Sisters are doing it for themselves, but they want help from their employers.

As I noted earlier, Working Mother magazine recently interviewed nearly 4,000 mothers nationwide to determine what their worries and needs are.  We know now that both mothers who work outside the home and stay-at-home moms carry the weight of retro expectations on their shoulders when it comes to their domestic life, but what about life outside the home?  What do career-oriented mothers want and need in order to both flourish in the workplace and feel as if they’re providing fully for their children?

According to Working Mother, the 5 most important benefits for working moms are: Continue reading »

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What's the one thing working mothers and SAHMs worry about? You won't believe it.

Working Mother magazine released a study this morning called What Moms Choose: The Working Mother Report, “a survey of 3,700 mothers nationwide reveal[ing] surprising insights into the differences and similarities between moms who work outside the home and moms who stay at home, as well as the factors that influence their decisions.”

As mothers, we’re all aware of the hot-button issues that make us feel divided and judged by our peers, and working vs. staying at home is certainly near the top of the list.  Each lifestyle choice brings with it its own set of guilty feelings, sense of inadequacy and source of pride (sometimes verging on arrogant righteousness).  So, besides caring for our children, what do working mothers and stay-at-home mothers have in common?  It turns out, there’s one thing both groups of women worry that they’ll be judged on, and it’s honestly so hilariously, ridiculously sad and retro that you’ll laugh when you read it.

The one concern both working mothers and stay-at-home mothers have in common is… Continue reading »

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The problem with the stay-at-home-mom vs. working mom “debate” is that, like many arguments nobody can really win, the issue is so often presented in black and white: either a mom works full time, or she stays home full time. Either a woman returns to a demanding job by the time her baby is six weeks old, or she “opts out” entirely.

Neither position generally represents the real lives of women somewhere in the middle, who take an extended leave and return to work later, work from home, or work part-time.

So I was intrigued by an article in Time called “Why Maternity Leave Is Important” covering a new analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Researchers looked at outcome data on everything from maternal stress to “quality of parenting” and studied mothers and children together in a laboratory setting to score how well they interacted. Based on the study’s findings, the Time article makes two distinct points: first, it is, in general, good for mothers to work; however, trying to balance a full-time job with a three-month-old baby is a recipe for stress and depression. Continue reading »

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Can we ever agree to disagree, or will the fighting continue?

Opinions are like moms. Everyone has one. And every mom has an opinion.

In fact, you won’t have to look far (the mirror, perhaps?) to find a mom with a very strong opinion on a variety of parenting topics. Perhaps the one thing we can all agree on, however, is that we’ll never agree on many of these things.

Take a glance at the arguments that will likely never be settled, no matter how right you just know you are on the issue:

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Is what he's doing any less valuable than if Mom were doing it?

Poor Dad can’t catch a break. Everyone refers to it as mom’s house, mom’s room and mom’s kitchen, but when he’s the one to stay at home, he’s still worth nearly half as much as she is, according to a new survey by Salary.com.

It’s an annual survey that determines how dads would be paid if there were a paycheck attached to parenting (as if!). They use some fancy-schmancy method to determine the numbers, so it’s really (kind of) scientific.

The 10 most common “dad jobs” are day care center teacher, CEO, psychologist, cook, groundskeeper, laundry machine operator, computer operator, facilities manager, maintenance worker and van driver. (The mom jobs, by the way, are the same, but are appropriately bestowed with more delicate titles.)

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10 more minutes per day? What to do . . . what to do . . .

New research commissioned by Microsoft found that 90 percent of moms would be happier if they had 10 more minutes in their day. Clearly I wasn’t asked to participate in the study, because if asked, I would have answered that I’d be happy with 10 fewer minutes in my day. Make it an hour or two less and I’d be downright ecstatic.

The Microsoft study also said moms would give up sex, alcohol, TV or chocolate to get that extra time. What I wonder is if they’re giving up everything pleasurable, then what, exactly, do they want the extra time for? Folding more onesies? Picking up Legos?

Give me 10 more minutes and that just means I have 10 more minutes of stuff to do. (And by “stuff” I definitely don’t mean eat chocolate, have sex, watch TV or drink alcohol.)

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One of the biggest challenges for many a stay-at-home-mom?  It’s not the day to day work it takes to raise a family, it’s not the constant car pools, cooking, and cleaning, it’s making that big transition from SAHM to working woman.

Now, first it should be pointed out that being a mom is pretty much the hardest job out there. But when starting to try to rejoin the ‘work force’ after taking years off to attend to their family, it can be a very intimidating process for many a woman, one that seems incredibly foreign from diaper changes, story time and making lunches.  But there are places out there to help. One that many utilize is Career Builder, a online job search company that has special resources just for working moms. Continue reading »

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