Working Mothers

DAN MCGINN: Welcome to Dear HBR: from Harvard Business Review. I’m Dan McGinn.

ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Work can be frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t need to let the conflicts get us down.

DAN MCGINN: That’s where Dear HBR: comes in. We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts and help you move forward. Today we’re answering your questions about working mothers with Daisy Dowling. She’s a career coach and she also helps companies with their policies around working parents. Daisy, thanks for coming on the show.

DAISY DOWLING: Thank you so much for having me.

DAN MCGINN: Now, you have children yourself. How much of this do you feel in your everyday life?

DAISY DOWLING: Well, I’m going to be honest and say I feel a lot of it. My kids are five and seven, and I’m living this every day.

DAN MCGINN: When you think about company policies on this issue, are things generally getting better, getting worse, staying the same?

DAISY DOWLING: I think they’re getting better, but getting better in patches. So, the key trend that I see is a move towards increased or better paid, more lengthy parental leaves, both for men and for women. That’s terrific. It’s important. We need it. The only challenge there is that that leave, even if you got it, even if it was incredibly valuable and helpful to you, that doesn’t continue helping you throughout your working parenthood.

ALISON BEARD: How much can individuals really do when companies and societies aren’t changing quickly enough?

DAISY DOWLING: You still have control over a fair amount. How you enlist help from family and friends and other caregivers, how you manage your own calendar, what you do on the weekends. No, the world isn’t perfect. And companies may not be as attuned to some of these issues as they should be, but nevertheless, I think it’s really important for each of us to take as much as we can into our own hands and make things better.

DAN MCGINN: We’ll go to the first question.

ALISON BEARD: Dear HBR: I’m a lawyer working in a large corporate firm in Australia. I’ve been with the company since 2012 and on my current team since 2014. We work on construction and major projects. It’s consistently a very busy practice. I’m currently on maternity leave with my second child. I was recently promoted to senior associate and will be starting back in that role soon. I’m feeling conflicted. When I returned to work after my first child was born it was a huge adjustment. I found it very difficult to manage. I was making many more mistakes and missing more deadlines than I did before going on leave. I think it was a combination of taking on greater responsibility, working part-time and sleep deprivation. Simply not having the hours and energy to get everything right. My husband does shift work so a lot of the home responsibilities fall on me. My boss is quite understanding, but he’s also impossibly busy. His ability to assist and support me is limited. I think that my strengths lay more on the people side of the business, like dealing with clients and managing junior staff. I was never the best technical specialist. But I used to be able to make up for it with extra effort and persistence. Now, with two children to care for I’m worried that I can’t do that anymore. That I’ll continue to make mistakes. I’m concerned about damaging my reputation and my city’s a very tight-knit legal community. Of course, I have good reasons to stay in my current role. I like my boss and my team. The work is stimulating and the pay and benefits are good. But it seems like this job is just not a great fit for me at this time of my life. And given the requirement for billable hours, there’s only so much job crafting I can do. Should I just hang in there while my kids are little? Or, should I seriously consider moving to a less demanding role? Maybe as an in-house counselor in government. I’ve had many unsolicited job offers. I could easily make a move like that. What do you think?

DAISY DOWLING: So, the first thing I think is I wish I were here to give the writer a big hug. She talks about feeling conflicted, worried about making mistakes. She clearly feels boxed in and a little bit as if her hand is being forced in terms of making some kind of big decision here. And she’s not sure which decision to make, or what to do. So, I sympathize with that first of all.

ALISON BEARD: Is it possible that that’s all in her own mind?

DAISY DOWLING: It’s possible, but I think she’s dealing with that’s very common for working parents, which is that when you become a mother or a father, and all of a sudden you have this additional layer of stress and responsibility put onto what might be an already very demanding life and career, that additional responsibility having kids takes everything that might have been an issue or a concern in your career already and it puts it into much, much more stark relief. But at the same time, it’s harder to see clearly and to make level headed judgments about because you’re trying to manage towards two different things. And I think that’s where she’s caught.

DAN MCGINN: When I started reading this letter, my first impulse was oh, this is a job crafting problem. She sort of cut us off at the pass there. She says there’s really no way to job craft my way out of this solution. It seems like she’s really thought deeply about the potential solutions to this and the idea that she can fine-tune her job isn’t going to make this go away.

ALISON BEARD: It’s interesting. I asked a friend who was a corporate lawyer and went through the same crisis really. And she said actually I think that she could go to her firm and maybe stay in a client facing role, but find some workarounds. She could ask if there’s a particular client that has an affinity need for her and that she really likes working with, could she work exclusively for that client. She basically said you need to go in and present a case that’s in the business interest of the firm.

DAN MCGINN: So, she might be able to job craft it even if she can’t really see that solution on the table in front of her.

ALISON BEARD: I think it’s hard to see it.

DAISY DOWLING: I think you really touched on two important things there. The first is that she’s not thinking broadly enough about how she could redraft her job and that might be by actually switching jobs. She might stay with the firm, but switch jobs instead of sort of redrawing the outlines of her current job. And the second thing is she’s trying to come up with the ultimate definitive answer to this alone. And I think that deprives her of the ability to see some of the other opportunities or tweaks that she might be able to make.

DAN MCGINN: One of the tensions that lies at the root of this is she sees herself as not a good technical specialist and I think that’s great because the higher you go up the hierarchy, the less the technical skills matter and the more that her client facing skills and her people management skills really matter. So, she really has the potential to move up. It’s just can she see her way through this valley?

DAISY DOWLING: I think she’s in a slightly different situation then what you’ve just laid out. I think it’s a little bit more of a looming decision she has to make. She’s a corporate attorney, so when you think about why do people pay top-dollar a terrific corporate attorney, it’s because they want somebody who’s a brilliant expert and technical specialist in what they do.

ALISON BEARD: And on call.

DAISY DOWLING: And on call all the time. And those two things are the things that are the biggest points of tension for her. And she probably has two, three, four years left before a decision around whether or not she’s going to become a partner. And that decision is going to assume in order for her to become a partner, she’s going to have to be a very, very strong technical specialist. And the mistakes she’s making, if that becomes a pattern, that’s going to immediately disqualify her. So, I think she needs to look down the pike here a little bit and say, OK, do I really want to stick it out in this job? And she says should I really hang in there when my kids are little? If she hangs in there, is she going to make it to the next level? And that’s something that it’s an extra layer of stress for working parents who are in jobs where you have this one really critical career point where it’s yes or no. And you have to figure out if you’re going to try and get to that point and then how you’re going to get past that point. I actually think she needs to think about moving jobs and doing something a little bit different.

ALISON BEARD: So, I agree with you that I think she needs to take a step back. She should step out of sort of the stress of being a mom and now a mom of two. A recent study showed that the chronic stress levels of mothers with two kids working fulltime are 40 percent higher than women without children working fulltime. It’s only 18 percent higher for women with one kid. So, there’s a huge leap that she’s just made in her life, moving from one child to two. And I don’t think it’s the right time to make a decision about what she wants in her career long term because things are crazy right now and she’s figuring out the new normal. I think she should take that step back that you’ve been talking about Daisy and I really think the best way to do it is by starting to talk to people.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah. One of the things I ask my coachees to do is to come up with a list of their career assets. She’s at a large corporate firm. If it’s a large firm, she’s not the first working mother to have grappled with these issues and she won’t be the last. There are going to be other people who have had these conversations before, maybe work through them in different ways that she could learn from, that she could get advice from. And then she also says her boss is very supportive. So, that’s somebody you should probably enlist as you’re going through this. I know it might be difficult for her to put her cards out on the table, but that could be a constructive conversation. And just as you say too, she’s got unsolicited job offers. So, I think in some ways her life is not easy. She’s got a decision to make. But she’s got a lot that’s good and I want to see her leverage that more.

DAN MCGINN: When she raises the idea of going to a company as an in-house counsel or into government work, I’m a little concerned by those ideas. It seems like those two places would perhaps demand more on her weak points and offer less for her strengths. So, I like the idea of her sort of starting over and thinking much more broadly, talking to a lot of people and really trying to imagine possibilities instead of maybe she answering the phone and seeing what job offers she gets organically and just thinking those are her only options.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. She just doesn’t have the data about what some of those jobs or opportunities or potentials could be. And if she doesn’t go out and solicit it, she’ll end up having decisions that happened to her as opposed to ones that she’s made really proactively for herself. So, I would suggest to her that she think about using some of her remaining leave to kick this off like a project and to say, I’m going to spend two months, three months in the research phase and doing nothing, but talking to people about what else is out there, what are some of the possibilities? How can I tweak this job, or how could I maybe find another that would really fit where I am in my life right now and would fit my skills. But as she does that to think about what’s going to work for her long term.

ALISON BEARD: So, Daisy I’m going to push back a little bit. Think back to when you had a toddler and a newborn. Do you really think you could embark on a big thoughtful research project?

DAISY DOWLING: I think it’s hard.

ALISON BEARD: I know I couldn’t have.

DAISY DOWLING: I think it’s hard, but I think it’s easier than having a toddler and a baby and you’re three weeks or three months back into the job, leave is in the rearview mirror and your clients need you, and senior people need you, and your returning emails at 10:30 at night.

ALISON BEARD: That’s the window she has.

DAISY DOWLING: It’s the window she has. You have to deal with the cards that you’re dealt. And right now what she’s being dealt is a career decision, a complex one, at a time when she would prefer not to be making it probably. But again, I don’t think life is going to get less busy or stressful.

DAN MCGINN: So Alison, what’s our advice?

ALISON BEARD: So, we think that she needs to step back and re-evaluate what she really wants from her career. This is a stressful point in her life. We suggest that she seek counsel from others on how their managing working family on the different paths that they’ve taken and how to achieve success while also being a mom. We advise her to think about some tactical ways in which she can make work easier, reduce her errors. We don’t think she should discount job crafting so quickly. If she can talk to her boss and others at the firm and prove a business case for shifting her responsibilities toward her strengths, it could be a successful tactic.

DAN MCGINN: Dear HBR: I’m 25 and got married last summer. This May I’ll graduate with my Master’s degree and I’m beginning a search for full-time work. My first grownup job. Here’s the issue. My husband and I have known for a while that we want to start a family sooner rather than later. But I have no idea how to navigate that conversation while beginning a professional career. I’m worried that employers won’t be eager to hire me if they know that I plan to have children within the next year or two. I’m worried that if I show up to a job interview and I’m visibly pregnant, I won’t get the job. I’m worried that by choosing to be a mom earlier, I’ll lose out on work opportunities and have fewer benefits like healthcare and maternity leave. Do you have advice for someone trying to start a career and a family at more or less the same time? Is that even possible? I feel like it would be easier if I wanted more than the other, but I care about both.

DAISY DOWLING: So, there are a lot of questions here. The first thing I want to do is salute the person asking them for raising them. Because when do I have kids, how many kids do I have, what’s the timing, what does this look like, how do I expand my family? Those are incredibly personal questions, but they really bump up against people’s career ambitions, what they want to do. Whether or not they want to go work at or stay at a certain employer. And those conversations never happen. They’re taboo. People are very embarrassed to ask these questions. People hold themselves back. Managers are leaders who get these questions, don’t know how to respond to them. They’re worried about offending, they’re worried about saying the wrong thing, or about liability. So, the conversation just stops. So, I’m excited that we’re going to provide some answers and some thinking to this 25-year-old.

ALISON BEARD: Is she right that there are really big risks to being a young mom while also trying to start a career?

DAISY DOWLING: There are some risks to being a young mom as there are some risks to being a medium young mom, and some risk to being an older mom, too. There is no perfect time to have kids. And I would just advise her and anybody going through the same thought process, just to know practically speaking, you’re not under any obligation to tell employers. If you want to start a family and you’re going to a job interview for a job you are really, really excited about you certainly don’t have to raise the interest in starting a family in that set of interviews. So, this concern that somehow discrimination is going to rear its head immediately, that can be avoided pretty quickly by just sort of stepping back a little bit, being a little bit more discrete and doing some of your own research on how the company, or how the organization has treated other and supported other working parents in the past.

DAN MCGINN: Yeah, I felt really strongly on that point. I don’t know why anybody would bring up, and she’s probably still a couple of years away from having a baby, that she might want to have a baby. I mean if you’re a married woman in your 20’s and 30’s that’s always probably going to be a possibility right?

DAISY DOWLING: I agree with you to some extent certainly. I think that if it’s one or two years out that won’t be a problem at all. I think that if she starts a job and three months later is pregnant and six months later needs to tell everyone that she’s pregnant, you could see a hiring manager resenting that a little bit. I don’t think that’s the way the world should be, but I think it’s a reality. Here’s where I’m going to put my human resources hat on. So, I spent 15 years in HR departments, working very closely with bright, aspiring, ambitious people and I can tell you from the other side of this conversation that yeah, I can see, I can understand her concerns, but honestly, it’s not news to people that young married couples often want to start families. That’s an assumption. It’s not a shock and nine times out of 10 when somebody would have a conversation like this, people would say oh, that’s terrific, or congratulations, or great, OK. You’ll be out on leave for this amount of time, but let’s talk about when you come back. It’s just, it’s not as dramatic as it seems.

ALISON BEARD: It’s almost like you think it’s a great calamity for the business than they do.

DAN MCGINN: Everybody thinks they’re irreplaceable and especially for three or six months, we’re all replaceable.

DAISY DOWLING: Although this woman is just starting. She doesn’t have a track record. She doesn’t have a reputation. But I think she can gain a sense of control over that while being completely above board, by focusing on her timing. I think once she has the offer in hand, if she wants to be completely up front with this conversation, she goes to the hiring manager, or to the HR person and says, I’m thrilled to have the offer, thank you so much. I’m excited about working at this organization. There’s one thing I wanted to raise in the spirit of full disclosure which is, and it will probably be no surprise. I’m a young woman, I’m recently married and at some point, exactly when unclear, but at some point, my husband and I are going to want to start a family. Is there any reason given that I shouldn’t continue in this process and accept this offer?

DAN MCGINN: All right. Let me stop there. If somebody said yes to that question, couldn’t they instantly be sued? How could someone say yes to that?

DAISY DOWLING: I think what you’re looking for here is for the person to reassure you in a more detailed way. Companies that are supportive of working parents would say, oh, yeah OK. Well, we have a maternity leave that’s this long. We have a maternity phase back program. We have lactation facilities. We have all these other things that we set up so that parents can succeed here. So —

DAN MCGINN: So, it’s not the yes-or-no. It’s the more open-ended piece of it that you’re looking for. Yeah, yeah.

DAISY DOWLING: Exactly. Exactly. It’s a due diligence question. It just lets you get more information.

DAN MCGINN: I think company policies and HR infrastructure and all that is super important, but I think in my experience at least it’s really come down to the attitude of the person you’re reporting to, the bosses, super, super important in all this kind of thing. And it might just be: does that person have a family? Did they bring their family up in the interview process? Are they casually talking about their life outside of work? You can kind of get a vibe for a person on whether work-life balance is something they think about. There might be ways to sort of more subtly get a sense of how your day to day supervisors going to feel about this, without sort of putting all your cards on the table.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I think a big part of the advice that we want to give her is that she needs to do her research about what their policies are and also what the culture is like. She needs to, if she can, talk to people who have been parents at the organization for a long time. She needs to interview her boss in the same way her boss is interviewing her.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah, I think she needs to do one more thing, too, Alison, and I’m going to sound maybe a little harsh here. I think she needs to perform.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah, absolutely. And I think nine months can be enough time if you really knock it out of the park.

DAISY DOWLING: Absolutely. It’s just so hard to find really, really good people and if somebody is just crushing it at work, and then comes in and says, well, I’m expectant. I just have a hard time imagining bosses saying, well, boy what a letdown. They’re going to want to try and keep her. They’re going to want to try and set her career, or her job parameters up so that she can keep delivering for them in the way that she has been.

DAN MCGINN: Let’s circle back to one of the very specific fears she raises in the letter. I’m worried that if I show up to a job interview and I’m visibly pregnant I won’t get the job. Is that a valid fear?

ALISON BEARD: I did run across a study from Rice in 2013 that found that pregnant job applicants were subjected to more interpersonal hostilities such as interviewers cutting them off, bad body language. So, obviously it’s illegal in the United States to discriminate against someone who’s pregnant, but I think in practice it probably does happen.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah, there’s a lot of complex law and in other jurisdictions and outside the United States, I think things may be more nuanced and shaded in different ways. But here’s what I would say. There is and I’m not going to shock anybody when I say this, there is bias in the world. There are people —

ALISON BEARD: Really?

DAISY DOWLING: Yes. As much as we don’t want there to be. There are people who will presume, there are people who will make decisions that they shouldn’t or that aren’t the right ones based on things that aren’t relevant. If she is going to commit to starting a family this year, before she starts her job interview process, she is going to have to accept that reality. And say, it was my decision to start a family now, as opposed to 18 months from now. And as I go through the interview process, what I’m going to need to do are two things. Number one, to have a very clear story about the fact that yes, I am expectant as you can easily see, but here’s how I’m going to be committed to the job and to the career and to this function, and to this organization for the long term. So, I think she wants to bring that forward in her interviews even more so than she would normally. And number two, she’s going to be willing, have to be willing to potentially be on the other end of some of that bias. I feel like that’s not the right thing to say, but it’s the honest thing to say.

DAN MCGINN: So, maybe her job search strategy might be a little bit different in the sense that she needs sort of a larger funnel. She might need to do some more interviewing to make sure she’s finding enough people that she’ll find the unbiased ones.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah and on the upside too that, and this is a, I think, a very powerful thing that she should find reassuring that if she is pregnant, if it is obvious and she does go through interviews, while that’s the case, and she gets great job offers out of it, then she should take enormous confidence in how that organization sees her and sees her long term potential and sees her commitment.

ALISON BEARD: It’s funny. I hadn’t thought about this before, but it brought me back to when I was interviewing here. I’d flown from London with my daughter who I was nursing at the time and went through a full day of interviews. And I talked about it with the people because I just thought, if they don’t respect the fact that I just took an international flight with this baby to interview for this job, then I shouldn’t work for this organization.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah, I actually had somewhat the same situation. I interviewed when I was eight months pregnant and looked like a caricature of a pregnant person. And interviewed with an organization that was known for having, for people keeping very long hours and for being in an intense place to work. And I sort of thought the best I’m going to get out of this set of conversations is a great dinner party story about how they reacted to me when I waddled in for the interview. And I ended up getting a great job there, worked there, found it to be a very supportive place and there was a happy ending. So, it’s possible.

ALISON BEARD: So Dan, what are we telling her?

DAN MCGINN: Well, first we commend her for thinking about these really hard issues. There’s a case to be made that you don’t necessarily have to put your cards on the table in the first interview. This is not something you need to feel guilty if you decided to keep it to yourself. If you do bring it up, you probably want to wait until the offers on the table and use it to try to suss out how the company reacts, what their policies are, how they feel about it. Second point, do some research figuring out what the maternity policy for this company is, what the daycare kind of situation is, what are the hours, how flexible are bosses? Look at your individual supervisor or your potential supervisor. Does he or she seem like somebody who’s going to be very accommodating? Do they seem to have a good work-family balance in their own lives? The third thing is, when you get into this job, you need to get in there and perform. Bosses want to keep that person. They want to bend over backwards to make life easier for that person. So, when you do get into the job, make sure that your performance turns you into the kind of person that they want to keep.

ALISON BEARD: All right, let’s get to the last question. Dear HBR: I’ve worked in IT for my organization for two and a half years including a three-month maternity leave. I’ve been considering taking a break to be a stay at home mom. My kids are two and a half and 15 months. Up until this point, my view was that I could make it work as long as the job was professionally rewarding, yet flexible enough to let me take care of my children at all stages of their lives. I’m fulfilled by and interested in what I do and my schedule is predictable. For the moment I have an incredibly supportive boss. And as an established employee, I could ask for even more flexibility. However, for the past two budget cycles, we’ve had layoffs, cuts to benefits and morale issues. My boss is the division manager and I joined the group to work with him, but he recently asked me to be a reference for him for an out-of-state position. He’s since decided to stay, largely due to family reasons. I have good relationships with the executives above him too, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be protected from further layoffs. My husband and I feel very fortunate for the life we have. But there are seasons when it seems like leaving my job to stay home might relieve the stress and busyness of work and parenting. I’d have more time with the kids and to keep up with household tasks. We’d save money on daycare and it would be easier to have more children. On the con side, I need to figure out a new way of spending my days. We’d have only one salary and insurance plan and there’s obviously the potential for career stagnation. Overall, as we consider expanding our family, having a third child feels like a turning point. Among our family and friends, when both parents work we haven’t seen many who have more than two kids. Precisely because of the career and financial considerations. What should I do?

DAISY DOWLING: I’m going to put my answer straight up front here and say, I don’t hear anything in this letter that convinces me that this writer should become a stay at home mom. When she talks about her job she says, I’m fulfilled and interested in what I do. And when she talks about the other hand, what she could do if she were a stay at home mom, she says, it would be easier to keep up with household tasks. And what jumps out at me and what really grabs me about this letter is fulfilled and interested versus keeping the dishes out of the sink.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I want to be careful that we’re not coming to this question with our bias. I have made a decision not to be a stay at home mom. You have also made that decision Daisy. And our bias admittedly is stick with it. If you love your job, stay. But maybe she could find the same fulfillment at home.

DAISY DOWLING: Maybe she could, but it’s just that I’m not hearing her say that she really wants to be at home. If she had written and said, my kids are two and a half and 15 months and those are little and that’s precious time. If she had said, I want to be with my kids when they’re small. I really want that extra time with them. I don’t know if it’s forever. If she were talking about it in those terms, we would really be having a different conversation about this. One of the things that I sometimes do with clients, sometimes, because this can be a testy area, is encourage them to think if they were of the other gender, what they might do. So, this doesn’t really come out in her letter, but she talks about the kids are small, the job is sort of good for me personally, but the organization is troubled and people are telling me that it’s hard to have three kids. So, OK, maybe I should be a stay at home mom. Is that a decision a male might make? Or a conclusion that a man might come to? That’s a very fraught question, but it’s just a way to sort of put a spin and a tweak on some of the thinking.

ALISON BEARD: That really resonates with me, Daisy.

DAISY DOWLING: Yeah. I mean another way to spin this situation is to say, what would you do if you didn’t have kids? Take the kids out of the equation. And you’re highly respected IT professional who’s in an organization that’s a bit of a mess and your wonderful boss has one foot out the door. What would you do? And the answer to that question probably would be quite different. It would be I’d talk to headhunters. I’d see what else is out there. I’d ask the boss if he or she could take me with them to their new organization. There are all different pathways that those answers might point towards.

DAN MCGINN: The line that I focused on was when she wrote, and as an established employee I could ask for even more flexibility. If she’s going to quit a job that she likes, I’d love to know that she exhausted every possible alternative and I think she should just try to stretch that flexibility and just see how far she can go. More time at home, maybe it’s more remote work, maybe it’s less than a fulltime schedule.

ALISON BEARD: As someone who has pushed for that flexibility and really enjoys it, I completely agree with that. But the situation at her company is really bad right now. Layoffs, budget cuts, et cetera. So, how does she, someone that goes in asking for more, at such a tough time?

DAN MCGINN: Well, let’s think about this creatively. If they’re laying people off and she hasn’t been laid off, that suggests that they value her as a performer. Number two, if one of these accommodations becomes oh, by the way, I’d like to work part-time. That is a financial help to the company at a time when they have budget issues. So, some of this could be a win-win. I think we have a tendency to think of these things as too adversarial. When sometimes the company comes out better off for it.

DAISY DOWLING: She says she’s got a great boss and the boss is coming to her and talking about his own career next step. So, she’s clearly a confidante and has a great relationship with him. But I don’t know if she’s had the reverse conversation with him and said hey, let’s talk about what I need and what’s some of your ideas might be for me. And I don’t think it’s a terrible time for her to think about what might be available outside the organization. Her boss is doing it.

ALISON BEARD: That was going to be my next question. Do either of you think that she should be exploring opportunities elsewhere even though she has a great reputation, the opportunity for more flexibility and a very supportive boss where she is?

DAISY DOWLING: The boss may not stay. The boss seems to have one foot out the door. So, if I were here I wouldn’t make career decisions based around that person. She says that the organization has had layoffs and cutbacks and so forth, but she’s working in IT. In most organizations finding terrific IT people is really, really hard. And I wonder if her skill set might be well placed in an organization that’s growing, that’s thriving. Maybe she goes into a different industry, but she keeps a functional role, but she just applies it in a different environment. That doesn’t mean she has to change jobs which is always a stressful thing to do, but I think the grass might be greener.

DAN MCGINN: That all makes sense to me. It seems like a lot of her concern is about the turmoil inside the company, but it also seems predicated on the idea that there’s some probability we’re going to go and have a third child and that that’s just going to up the complexity and the demands even more. Trying to get further down that decision pathway, presumably with her husband about whether they’re going to have a third kid or not might help bring some clarity to what kind of career she wants going forward, whether it’s at this company or another company.

DAISY DOWLING: And I think that’s a decision that you need to make for about what’s right for your family. I think it’s really: does our family feel complete with two, or do we need one more? And then you talk about OK, how is this going to work with my career? Do I need to change my career because of it?

DAN MCGINN: Yeah, I agree completely with that. You have two children, I have three children and jobs are temporary. Your family is forever.

ALISON BEARD: If she does do a lot of this reflection and decide that actually, she’d liked to try being a stay at home mom, how does she do that in a way that helps her avoid that career stagnation that she talks about?

DAISY DOWLING: So, if she does deep introspection and decides that being a stay at home mom is the right thing, she needs to start planning right now, before she even thinks of leaving this job, before she steps out, how she’s going to step back in. How long might she want to be out of the workforce? And given whatever that period of time is, when is she going to want to start putting feelers out about going back in? So, she can plan the two years, or five years, or 10 years that she does want to be at home. What will she do to keep her network fresh while she is not working fulltime? How will she remain on the receiving end of job inquiries and industry knowledge, and technological innovations? She works in IT where things work really, really fast. How is she going to keep up on all those fronts while she’s at home? Those things are all really solvable. You can figure out in a couple hours a week, or even less how to do those things and how to set yourself up for success. But if you become a stay at home parent without a plan, and then let some period of time pass, then I think you do tend to find yourself on your back foot in terms of wanting to go back again.

DAN MCGINN: So Alison, what are we telling her?

ALISON BEARD: So, we think she should ask herself if the stress that she’s feeling is stemming from the turmoil in the organization or the struggle of balancing work and family. If she still loves the work, stepping away might not be the right thing for her. She should ask whether she can make it work by requesting more flexibility, perhaps doing some job crafting. We also think that she should explore opportunities elsewhere where she can find a more stable organization just as supportive a boss and equally flexible work. If after the soul searching she really things that she wants to stay home with the kids for a certain period of time, she should absolutely do it, but then start prepping for re-entry from the beginning. If she maintains her network and keeps up her skills, the on-ramp will be ready and waiting for her.

DAN MCGINN: Daisy, thanks so much for joining us.

DAISY DOWLING: Thank you so much for having me.

DAN MCGINN: That’s Daisy Dowling. She’s a career coach and a founder of the consulting company Workparent. Thanks to the listeners who wrote us with their questions. Now we want to know your questions. Send us an email with your workplace challenge and how we can help. The email address is DearHBR@HBR.org.

ALISON BEARD: On our next episode, we’re talking about critical feedback with Ben Dattner.

BEN DATTNER: It’s often as much about the feedback giver as it is about the feedback receiver.

DAN MCGINN: To get that episode automatically, please subscribe. I’m Dan McGinn.

ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Thanks for listening to Dear HBR:.