3 weeks) can confidently and guiltlessly say he is bonded with our dcs, there is no reason why Xenia cannot say the same thing about her 5 dcs without being disbelieved.

Having said that, I would add that I take the full 1 year off for each of my dd and ds - that's because of the babies they were and I could not afford a nanny.

But I can see how a person might go back after 2 weeks if suitable childcare was available.

"Also, this bonding thing is a red herring."

I can assure you that it is not a red herring.

I prepared myself mentally and emotionally with my firstborn and read just about every single pregnancy book going on "what it would be like" etc etc.

I bonded with my baby the very second that he was born and that bond only grew stronger and stronger.

The bond with your baby is far more important than a few thousand pounds lost,and yes I myself did go back to work but not after 2 weeks.

Ok maybe everyone does not feel this way, nevertheless instict tells me that going back to work just 2 weeks after birth is wrong. It is certainly NOT something to be glorified.

Your instinct says it's wrong for mothers but not fathers and yet you did go back to work. What is so magical about doing it at a later age. Surely it as much breaches this bond as as if you back earlier? Some mothers are in floods of tears when the 18 year old goes to university.

I accept the points about most people's incomes. A lot of people don't earn more than the hourly rate of child minders so very different issues then come into play. The post below about going back preserving a career at a certain point and a lifestyle that might benefit the family for the next 30 years is correct and certainly influenced me although I must say I was more influenced by my feminist views and ideals over roles of fathers and mothers at home rather than money at that point and also because I genuinely found it easier at work and we had a good nanny so were lucky.

As for the health points she hardly slept at all. We had a very tiring first 6 months. I am afraid it was a relief to leave her many mornings as she screamed so much, that one, not the others. And with her, not the other 4, I'd had stitches but that didn't stop me walking. In fact I cycles to the tube station every day and back. I think the exercise did me good. Women give birth and till fields. I'm not sure it does them any harm.