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Parenting takes both time and money, and therein lie the seeds of deep and abiding family conflict over the time spent working to earn that money and time invested in parenting. And that means "hands-on" parenting—not the kind where you are on the phone or working at the computer in the same room as your child. (Yes, I still feel the guilt of my baby daughter rolling off the bed while I checked my email.)
Divna Haslam and colleagues in Australia have developed a questionnaire to study parental guilt and tested it on working families. They wanted to look at the impact of parental guilt on two kinds of work stress. Firstly, there is family conflicting with work, where family life makes it hard to get work done, and secondly, there is work conflicting with family, where work cuts into family time. Many working parents feel guilty on both counts as they struggle to meet the demands of both work and family life.
Two hundred and ninety parents of children aged 2 to 12 were asked questions such as, "I feel guilty if my child gets upset when I leave them," and "I feel guilty when I do not have the energy to fully engage with my child." I feel guilty just reading that.
They also wanted to know whether more confident parents might feel less guilty and whether feeling guilty had any effect on their children's behavior. They asked how often behaviors such as "Refuses to eat food made for them" and "Has trouble keeping busy without adult attention" occurred in their home, and how confident they felt about dealing with it.
And yes—I chose those two examples because they were daily occurrences in my house. I dealt with them by waiting for her to grow out of it. Food is still a work in progress as a teenager.
What they found was surprising. Confidence had no impact on feeling guilty: Confident parents felt just as guilty as the less confident. And you might think that children's behavior would be worse when work conflicted with family life, but it was the other way around—their behavior was worse when family life impacted work.
Haslam suggests that this might be because children don't really register stress that is caused by something outside the home, like work, that has nothing to do with them (it's not their fault)—or maybe work stress leads to poorer parenting. I think there may be a lot more to that last point.
Some of you might already be wondering about the 290 parents. Whenever you read papers about
"parenting," when you look at the fine print, you generally find that they mean mothers with a few random fathers they were able to rope in. In this study, there were just 34 fathers, understandably, as it's a lot easier to recruit mothers, working or not.
So most of this family conflicting with work is happening for mothers, and we know that this conflict is always more challenging for women. Most of the parents in Haslam's study were not just working for the money—they wanted to work. If an android were programmed to want both a career and children and to optimize both, I wonder if it would just shortcircuit and die.
In Sheryl Sandberg's TED talk, "Why we have too few women leaders," she tells how her 3-year-old toddler clung to her knees, begging her not to get on the plane to give the talk. When my own daughter was nearly 3, I flew to a conference. She cried on the phone. I cried over breakfast in front of my male colleagues.
Sandberg talks about how women "lean back" at work—not just when they have children, but long before when they think about how they can manage work and children in the future. And so successful men have more children, and successful women have fewer—maybe none. Successful men are seen as likable and strong providers for their children. Successful women are seen as less likable and neglectful caregivers. It's easy for women to feel they are failing at both work and motherhood.
So I have to wonder whether the fathers' work in Haslam's study was being impacted as much as the mothers, whether they felt as guilty about it, and whether their guilt affected their children's behavior as much. Of course, you'd need to get a lot more fathers to take part in studies like this to test the gender differences, but if I'm right, then Sandberg gives good advice when she says that if work is important to you, don't lean back when you have children—keep leaning in. And don't feel guilty—because it really will be better for your kids.
PS — Not wishing to detract from the message here but for the curious—I leaned back so far as to be practically horizontal—and it really is very tough getting back up from down there….
