Picture this:
Your child has been asked to read a few lines in a class assembly. All parents of the class are invited to attend the assembly, which will last around an hour, at the start of the school day. Although your child will only be performing for a short time, you will be expected to stay for the full duration.
You are a working parent and your working day usually begins soon after the school drop-off. You know that by the time you watch the assembly, have a few words, hugs and/or tears with your child, and commute to your workplace, you will delay the start of your working day by a good couple of hours.
Would you…
- Take time off work using your paid or unpaid leave allowance?
- Arrange to start work late and make up the time later in the day (even if this means rescheduling or postponing work meetings or training courses to allow time for this)?
- Prioritise going to work and not attend the class assembly, leaving it to your partner or another person in your child’s life to attend while you go to work?
What I’ve just described is likely to be a familiar scenario to most working parents. A working mum myself, with three school-aged kids, I certainly recognise the pressure that school events can put on diaries. And how, for some parents, a great deal of expectation and guilt are bound up in deciding whether – and how – to arrange other “work” and “life” things in order to be there.
This was not the case, however, for my upcoming podcast guest, Gilles, who featured on the blog last year: “My Work is My Health”: Finding Balance When Work Comes First – Gilles’ Story – On the Virtues of Working Hard, the Perils of Loneliness, and the Importance of Quality (over Quantity) When it Comes to Spending Time. (Subscribe here to be notified when the episode is ready to download).
Gilles commented on how he did not place too much emphasis on attending school events: “I am there for my children in different ways”, he told me. And it is enough for someone else to be in the audience for his child.
I was intrigued by this, as it is not a viewpoint that I often come across:
- When I interviewed Tom, a retired Managing Director, who worked full-time and missed many of his children’s milestones, he described looking back with regret.
- Many other working parents I’ve interviewed, like Sarah, a part-time and self-employed mother of three, would consistently go to great lengths to rearrange work commitments to attend school events, and having that flexibility in their work was a fundamental work-life balance choice.
- It’s not uncommon for me to hear of people (admittedly mostly women) constructing their careers specifically to allow for the flexibility to attend school events, and the like. And the stay-at-home mothers I’ve interviewed, such as Nadine, who gave up her career after having children, referred to such events as being of utmost priority.
I decided to test this idea with a poll, asking my social media following: does attending school events afford working parents a better sense of work-life balance?
The overall result was as I would have predicted: the vast majority said “Yes, I don’t want to miss a thing”.
What surprised me though was how many people (22%) answered “No, I’m there in other ways”. And that most of them were women.
It would be interesting to explore this more as it’s not a view that I have heard from many working mothers before.
As my podcast interviewee Gilles argued, there are plenty of other ways that you can be there for your child. And consequently, plenty of other ways that you can show you care, and find a balance between the time you spend with your child/ren and your work.
There is something to be said for the hybrid office and home-working options that the Covid pandemic created. Whilst that kind of flexibility can make it easier to ‘have it all’, there will always be a choice to make, a prioritisation to mentally calculate.
So, going back to the scenario I set out at the start of this blog post… What would you choose?
How much of that choice would be influenced by what your child needs from you, and by what you want from your experience of parenthood?
For the working parent, the pursuit of balance is fraught with such scenarios and decisions to take. Which of those choices will leave you feeling more balanced is something personal and individual to each working parent and their family, and can change at any given point in the life of your child and your career.
Choosing with intention, as Gilles has done, seems to be one sure way not to look back with regret.