Category: Working Motherhood

Are Breadwinning Moms Happy?

A new study by Working Mother Media about breadwinning moms reveals that more breadwinning moms who chose their roles are pleased with the way chores are divided at home. As Kelly Wallace writes on cnn.com:

The survey found that 89% of the moms who were happy to be breadwinners were satisfied with how much their spouse or partner took care of the children, versus 58% for the “reluctant” breadwinners. Meanwhile, 75% of “pleased” breadwinning moms were satisfied with how chores were divided at home, versus 48% of the group who would prefer not to be the primary earner.

I spoke with Kelly about my own experience for the piece. I am not a reluctant breadwinning mom; it was a choice we made. Lots of elements went into it, including my own earning power and our natural temperaments, but, at bottom, these were roles we chose. I told Kelly that I thought another aspect of making it work was the lack of measuring — I don’t count each task my husband does at home and consider whether he is pulling his weight.  Similarly, he didn’t resent me for not taking more lucrative jobs. Kelly includes a short quote from me at the end of the piece, and one from my youngest daughter Charlotte, who knows no other situation than her mom working and her dad cooking, cleaning and changing her diaper way more than her mom does.

More Mom Breadwinners Challenge Our Notions of the Traditional Family

It’s not easy to diffuse the impact of long-held stereotypes, especially when biology is involved.

It looks like my situation  — I’m a working mom and my husband is a “diapering dad“ — is becoming more common. And according to the Pew Center’s recent numbers, the radical change in society in the past 50 years looks like this — women are now the sole or primary breadwinners in four out of ten households — up from 11% in 1960. The study also found that family income is actually higher when the mother is the breadwinner.

A change like this one does not come easily — it alters people’s fundamental notions of family structure, and may not be a perfect fit with the human biological reality. I’d argue a mom can make the money and have thriving kids and a thriving marriage — uterus, breasts, estrogen and all — as long as we don’t pretend those biological differences don’t exist.

The Pew report came out a few days after the release of hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones‘ statements to a group of business school students about the unsuitability of mothers as global macro traders, an intense profession. He said, “As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it” and motioned to his chest, arguing that becoming a mother made women lose focus. His remarks were immediately criticized, especially by those of us who think we were focused pretty well after having babies. Continue reading More Mom Breadwinners Challenge Our Notions of the Traditional Family

How I Do It

[Note: The following is my contribution to the “How I Do It” series at the New York Times’ Motherlode.  I thought the series provided a unique way to really see parenthood in action – there is no better way to answer the question “How do you do it?” than really laying it out, warts and all!]
 
Motherlode asked parents, from members of Congress to retail clerks, to share “how they do it” on one typical day.

Rebecca Hughes Parker is the editor in chief of The FCPA Report, a legal publication about anticorruption issues. Previously, she spent eight years as a litigator at a large law firm, a job she took while pregnant with her twin girls. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and three daughters, 8-year-old twins and a 2-year-old. Her husband is the primary caregiver for the children. They have never had a nanny or a housekeeper.

Manhattan, Tuesday, May 14
5:20 a.m. My husband comes in from the truncated overnight shift he did at the local television station –  he freelances as a news writer for the morning show there and does a shift once every two weeks or so. Today he worked midnight to 5 a.m. He takes the dog out.

5:40 I peel myself off the bed and go into the room that my three girls — 8-year-old twins and a 2-year-old — share. I nudge Alex, one of the twins. “Are you sure you want to go?” I say, hoping she will say she wants to cancel ice skating and we can go back to bed. “I want to go,” she says. I tiptoe out of the room, thankful that for once the 2-year-old, Charlotte, does not wake up. The other twin, Natalie, sleeps like a log. Continue reading How I Do It

The Unsteady Rise of the Power Mom and the Diapering Dad

“The most important career choice you’ll make is who you’ll marry,” Sheryl Sandberg, the ubiquitous Facebook COO and author of the “Lean In” book (and social movement), famously tells women.  She advocates marrying someone who will do 50% of the “second shift,” freeing women to go full force in their careers, and allowing those stubborn low numbers of women in leadership positions to finally rise.

IF A MAN DOES ALL THE WORK THAT A WOMAN TRADITIONALLY DOES, as my stay-at-home husband happily does, IS THE PROBLEM SOLVED?  Did I manage to reverse the gender roles and be the “father” who goes to work?  Fresh out of law school, I expected to.  But, it wasn’t so straightforward. Continue reading The Unsteady Rise of the Power Mom and the Diapering Dad

Much Ado About Going to the Office

I was interviewed in a piece on NPR today by Jennifer Ludden on Marisa Mayer’s now infamous “work from home memo,” available here.

Four  points on the backlash:

1- Attack on Flexibility:  This memo was perceived as taking something away that employees have gained in today’s workplace, something that innovation has enabled.  And it’s more than just working from home – flexibility and remote work policies often go hand in hand and people, working mothers in particular, conflate them.  They viewed this memo as an attack on flexibility as well.   Studies show that most working moms want to work flexibly, or part time.  That’s why the backlash was particularly harsh among female bloggers. Continue reading Much Ado About Going to the Office