How to Thrive as a Working Parent

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

Okay, listeners, get ready for a confession. There’s a problem that I’ve struggled with every single day for the past 11 years. It’s an issue I’ll bet some of you deal with too: Working mom guilt.

Like all of you, I’m a person who wants to be great at work and at home — to give 100 percent to my job and career and 100 percent to my family – my husband, my two kids, my parents, even my cat. I want to edit important articles, interview smart people, attend key conferences and help with the homework, go to all the soccer games, tuck everyone in at night.

In theory, it’s totally doable. And I make it work. But it’s also a hectic, stressful, and – because I can’t be in two places at once – guilt-inducing existence.

Our guest today is on a mission to help working parents like me navigate these issues. And with decades of experience in HR, as a consultant and now as a mom herself, she has tons of practical advice about how to make it happen.

Daisy Dowling is founder and CEO of Workparent. She’s also the author of the HBR article “A Working Parent’s Survival Guide.” Daisy, thanks so much for being on the show.

DAISY DOWLING: Thank you so much for having me.

ALISON BEARD: So, when we talk about the stresses of being working parents, it often seems like this one, big, massive problem. But are there separate challenges that we need to think about?

DAISY DOWLING: Absolutely. I think the daunting, scary thing for most working parents is that it feels as if they’re looking at one big, ongoing, tangled and untangle-able problem. So, they look at working parenthood and it looks like a plate of spaghetti. And how do I create order and structure around this, which I know how to do in my professional life, but how do I do it in my working parent life?

Having interviewed and spoken to so many different working parents, they each felt that way, but the more people I spoke to, the more patterns emerged. And the conclusion that I came to, or the realization that I came to was that working parents were typically dealing with a repeated set of problems, really five different core areas of challenge.

If working parents could be given a sense of that framework, if they could be given a sense of wait, there is some order to this problem and I can attack it, all of a sudden it put them in the driver’s seat again.

ALISON BEARD: So, really quickly, take us through those five dimensions.

DAISY DOWLING: There’s what I called five core challenges. The first is the transition challenge. When people think about working parent transitions, they often think of the transition off of parental leave, back to work.

But in reality transitions happen all the time. There’s even the transition when you get home from an intense day at work and you walk through the door and you see your kids and you have to show up and want to show up as a loving, nurturing parent. That’s a transition too.

The second is the practical challenge. And the practical challenge is just the load of stuff that every parent has to deal with. This is the daycare drop off, getting to the pharmacy before it closes, figuring out the day camps. It’s everything that’s on your to-do list and it’s a long, long to-do list and figuring out how to tame that is not easy.

The third challenge is what I call the communications challenge, and that’s just talking about being a working parent, both at home and at work. So, most of us, even if we consider ourselves good communicators, even if we have good relationships at home and on the job, are simply not used to – and therefore not comfortable – talking about our needs and about our plans as working parents.

So, if you have to ask your boss for greater flexibility, again this week, and you did last week also, how do you frame that? How do you make that not an awkward conversation? Or, if you need to talk to your eight-year-old son about the fact that you’re going to be travelling for work again, how do you do that in a way that the conversation is going to be more reassuring to him?

The fourth challenge is the loss challenge. And the loss challenge I think is the most sort of intimate and emotional of the five challenges. But the loss challenge is just being worried that you’re missing something profound.

ALISON BEARD: That’s where my guilt comes from.

DAISY DOWLING: Exactly. And its guilt, but it’s also just a sense of bereavement, for lack of a better word, where you feel like well, gosh, I missed the soccer game and the kids are growing up really fast, and what did I miss? What am I doing here? Or, you may spend more time at home and think, gee, did I give up a promotion or a great work opportunity? And then the fifth challenge is what I call the identity challenge and that’s really figuring out who you are as a working parent. So, if you’ve always been a hard charger, when you become a parent, who are you then? Putting those things together into a unified identity can be really challenging also. It can be tough.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So, what are some specific strategies that you would recommend to, for example deal with, the transition challenge?

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah, so when I do individual coaching with parents who are going through transitions of any kind, I always encourage them to think about rehearsing their transition. So, if you’re planning to come back from parental leave, maybe it’s your first leave, maybe it’s your fourth. Before your first day back at work, why not have a dress rehearsal day, where you get up, you get the baby ready, you get yourself dressed and ready for work, you get everyone into the care, you do the day care drop off, you commute to work and then when you get to the door, at work, you turn around and you take yourself out for a nice cup of coffee and then you take yourself back home and you enjoy the day. Pick your kid up.

What that does is let you spot what things are really going to be like. It lets you catch any sort of logistical challenges that are going to come up in the course of that commute, in the course of your morning. Small things that might derail you practically, but also emotionally if you’re making this big leap back into work.

And then when it is your first day back, you have this comforting sense of oh, I’ve done this before. And I know I need to give this part of the process an extra five minutes. You can also think about rehearsing in a much smaller or mental way. So, if you are coming home from a, if you have a very stressful workplace and you’re coming home from work, with sort of a frown on and the stress of the day is sort of in your tense shoulders and in how you’re carrying yourself, stop and think: how am I going to actually make the transformation into loving, patient, nurturing, caring mom or dad when I walk over the threshold?

And maybe you walk yourself around the block one extra time before going into your apartment building, or you sit in the garage for an extra 30 seconds to do that mental transition, or you do it somehow on the commute home.

ALISON BEARD: I can see rehearsing helping with the communication challenge too. Figuring out exactly what you want to say about the parental leave you’d like to take, or the flexible schedule you want. And then saying it in the best way you possibly can.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah, I think the trickiest thing when people feel most awkward is when they find themselves in what feels like a very high stakes communication around working parenthood, and they just don’t have the words. And it’s, even if you’re the best communicator, it’s going to be really hard on the fly to come up with what you want to say.

So, I do encourage people to think ahead, to do a little bit of mental rehearsal, to get comfortable with what they’re going to say, but then also to think about putting their comments into a format. And this can be adapted. It doesn’t have to be so firm. But where people think about communicating their priorities, what they’re going to do next and their commitment and enthusiasm.

So, if you’re asking your boss, I mean I had to go to my seven-year-old’s end of year school concert. Instead of going to my boss and saying, if I had a corporate boss, instead of going to that person and saying, I have to leave now it’s a school concert, or instead of just getting up and slinking away from my desk, I can go to somebody and say, “I’m going to my daughter’s school concert right now. But I’m really focused on getting together all my notes for the meeting this afternoon so we can come to agreement on the marketing plan.”

And all of a sudden, the conversation moves away from your needs, you’re feeling a little sheepish about wanting to leave the office for the concert, which you should do. You’re putting that fact up front, but then you’re also flipping the conversation to talk about the value you’re adding.

ALISON BEARD: And it seems as if that message would go even better if you already, with your boss, established that identity that you talk about. I am a fully committed person who’s going to be here for you when you need me, however, I am also really committed to my family.

DAISY DOWLING: Yes. Yes, it is. And the identity challenge can be solved through an exercise, I think similar to what a lot of people have done in different leadership development programs, or if they’ve maybe read books or articles on the topic, which is the idea of personal branding. We all have a set of adjectives that we would like to use to describe a professionally speaking, we’re smart, we’re committed, we’re responsive.

The idea now as a working parent is to update that and to choose an identity that gets at the essence of the fact that you are a parent and a professional, but that doesn’t create a contradiction. So, to give a specific example, many parents will say “oh, well I’ve always been the hardest worker and the most responsible person in my office.”

That’s a great identity. It’s an extraordinarily difficult one to keep up when you’re a working parent. But instead of choosing those as how you want to be perceived, you can update your identity. You can recast yourself a little bit to be the most judicious colleague in the office, the most thoughtful, the most articulate. You can pick other things that get to the same set of issues that have meaning to you, but that are just a little bit more feasible now, as a working parent.

ALISON BEARD: OK, let’s talk about practicalities, specifically how do I deal with those practicalities without getting in huge fights with my spouse?

DAISY DOWLING: Or, beating yourself up about not finishing every single thing on your to-do list every day. You can argue with a spouse, but you can also sort of berate yourself and neither of those things are good.

ALISON BEARD: I do both.

DAISY DOWLING: Yes, we all do. So, and we’ll always do, but these things can help. So, the key with the practical challenge is you’re always going to have a gigantic number of things to do. But you can try and cull and prune that list down as best you can. And I encourage people to go over once a week, or at some regular interval, I think the week is best. To go over their calendar, their to-do list and whatever organizational system they have for keeping themselves sort of together at work and home. To go over every single meeting that was on that calendar, every single item that was on that to-do list and cast a really critical eye on each one and say, could this have been done by somebody else? Could I had done it in slightly less time? Am I hovering on things a little bit too much or being a perfectionist? Could I have delegated it? Could I have skipped it without too much consequence?

What I’m essentially encouraging people to do is to take sort of a Marie Kondo approach, but declutter their time and their to-do list. And if you can win yourself back five precent of your time, if you can take off five percent of the things on your to-do list, you will feel that impact. That is significant. There’s 252 business days a year, at least in the United States and you win back five percent, that’s 12 and half days.

ALISON BEARD: One of the best pieces of advice that I got as a new working mother was absolutely volunteer for things at the school, but make sure that your kids are there when you’re there. So, don’t be on the PA and have meetings with other moms, chaperone the school fieldtrip.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah, I think that’s terrific advice. I’m actually going to go one further in terms of the school thing and say, for working parents I would encourage you to think about taking a defined amount of time, whether that’s half a day or a day, take a vacation day off and go stack your volunteer commitments all over the course of one day.

ALISON BEARD: OK, so we talked about the practicalities which are maybe the easiest and least emotional to deal with. Let’s talk about this really hard, sometimes heart-wrenching piece, feeling like you’re missing out on things at home, and also missing out on things at work and that sense of loss.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah. So, this is the most interesting and to me non-intuitive strategy. And in all of my research, talking to men and women, dealing with the challenge of being working parents, this really, really caught my attention.

People who were reported being the most satisfied over the long term, in that role, had this unique ability to think very short-term and really long-term at the exact same time. Which it doesn’t come to me naturally, but they would look at not being able to get to a school concert let’s say. And they would say well, “gosh, that’s really, really hard. I didn’t get to it, but I am going to see my daughter tonight and my spouse has the video of the concert and we’ll look at it together and I’ll see that and that’s only five hours away. And long-term, my daughter is going to know that I was at the vast majority of these concerts and also that I set a really great model for her as a working mother.”

So, they would take this incredibly short-term thinking, what’s going to happen today? What’s going to happen in the next couple of hours? And suddenly go 20 years in the future. And so, I began thinking of this as today plus 20 years thinking, where they would get an immediate sense of relief in the next couple of hours, but then they would also have this very long-term perspective. And putting those two things together, seemed to really, really help the sense of loss.

If you think intermediate term, it’s going to be more challenging. For example, if you come back from parental leave and you have a baby at home and you think, “oh I miss the baby so much. What’s it going to be like three months from now, or six months from now?” That’s very hard. That’s where the sense of loss will come from. But if you think of yourself 20 years in the future, it’s going to make life a little bit easier today.

ALISON BEARD: This gets a little bit at the next question that I was going to ask, and that’s this challenge of measuring success. It’s very easy for us to do that at work in most cases via what you produced, or sold, or your reviews, but it’s really hard to gage how you’re doing as a parent and whether you’re getting the balance right. But maybe that, how did I do today, and what do I think the long-term impact of that will be is a better way to think about it?

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. All of us need a sense of: I’m on the right path. And the daunting thing about working parenthood, or one of the many daunting things is that there’s nobody standing over your shoulder who can say, yep you’re doing all the right things, or that was the right decision, keep going with that.

ALISON BEARD: Kids very rarely give you that sort of positive feedback.

DAISY DOWLING: Nobody gives you that positive feedback, or negative feedback either. It’s a conversation that’s just in your head and therefore is, it’s easy to sort of get a little crazy feeling because you don’t know if you’re doing well, or not and you’re debating it in your own mind. It becomes a big distraction.

So, a lot of working parents I see, and I also recommend this with the individual clients I work with, set out for themselves a set of guidelines and a set of goals, for where they want to be. So, if you know that 15 years from now, you still want to be the central adult in your children’s lives and you want to be able to fully fund their university educations, and that you are interested in becoming the head of your department, but not the head of your entire organization.

Well, those three things are interesting factors because then all of a sudden today, you know that well, you probably want to prioritize being home for dinner and you are willing to take on extra projects, but not do too much business travel. In other words, you can start sorting and picking your commitments based on what you want to see in that future success, and how you’ve defined it.

Whereas, if your goal is getting through to the end of the day, or getting until Friday afternoon, if your goal is just survival, you don’t have a great decision making – a way to make decisions on what to do, what success looks like and so forth and it’s also very demotivating.

ALISON BEARD: How does putting your advice into practice and advocating for yourself become more challenging when you’re not someone who’s seen as, typically as the primary caregiver? I’m thinking about dads, I’m thinking about maybe even grandparents, people who foster, same-sex partners.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah, so I think that there has been an overly narrow view generally of what quote, unquote working parenthood means or looks like. And again I think the more conversation the better. So, if you have a working parent’s network within your organization, and you are not part of it, join as soon as you can at whatever level of experience of working parenthood you have.

And just simply be willing to share your story and also be willing to ask questions. Because the more voices there are around this topic, the much better advice everybody’s going to have and the more normalized and accepted working parents will feel.

ALISON BEARD: What would your advice be to people in the office who don’t have children and might feel like there’s too much attention paid to this problem and they’re outside interests needs which don’t involve kids aren’t taken as seriously as their parent colleagues?

DAISY DOWLING: Yes. I think that’s a, it’s a really great question and I think there is some rightful concern, well what about me? I’m dealing with eldercare for example, or I have a really significant other commitments outside the office, or hobbies. Things I want to devote myself to, or faith practices. Whatever it might be.

Whenever I give a presentation at a company, and I give advice and tips and techniques for working parents, often in working parent groups, what always happens at the end of the presentation is that people come up to me and say, this was really interesting, but I took notes and I’m going to go share it with a bunch of the people in my group who don’t have kids because, this person is dealing with, you know, other issue outside the office and this person is a competitive marathoner, but all this stuff that you advised around time management and visioning success and thinking through your transitions and so forth, this is really useful for all of us. And I smile and it gives me great pleasure to hear that because I think what’s good for working parents is good for non-working parents when it gets down to this level of day to day practices.

ALISON BEARD: Being honest and authentic about what you value and how you’re going to handle it.

DAISY DOWLING: And feeling comfortable being a little bit more forward about what that is.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. What should managers do to help working parents while still making sure that everyone feels equally valued?

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah, there are a lot of things that managers can do and here, I’m going to put my 15 years in human resources in and the human capital field hat back on. One of the really, really important things managers can and should do, particular for new working parents is make certain that they understand all the benefits and programs that are available to them. So, I have yet to meet an employee at any organization who spends their spare time reading the employee manual, or scouring the company intranet for all the different pages that have to deal with backup care, or the phase back program, or the support and mentoring that can come through an employee resource group, et cetera.

Most people just go ahead in their jobs. They take the parental leave that they know is available and they come back and they grossly underutilize all the supports that have been put in place. Particularly in mid to larger sized organizations.

So, I would say be a marketer. Be an advocate. Be an educator around what’s out there and that can be more formal. That can also be informal. It can also be saying hey, you know what? Do you know the guy down the hall who works in the other division? Well, he just came back from parental leave two months ago. You should talk to him because he might have some great advice for you.

So, be a connector and figure out how to help, what’s available at the organization, connect to those individual employees, number one. Number two, don’t be afraid to really engage in the conversation. I think it’s really scary for a lot of managers to feel like they may become life coaches, or on the receiving end of requests that they’re going to have a lot of difficulty accommodating certain flexibility asks and so forth, so they think well, gee, if we kind of just don’t broach the topic, it’s probably better than my getting kind of embroiled in this conversation that it will be hard to get myself out of.

But the number one thing that you can really do as a manager is help the person working for you come to their own solutions and conclusions. And you can do that by simply nudging them gently and by asking some really open-ended questions. Like, how do you think things will work when you get back from parental leave? Or, who within the organization can be a great mentor or additional support for you when you are back? Or, what else should I know about these two months that you’ve been back from leave and how might we work best together now that some of your personal responsibilities have changed?

Those don’t put you in the position of commitment, or of making promises, but they do open the door to things that might be really prominent concerns for the employee.

ALISON BEARD: And last, moving beyond these individual coping strategies or things individual managers can do, what types of work-family policies would you like to see enacted either in workplaces or countries, over the next decade?

DAISY DOWLING: So, I’d like to see an expansion of policies in addition to parental leave. Parental leave gets the lion’s share of the attention from a policy perspective, at least in our country. And I think that is important, hand on heart, I will say completely important. But what I would like to see is some additional flexibility and coping wiggle room granted to families that have older children whose needs are just as acute, but who don’t have that structural outlet. And so, one thing I’m a big advocate of, a lot of organizations give sick days and or, personal days. And there’s an increasing trend now towards kind of more flexibility around how and when people structure their time off. I’m a big believer that if every organization could either recast or add, recast the personal days, or add additional flexible days that are deemed personal needs days, where instead of having to say I’m deathly ill and I can’t come into the office, you could say, I’ve got some family stuff going on and I need to take care of business and I’ll be back in tomorrow. I think that little bit of wiggle room, if we all had three days a year that we could do that, I think it would have a disproportionately positive impact on the average working parent, and the average working family.

ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Well hopefully working together we can tackle all of these challenges. Thanks so much Daisy.

DAISY DOWLING: Thank you for having me.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Daisy Dowling, founder and CEO of Workparent and the author of the HBR article, “A Working Parent’s Survival Guide.” You can find it in the July-August issue of Harvard Business Review, or on HBR.org.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.

Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.