The Huffington Post, recently published, “Supermoms At Higher Risk For Depression: Study” – a pragmatic, powerful and practical piece about avoiding the almost universal guilt and frequent depression felt by working mothers.
Key points include:
- Mothers are better off at home if that’s really where they want to be and they’re better off working if that’s where they really want to be. Such a simple – and powerful – statement!
- Own your choices – this is a particularly good point for mothers who would prefer to be at home, but have to work. You don’t have to love your job, but if you know in some fundamental way that you made the right decision about working, you’ll be more comfortable going forward than if you’re always questioning yourself.
- Find your work-life “fit” – not balance. Why? Because “balance” is a guilt word; it implies you have to have everything on an even keel and that if you give to one side, you take from the other. “Fit”, on the other hand, is about doing whatever works for you. When balance is out of the equation, so is the guilt that comes with trying to achieve it.
- Align your expectations with reality. Staying stuck with expectations that aren’t coming true leads to depression and guilt.
Click here to read the full article, which includes a list of six practical tips to banish working mothers’ guilt for good!
My response:
Over the past forty years, the feminist mantra that “women can have it all” has subtly turned to show its dark side, that in order to have it all, “women must do it all”. Current research shows that despite the advert of modern feminism, working mothers – even those engaged in full-time work – still do most of their family’s housework, cooking, shopping and childcare and hands-on caring responsibilities for other family members, such as aged relatives. Easily a 70-80 hour working week, when travelling, working and domestic work is taken into account. Against that backdrop, the expectation that so many women put upon themselves, to manage the perfect home, be the perfect mother and have the perfect career, or run the perfect business, is a recipe for emotional and psychological disaster. The work/life balance myth has added to this pressure, causing women to question why they can’t find that elusive balance that would enable them to hold all the parts of their life together. Unfortunately, the only structural and long term solution to the woes of Australia’s working mothers that I can see lies in the hands of government. Not an ideal situation, but all we have to work with. The government is already recognising the importance of quality child care, by planning to staff early years child care centres with qualified teachers – a step in the right direction. But that is of little use to mothers whose children are currently on a two to three year waiting list to access their centre of choice, or who aren’t able to use child care centres because they close too early. Like it or not, it’s a fact of life that many mothers are not in the privileged position of being able to collect their children by 6 pm. Child care centre operators should be encouraged to recognise this and extend their hours to a more realistic timeframe, with the government subsidising their additional operating costs, to avoid the ridiculous situation of centres charging $1+ for every minute a parent is late collecting their child. Outside school hours care should also be subsidised in the same way. Family day care is not everyone’s choice and parents should not be forced to put their child into that model of care because nothing else is available. I would also like to see the use of accredited domestic support services made tax deductible, to increase their affordability to all working Australians (I say “working Australians” because some groups of non-working Australians already receive subsided or free domestic services) and open up employment options in the home services field, thereby reducing the ongoing drain on government funds caused by able-bodied people accepting unemployment benefits.
