Juggling Work and Motherhood

The ever growing dilemma among every working mother today, is whether to be a full-time mother or to walk the tight rope balancing both work and home. In this article, we will talk about these dilemmas and some pragmatic solutions.

Children bring a lot of happiness and fulfilment to a woman’s life; however, when it comes to all the care and attention they need, children can also be a handful. With the commitment to nurture another human being from infancy to adulthood comes an additional load of stress, and the stress that comes with motherhood can be significant.

Hochschild (1998) found that women who work outside the home are faced with a second shift or additional working month of 24 hours per annum compared to working men with children. In a study by Baxter and Westin (1998), it was found that married women performed around 64 percent of the total amount of household work and that their contribution as compared to married men was particularly high when it came to the work indoors (78 percent) and childcare (67 percent).

How Stress Affects Women
Most women start out with the belief they can be ‘a superwoman’ and handle everything. The burnout is quick and brutal. The financial pull is felt increasingly as the children grow up, for the unending need of clothes, school and finally for the college.

In struggling to make the ends meet, both the partners are hardly able to spend anytime for themselves. It takes a toll on all the pre-motherhood things that she loved and treasured. The all important relationship with the husband takes a back seat.

The result of all this stress in most cases is self doubt. Every time she finds a child ill or hurt, she blames herself of neglect. She loses confidence in herself, and considers herself a complete failure in every walk of life.

Possible Ways Out
A working mother needs all the help possible from every member in the family. Duties need to be delegated as much as possible. Taking a part-time or may be a less stressful job can also help ease the stress.

The results of a German research that dealt specifically with the stress of working among mothers might be pertinent here. The research was conducted by Gunn Johansson, PhD, professor of work psychology at the University of Stockholm, which yielded some very interesting results.

The researchers found that women read the signals they get from society and take decisions accordingly. A researcher compared the decisions taken by managers in Sweden and erstwhile West Germany. Both the societies differ in a major aspect. Sweden offers a very high-quality child care to almost every family which asks for it. Accordingly, in Sweden most of the women managers had at least two children, while in Germany, most women preferred not having children.

Johansson said, “While the German women recognized that they had to forsake family for work, the Swedish women took it as their right to combine the two roles.”

So, it’s for the individual mother to logically decide how she can best juggle the two. But an important consideration should be that, as a human being, there is a limit to the stress one can take. At a later stage of their children’s lives, the time she spends with them will be cherished and remembered more than anything else.