Sharing the caring is key

A new book says working mothers can have it all – half of the time. Lisa Salmon reports
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Many mothers struggle to juggle children and a career, and often feel guilty that working means their children are losing out in some way.

However, two high-flying career women with five children between them desperately want to promote the message that families thrive not in spite of working mothers; but because of them.

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The pair have written the book Getting To 50/50: How Working Parents Can Have It All to discuss the benefits of being a working parent and to share the secrets for successfully combining career and kids. And both authors certainly know how hard this can be – one, Joanna Strober, is managing director of a private equity fund at an investment firm in California and has three children aged seven, 12 and 15.

Her co-author Sharon Meers, 47, has two children aged nine and 12, and currently leads global business development and sales for the commerce platform eBay.

Both women took three months off work for each child they had, then returned full-time.

Strober, 45, says: “I wasn’t happy to go back to work – it was hard, but I knew it was the right thing for me and my family. We wrote the book because we saw too many fabulous women quitting the jobs they’d worked very hard to get, not because they wanted to but because they thought it was too hard to combine work and family.

“We wanted to help women like that keep working.”

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Strober stresses that she and Meers aren’t saying mothers must work: “I’m not interested in telling women they should work if they don’t want to. But if they want to, they should and they should know that it’s fine.”

She says research, and their own interviews, shows that children with two working parents gain independence, self-confidence, cognitive and social skills, and strong connections to both parents.

Yes, both parents working means childcare is usually necessary, and there are scare stories about childcare damaging children in some way. However, the book refers to a 2006 study by the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which studied 1,364 children for 15 years.

“The conclusions were unambiguous,” says Strober. “Kids with 100 per cent maternal care fare no better than kids who spend time in childcare.”

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And she points out that how parents behave and treat their children influences their emotional, behavioural and cognitive development at least twice as much as than any form of childcare.

“In other words, stop worrying about leaving your child with someone else and focus on what happens when you and your husband get home.”

Ideas to make a working mum’s home life easier include making simple meals and freezing batches, forgetting about tidiness, accepting offers of help 
with shopping and errands, and even getting an easy-to-manage haircut.

But the key to coping with the demands of a family 
and work, says Strober, 
is for the mother to get 
her partner or husband to 
share equal responsibility 
for the home and kids – 
hence the book’s title 
Getting To 50/50.

Getting To 50/50 by 
Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober is published by Piatkus, £13.99.

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