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Home › Articles › Career › The Career Challenge

The Career Challenge

How Moms Balance Work, Family and

External Pressure

By Karen Deaver

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The pressure we feel is real. Mothers who stay home to raise their kids get it from friends who say, "You're giving up that education just to stay home?" and from strangers who ask, "What do you do?" and even from our kids. Questions such as, "Why don't you have a job, like Jane's mom does?" can be damaging, making us question our choice to give up our careers and the income they generate. Some mothers who work outside the home are pressured by family members who want us to raise our own kids or by those who ask why we had kids at all and even sometimes by employers who can threaten our standing on the ladder.

Many mothers who stay at home to raise children or carve out time to work a second job are perpetually stressed out by alternating pressures to do more in each arena. They are strung between two rigid models of motherhood.

To locate the source of those pressures we must look beyond each other and the media-hyped "battle of the moms" to the often contradictory society in which we live – one that expects mothers to either stay home or work, but that doesn't support either extreme very well.

Becoming aware is the first step in finding solutions. Here are some of the tensions under which we labor, how we can gain perspective by looking at the bigger picture and how to feel good about the future.

Staying Home
"What do you do?" is a question many stay-at-home moms aren't prepared for. How we answer it says a lot about the state of modern motherhood. "I adjust my answer to the person," says mother of two Natalie Warner, also co-leader of the Princeton, N.J., Chapter of Mothers & More, a national support and advocacy group for women who are staying home from careers to raise their children. "I tell strangers I'm an environmental engineer first. I guess I want all that education and hard work to count for something."

Stay-at-home moms who have been trained to hold bread-winning jobs are particularly vulnerable to feelings of withdrawal from validation gained from all they used to do. We want to be identified as the smart, interesting people that we are and to not have our work as mothers devalued.

Our cultural tendency to dismiss work done at home puts us on the defensive. Moms who are at home can find themselves chafing at the myth behind June Cleaver, that we must be selfless to be good mothers without outside interests. This model assumes that our spouses work while we raise children, a job characterized less as work than as play. Having a job that's perceived as all fun supports our guilt if we return to work or need a break, even if it's just to go to a movie.

And we're often burdened by the sense we're letting the women who liberated June Cleaver down. "I'm grateful to the women's movement for giving us an opportunity to do something other than raise children," says Manhattan mom Janet Stark. Our gratitude conflicts with our suspicion that the previous generation would be ashamed of us for passing up a hard-won career. "Now it's uncool to stay home. The Barbie career book has every career except mother. That's supposed to make me feel good, but it doesn't."

Suburban women of color face an additional burden. "I can see the surprise in people's faces when I tell them I've chosen to stay home," says Donna Robinson, who left her career as teacher and social worker to raise three children. "They think I have no choice. It's hard for professional, middle-class black women to connect with their Caucasian counterparts, because of the assumption that there's a larger gap than there is in education and class."

The Economics of Parenthood

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