If you prefer to listen to this blog, click below for the audio. Or, just read on…
What's happened to parenting?
Our journey at the Working Parent Company
When we first started the Working Parent Company in 1998 it was because both of us had experienced challenges as parents and as working parents. We asked the questions:
‘Parenting – how come we are supposed to just know how to do it!’
And ‘is it really ok to be a working parent, aren’t I messing up my kids by doing so?’
We started the company largely offering skills training to parents who worked, everything from first aid through to sleep training. We found that whilst hungry for skills, it wasn’t enough and so ten years down the line we expanded to include coaching for working parents. We were the first UK based company to offer this.
Fast forward 26 years and having run zillions of those workshops and coached thousands of parents who work, we have learned that the answer to the latter is far messier than the former. Yes, you can learn skills, and No, there is not a straightforward global answer to the latter question. Its deeply personal and unique, and a lot of it is not of our making.
The historical context
Historically business people spent less time with their children and didn’t worry about it.
Consider the traditional family of the male breadwinner and the female caregiver. Let’s say this is circa 1950. The breadwinner wasn’t heartless, they just had someone at home who did the caring so they could do the breadwinning. Plus the prevailing cultural wisdom at the time was that it was wrong to spoil children or indulge them with too much of your time. Noone talked about parental guilt, infact no one really talked about parenting.
It wasn’t until later in the 1950’s that this view started to change.
It was around that time that research started to heat up in the area of child development. And it was in the 1950’s that the psychoanalyst, John Bowlby – stressed the importance of continuous and close relationships with parents. Bowlby demonstrated the value of a warm, reassuring parental figure for the good development of the child. Playing on the carpet, washing hair, bouncing balls, laughing over teddy’s antics, were, for Bowlby, matters of psychological life or death for the child. And we learned to understand that such experiences would teach a basic trust that was critical to a child’s sound development.
The modern impact
As with all theories it became popularised and, in part, misunderstood.
Now, I don’t believe for one minute that Bowlby’s work meant to cause the tsunami of parental angst and guilt that has followed, but it kinda did. It created a whole new landscape for modern parenting and new levels of pain and distress that came with it. What followed was the deluge of authors on parenting and a whole debate on what defined a good parent.
Expectations were born! And both quantity and quality of parental contact came under the microscope.
The timings of Bowlby’s critical findings couldn’t have happened at a more imperfect moment, for parents that is. As it coalesced with the rise of the economy and the changing relationship that we started to have with work. All of a sudden, the best way to raise a family was at complete odds with the best ways to run an economy.
The myth of work-life balance
What came next was the very early ideas of work life balance and that then coalesced with the rise of women back into the workplace – we are now around the mid to late 1960’s. Simply put the breadwinner didn’t necessarily have the care giver at home any more and childcare became sub contracted out to the growing market of childminders etc.
Work life balance was such a seductive thought, we all fell for it. Up until about 15 years ago we used to run workshops ourselves on work life balance, I shudder now at the naivety of them. As if by means of being more efficient or more assertive, or just better we could fix this conundrum by ourselves. It’s a nonsense of course, we can’t, and we suffer greatly in that place of thinking we can. Balance is dynamic its changes all the time as the needs of our children and our jobs and ourselves change. It’ s rarely something we can tick the box on and be done with. But we tried, we all tried very hard and in our failings to attain this very elusive condition of balance our frustration and discontent grew, towards ourselves, our partners, families and our organisations.
So whats the upside here?
Well, if there is some soothing consolation to be found it is that our failure to achieve a static state of balance is not personal. It’s timing, we just happen to be the generation where both work and family have risen to lofty heights in their roles and needs. It’s not our fault that they clash in such spectacular ways, but it is ofcourse problematic because we suffer so much when we are out of balance. our coaching now has compassion at its core, because juggling the demands of both of these areas of our lives is hard work and requires a practice of self-compassion, forgiveness and acceptance as the balm to guide us through.
We have to understand our unique vulnerabilities and do the harder inner work of making decisions about how and where we choose to put our time and energy, we have to claim our own personal power and take responsibility for what we can. We have to be able to tolerate the imperfection of our attempts to balance these two areas of our lives. And to accept compromises. It’s worth it of course, the constant course correction, the deeper work of understanding ourselves, all makes us into pretty decent role models for our children when it’s their turn to make these same or similar attempts.
Twenty six years on we have learned that parenting is deeply personal, that there aren’t quick fixes to these challenging dilemmas, but with compassion and safety we can emerge to find the fix for ourselves. And that looks different for everyone.
If you enjoyed this article and would like to receive the next one direct to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter here.