The Balancing Act: Looking after the family ecosystem
Bread-winning and care-giving have never taken up more of our time.
There’s just too much to “balance”
While the ability to work from home may feel like a godsend to working parents, the reality can mean we’re in work mode ALL the time. So, if you’re a parent with young children and you’re struggling with the work life balance, it’s probably not that you’re doing something wrong. An article in the Economist recently informed us that we’re also spending double the amount of time with our kids than parents did in the 70s. The maths doesn’t add up.
On the “CEO Mum” podcast, Tiffany Boswell, co-founder of the therapy aggregator app, ‘Mila’ talks about discarding notions of “work/life balance” in favour of “work/life integration”. “It’s not about ‘I need clear boundaries’, it’s about, ‘I need flexibility and integration between the personal and the professional… how can we create workplaces that actually are parent friendly and where does that flexibility need to be?’”
The workplace is taking notice
Tiffany is creating a top-down working culture with parents in mind. Sounds nice! We all wish we could have a boss like Tiffany. Things are changing though; the data is out. Larger companies understand the value of properly supporting their parental workforce and some of the new policies coming in are forward-thinking and family-centric. Elliot Rae, a specialist in helping organisations support working fathers, lists 74 UK companies than now offer parity in paid paternity and maternity leave. From January 2025, employees of Deloitte in the UK will receive 26 weeks fully paid parental leave, regardless of gender. An increasing number of employers in the UK now actually assist with conception and fertility treatment. The message seems clear: having a family is encouraged. You can be sure that if the largest and most successful companies are supporting parents it’s not so that they can feel warm and fuzzy, it’s because they know it’s good for their bottom line.
What more can companies do?
Extended paid parental leave may be too expensive for some smaller companies to offer. What can these companies do to help ease the stress of returning to work at the end of parental leave? I spoke with Lizzie Martin, founder of ‘work life mother’, a coaching and consultancy business that partners with organisations to improve retention, inclusion, and employee experience for working parents returning to work, she explained…
“Flexible working is understandably a key factor in facilitating a positive return to work. However, it’s not enough on its own.
Equally critical is having a supportive manager and fostering a culture where returners feel psychologically safe to share challenges, seek support, and thrive. Companies need to take a holistic approach to fully address the challenges faced by returning parents.
The benefits to companies if they get this right are huge:
Improved retention rates
Higher engagement levels
Enhanced reputation as an employer of choice
Better employee wellbeing
Doing the right thing for your people
Replacing lost talent can cost upwards of £30,000 per employee. Can businesses afford not to get this right?”
Tips for employees
Much of the stress experienced by parents returning from extended parental leave is related to self-doubt. Being at home as the primary parent is tough. Quite aside from the worries about being “out of the loop” or “out of sight, out of mind” in the workplace there can be a general knock to our confidence when caring for a small child. “How can I give a presentation to a room full of people when I can’t even get my child to sleep/ feed/ stop crying?” Lizzie suggests recording your goals with someone before you take your parental leave:
“Ask your colleagues and manager questions like:
When have you seen me at my best?
Where have I added the most value to the team over the past six months?
Log their feedback in a place that’s easy to revisit. This can serve as a confidence boost when you’re navigating self-doubt during your return to work.”
Looking after the family ecosystem
Care-giving and bread-winning may both me more time consuming than they were a generation ago. The good news is that parents are more versatile than they’ve ever been. The answer to this problem lies in openness and vulnerability with our partners. This generation of parents are conditioned to only talk about what the “children need”. This is short sighted and unsustainable. If we spend time as parents working out our personal values around work and parenting, we’re better placed to make decisions that will support the whole family. Our working lives are part of a complex formula involving financial necessity, personal ambition, children’s needs and logistical practicality. The damaging ideal that “parents shouldn’t think of themselves” means that we often leave what we’re able to tolerate out of the equation.
A mother said to me recently. “I ‘ve worked out that two days of my daughter in childcare is the maximum I could feel comfortable with. I know that will change. My partner has juggled his days and after loads of anxiety I can now go back to work for 3 full days. It feels really good.”
That seems like a family working hard at finding the balance!
