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Last week’s Zoom meetings included one colleague holding her 18-month son on her lap, one taking a break to speak with the vet, and one pausing to play tutor for their middle schooler. I recognized myself in them all. As a parent working remotely, I also regularly juggle my professional and personal realities for all to see on Zoom.
These multiple, concurrent presentations of self initially caused me great angst–to which I turned to Goffman’s classic “presentation of self” to help me understand why my many roles felt in conflict. But after nearly a year of pandemic-imposed, full-family quarantine, I’m more comfortable playing all my roles at once. Parent, spouse, professor, consultant, advisor, sister, pet-owner; the boundaries between my many identities have become less siloed and more integrated.
In many ways, this integration feels good. One of my colleagues put it well after she paused for a moment to help her son during a conference call, “I feel free like I don’t have to hide the fact that I have kids anymore when I am at work. It’s liberating!”
Freedom. That word seems paradoxical in continued quarantine lockdowns and COVID-19-disrupted lives. Yet, in many ways, freedom is an unexpected gift we’ve received if we dare to unwrap it. Freedom to erase the artificial divides we had created between work and home. Freedom from trying to hide the messy realities we are constantly juggling. Freedom to fully be our whole, multifaceted selves when interacting with others at work and beyond.
This gift of freedom seems to be delivering another gift to working parents as well: increased career optimism. Defined as employees’ expectation of positive outcomes for their future professional development, career optimism is yet another paradox in our pandemic-impacted lives. Given that there have been more than 10 million employees impacted by organizational restructurings, downsizings, and closings, one would think that career pessimism is pervasive, especially for working parents who are bearing the brunt of the pandemic in unique ways. A recent survey commissioned by Champlain College Online, however, revealed that adults with children in the household felt notably more optimistic about career prospects (63%) than those without children at home (51%)–despite likely holding additional responsibility for caregiving and education at this time.
I found this data curious at first glance. Why would working parents feel more optimistic? After all, although we may feel new freedom in some ways as working parents, we still experience heightened stress from our disrupted lives. Yet, it is the recognition of the unique stresses facing working parents today that has led many organizations to implement additional supports to help employees ebb and flow between work and home. From expanded flextime to extended parental leave benefits to changing norms around meeting expectations, organizations are changing in positive ways to accommodate the holistic lives of their employees, especially those with children.
Interestingly, the survey by Champlain College Online also found that working parents were more likely to accelerate their decision to gain new workplace skills compared to those without children. This finding could be explained, at least in part, as the return on investment (ROI) for their increased optimism. After all, we know that increased optimism pays dividends in a myriad of ways, from higher job satisfaction to higher salaries to expanded career options. The career optimism working parents are feeling may be motivating them to explore opportunities they might otherwise have ignored before, including in-house professional development training and even entire new career paths.
Furthermore, as we watch our children navigate a new world of online learning, many of us are recognizing that succeeding in the future will depend upon being able to successfully learn and collaborate online. As such, working parents are also leaning into expanding their skills as online technologists–learning how to use a variety of new virtual tools to benefit them both at work and home.
Upon deeper reflection, I realized that the stress we are feeling as parents is ironically also perhaps fueling our optimism. Because of our stress, there is a shared sense that things will not "go back to normal," and perhaps we do not want them to. We do not want to return to the times when we had to hide pieces of our identity and our challenges from our co-workers. We do not want to go back to having our productivity evaluated based on the number of hours we spent in our offices. Instead, we want to continue leaning into fully integrated lives where we can bring our whole selves to both work and home, because we are optimistic that we can.
As we now begin to peer over the horizon to imagine life in a post-pandemic world, many of us realize that we do not have to be bound by what was, but rather can dare to dream what we want to be. This has tremendous implications for not only career trajectories, but for the entire economy as well. Parents comprise nearly a third of the workforce, thus any economic recovery depends upon their presence. The more ways that organizations can cultivate cultures that support working parents and develop their skills for the future, the more they can create an upward spiral of increased optimism and positive work outcomes.
With sustained disruptions likely remaining as the backdrop to our lives, we recognize that tomorrow does not need to–and indeed most likely will not–look like yesterday. Every day is an opportunity to create the life we want to be living. Whether that involves going back to school to gain new skills, moving to a new region we love because we are working remotely, or considering an entirely new career path–we realize the future is ours to create.
Embracing the possibility of living as our whole selves, imperfections and all, sounds perfect to me.
