Why ‘mom guilt’ is an unreasonable term
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America's poor family leave policies for new parents are the reason why 'mom guilt' is universal – but that guilt is unreasonable, says Smith Brody.
'Dad guilt' is not a term, but men should also be part of this conversation.
For every month of parental leave that a father takes, the mom's lifetime earnings increase by 7%. Studies prove fathers who take parental leave ultimately have better relationships with their teenage children.
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LAUREN SMITH BRODY:
Lauren Smith Brody is the founder of The Fifth Trimester movement and the author of the #1 bestseller The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Big Success After Baby. Prior to launching T5T, Lauren had a 16-year career in magazine publishing, most recently as the longtime executive editor of Glamour magazine at Condé Nast, where she produced the Women of the Year awards, honoring luminaries like Dr. Maya Angelou and Hillary Clinton.
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TRANSCRIPT:
LAUREN SMITH BRODY: So mom guilt is unfortunately kind of universal. A lot of women blame themselves first and foremost when life doesn't feel in balance or in check, in terms of managing career and family and home. And it's really, really – it's not reasonable to expect that anybody would have that in balance, given the lack of respect that our country shows for new parenthood. Now, that said, I don't mean to blame the victim, but it's something that we can kind of control. So when I did the research for my book I interviewed and surveyed more than 800 new parents, and what I found when I looked at the transcripts of the longer, deeper interviews is that the word "guilt" popped up again and again and again. Only what I was actually sort of surprised to see is that it meant really different things to different mothers. So there were some mothers who felt really guilty leaving their baby to go back to work and leaving the baby in someone's care who they felt like maybe was not quite as capable as they would be themselves of loving the baby. There were other people who actually felt guilty because they loved being back at work. And I experienced both of those feelings. When I went back to work after having my first son and my second, my husband was in his medical residency. There was no real choice for me to make about the income that our family needed, and so I didn't feel terribly conflicted about going back to work, it just felt like it was too soon and it was not in the most supportive cultural circumstances that I would have wanted. So what I say to women is, first of all, guilt implies that you've made some sort of wrong decision. That there's some other "better, less guilty" working mom out there who you should aspire to be like. But erase that idea, because every single mother out there will admit to feeling guilt in one way or another, right? So if it is just a lowest common denominator, let's just erase it and treat for whatever feeling we actually have.
If you feel regretful, if you feel conflicted, if you feel overwhelmed, if you feel unsupported, let's solve that problem rather than writing something off universally as "mom guilt". You don't really hear people talk about "dad guilt," and I would actually really welcome that conversation, and I think dads would actually quite like to be a part of that conversation. But it feels kind of anti-feminist, actually, to just call all of this conflict that we have about this transition back to work after a baby, to call it "mom guilt". And it's something that's perpetuated if you don't acknowledge the reasons for why you're having these feelings early on, they snowball and they can make it harder and harder for women to stay in the workplace. We know that 30 percent of professional women drop out of the workplace within a year of having a baby.
Even in the most progressive couples, even in couples that came into their couplehood saying, "We're going to be equal partners," if mom is learning everything in that time about how to care for the baby...
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