The Mommy Effect Study: Did You Underestimate Working Motherhood?
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Have you seen the recent Wall Street Journal article called “Working Women Often Underestimate Motherhood Costs”? It reports on a recent study, “The Mommy Effect,” which found that many women have unrealistic views of what it’s like to be a working mom. The researchers say that women underestimate the time, money, and effort it will require — from childcare costs to the pressure to breastfeed — and are too optimistic about how their careers will fare. (Not surprisingly, this often leads to them leaving the workforce.) Let’s discuss it today: Did The Mommy Effect study resonate with you? Do you think you had unrealistic views of what it would be like to be a working mother? On the flip side, do you feel like you were too pessimistic about being a working mom before you became one?
Psst: you may want to check out some of our previous discussions on career changes after baby and work-life balance advice to your pre-mom self.
Here are a couple of key passages from the article so that we can discuss (note that the WSJ is subscription-only), or you can take a look at the full study:
- “When asked in a U.S. government survey, 60% of women with bachelor’s degrees and children under the age of 6 agreed with the statement that ‘being a parent is harder than I thought it would be.’ Fewer than 40% of men with college degrees and children under age 6 agreed.”
- “Since around 1990, they found about 2% of 18-year-old women who participate in a University of Michigan survey of young Americans’ attitudes and values said they expect to be stay-at-home mothers at the age of 30. Yet 15% to 18% of American women become homemakers by age 30, suggesting that many expected to combine work and motherhood and then reversed course.”
You’ll find plenty of mansplaining in the comments on the article (but, yes, #notallmen), as well as attacks on millennials and “the feminist agenda,” but some moms have written comments about things like questioning the effort you’re putting into your job when you’ve already been mommytracked, and wondering why many companies are still so inflexible with employees’ schedules. What are your thoughts?
Do you agree with the findings of The Mommy Effect study? What surprised you most about the physical, emotional, financial, or other costs of being a working mom? Do you agree or disagree with the statement from the survey that “being a parent is harder than I thought it would be”? Since having kids, have you made career adjustments that you didn’t expect (either by choice or not)? What advice would you give your pre-mom self about these issues?
Stock photo: Deposit Photos / yacobchuk1.
Further Reading:
- The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood? [National Bureau of Economic Research]
- Young working women are shocked by the ‘mommy effect’ on their lives [MarketWatch]
Yes. I had a picture of using the computer while my child quietly played nearby, or with one foot on a rocker while he slept. Cough, yeah right. He never slept unless I was holding him AND walking when he was littler, and he is all over the computer when he’s awake now. No work happening at home for me.
I didn’t listen with my first when people said time would fly, I only finally got it with my second. I only work 40 hours, make it a point to leave at exactly 4:30 for commute and leave work at work. Once Home my phone is off, and work knows this, we eat as a family and I incorporate my kids in everything, from laundry to dishes to grocery shopping. My thoughts are they are only young once and I won’t die thinking damn I missed that important meeting. I have struggled with my career and finally said to myself…what’s more important to me right now, family or work? I do have a successful career and I waited to have kids, but I’m finally okay if I don’t get that promotion, I refuse to stress myself out anymore, my house will not be spotless, laundry will always have to be done…..oh and I deleted FB, Instagram and Pinterest, lately because I found myself comparing myself to other moms.
I had no idea that I would be responsible for all of the thinking that goes into actually taking care of and parenting children, and that my husband would mostly just want to do the “fun” stuff with the kids but not the actual hard stuff. I was very naive. It’s exhausting feeling like you’re responsible for it all – and then to have society expect it to all fall on the mother. Someone mentioned above but school/appointments/all calls come to me, even in the instances when my husband is listed as the first point of contact. He has WAY more flexibility at his job than I do, and yet I still find myself bending my schedule and my career to fit our family’s needs. Writing this I see that we need to work on our relationship on these issues – has anyone been in a similar situation and found that something like marriage therapy helped with more equal parenting?
I can’t really answer this question, because I expected my kid’s dad to be a co-parent, living with us. He split within a week, so I’ve always been a single parent working mom. That was harder than I expected. The hard parts, for me, are mental; the pressure of knowing, where ever I was, what ever I was doing, that this little person’s life depended on me was much heavier than I expected. I also put a lot of thought into decisions about him. The other really, super-hard thing is my family’s expectations of working moms. Not only do they not want to help out with the child (fair enough, my choice to have him), they make demands that make being a working mom more difficult, like insisting on family time during very busy parts of the year.
Honestly the hardest thing for me has been relating to other women (who are moms). Because I still choose to prioritize my career and rely heavily on my husband, nanny, daycare, whomever we can beg / borrow / steal to help us , I’ve noticed I have a hard time relating to women in my same field who make different choices (e.g. take the mom track, go down to part time, etc.) almost feeling judged for not doing the same! And when it feels like everyone else is making the choice to change their career somewhat (if even temporarily) it can genuinely undermine my confidence in my decisions. Like, why am I the woman who hasn’t changed? Traveling weekly, working 70-80 hours, and still enjoying it? It makes me feel like I’m the “worse” mom, which of course may be true in some cases, but may not be in other cases. My parenting style is pretty hands-off in general – pick yourself up when you fall, soothe yourself back to bed, gain independence, etc., and I don’t see a lot of that either among the parents I am surrounded by (incl. my husband!), which AGAIN makes me feel something like – what’s wrong with me? Anyway, this was something I was not prepared for – feeling pretty isolated in my choices.
I think motherhood has made me a better worker. It’s really given me a focus in work that I didn’t have before, because I could just stay as long as I needed. Now, my ass is out the door at 5.
And I have dropped the ball HARDCORE. That’s been the most pleasant surprise for this recovering perfectionist – I just turn it over to my husband (e.g. Laundry) and it gets done the way he does it and that’s that. If there’s one thing I tell my friends, it is to drop the ball unapologetically. (And formula feed.)
I had no clue my life would change so dramatically. I had post-partum depression so bad I had to do an intensive outpatient psych program after having 2 babies in 12 months. I was non-functional. Something my law firm did not really accommodate. The upside: Mr. Wonderful had to take over all parenting. He is much more involved & has a much closer relationship with our girls because he had to step up. There’s always a silver lining.
I think the hardest, most surprising part is the lack of institutional support, for lack of a better term. I always knew I wanted to work and have kids and I expected that to be hard, but it never occurred to me just how much of a problem childcare would be – how expensive, how long the waitlists, etc. I didn’t realize that all the stuff for kids that I would love to sign up to do with mine would be on Wednesdays at 10:30 AM. Or that maternity leave benefits would be so sh*tty.
I got married older than most of my friends, so I saw the struggles they went through. In theory, my husband I would like kids, but given our work schedules we don’t know how we can do it without being completely stressed out all the time and exhausted. We have both learned we don’t function well on little sleep, and it doesn’t help we are older. We also don’t really have the option to work part time or have one of us stay home for financial reasons, and adequate childcare would be very expensive. If we could do either of those things, I would love to have children, but since we can’t, I don’t think it would be sustainable for us. We have thought about adopting when we are yet even older if we have more time, but who knows if that will happen.
I get frustrated that we can’t move from “working motherhood” to “working parenthood,” but, then I see something like this article and am reminded that it still really is a woman/mom’s problem. I said to DH that the system is broken, like, I’m expected to work from 8:30 to 5 and daycare is open from 8 to 6, and how am I supposed to get my kids there and then to work and then from work to pick up and see them at all and handle all the menial tasks of life (like grocery shopping, cleaning, doctor’s appointments, etc.) and he just shrugged. Because he helps out a lot (there it is, “helps” creeping in to my language!) but he just.doesn’t.know.
I overestimated how much it would affect my working life– my job is flexible, my boss is a mom, I have not been mommy-tracked or given less plum assignments than before. It’s fine if I go in early and leave early to make a doctor’s appointment. I underestimated the sheer monetary expense. All non-daycare expenses are not as expensive as I thought they’d be: formula, diapers, whatever, we can easily handle all those with both incomes. But we had twins, my husband and I are both only medium-well-paid government employees (HHI a little over $100K), and we. are. BROKE. entirely due to how much day care costs. I know it’s a temporary expense, and I’m still putting money in my retirement account, and I’m getting raises, and in five years we’ll probably be ahead of where we’d have been if I stayed home (and I don’t want to stay home). But the fact that it eats up all of my take-home pay after deductions for retirement/health insurance/parking AND I don’t get to see them all day is infinitely more frustrating than I thought it’d be. I’m always on edge about whether our ten-year-old cars will break or the house will need new siding.
Husband’s sp*rm analysis was awful. Very low count, almost no movement, almost no normal morphology. So bad that the nurse asked twice if he’d missed the cup altogether.
He’ll redo in a few weeks, but it is so hard not to be sad and scared. I’m 38 and I honestly thought i’d be the problem.
This isn’t working mother specific, as much as it’s parenthood in general. But I never realized that I’d be as anxious about the state of the world as I am now that I have a young daughter.
I was surprised to find out how well I would function with so much little, broken sleep. Or that that the partners I work for would not mommy-track me (I am working on some of the best deals of my career at 10 months post-partum with a shocking amount of flexibility to work from home when I need to and to disappear for a few hours for snuggles, dinner and bedtime). Or how much bone-deep satisfaction there is of sleeping baby snuggles. I know that none of this would be true or relatively easy if 1) I didn’t bring down a BigLaw salary, which allows for a lot of extra conveniences and 2) my husband didn’t stay home with my daughter. I am surprised (constantly) by how little my husband gets done at home while I work all day, but I am sympathetic to the fact that my daughter refuses to sleep for him unless napping on him and that she constantly wants to be held by him all day (even though she does not act that way with me). So division of household chores is still something I primarily do, but now that she is getting a little older and a little more independent, he is aspiring to do more housework. The emotional labor part doesn’t bother me because I am a planner and organizer by nature – keeping track of all of that stuff keeps my mind occupied so I’m not rearranging furniture, alphabetizing bookshelves, etc.
I think I knew everything would change but just didn’t understand how much emotional labor there would be and how little of it would be seen by my husband or other family members – the clothes and schedule and doctor’s appointments and meals and so forth.