I was recently asked for my thoughts on return to work mums, and to be honest I really struggled to get my bum off a really uncomfortable fence. I made a week-long return to work when Dexter was 7 months-old, needless to say, it was incredibly short-lived. It had been the plan to phase out Craig’s work and have him work 3 hours in the morning and late afternoon, and I would work from 10am until 3pm. This plan was based on the fact that both Craig and I wanted to spend time with Dexter, and I had the ‘potential’ to command more money in those core working hours than he could. My work bent over backwards for me throughout my pregnancy and maternity leave, and were even happy with my proposed return-to-work plan - it seemed like we had it all.
None the less, after just one week I didn’t want to be at work. I just couldn’t seem to get over the changes that had happened in those 8 short months I’d swapped my laptop or CBeebies. These changes weren’t just those at work itself, but those that had happened within me. I found myself constantly questioning why the work I was doing was important, who was benefiting, was Dexter better off without me, was I prepared to be solely responsible for our family finances??? When I failed to see any positives, I sat with Craig to reassess where we’d go from there.
The long and short of it is that Craig returned to work full-time and I became a stay-at-home mum. Luckily Craig is self-employed and makes good money on his own. Don’t get me wrong, he cannot wait for the day our children are in nursery places so I can lighten the load for him and go back to work. But we are still happily self-sufficient, have a lovely home, and can still afford a summer holiday every year. The pre-school years are certainly a struggle financially but we are able to survive without two incomes. This means I can spend these precious years with my children and achieve things at home rather than in business.
Nevertheless, our current set-up is purely a result of circumstance. My decision to stay-at-home is only possible because we are a two parent household where one of us has the ability to sustain a family financially. I know this position is a rarity in today’s world and admire women that return to work sooner - through choice, or the burden of finances. I do however feel that there is some way to go to make our working lives flexible enough to better accommodate return to work mums, and much of this can only be achieved if there is a cultural shift in our ways of thinking about how we work.
This is exactly the sort of question recently posited to a sample of working mums in a recent survey. The results make for interesting (if a little disappointing) reading.
Juggling a family and a career is never easy, but are today’s women being pressured into returning to work before they’re ready? A recent YouGov survey, commissioned by Vertbaudet, asked 430 working mums about their relationship with their careers and the support their employers offer. More than two-thirds (67%) of respondents said that if they had another child, they would be “likely” or “very likely” to return to work once their maternity leave was over.
But despite this willingness to get back to working life, the survey also revealed some big barriers to doing so. Some 44% of mums surveyed said the cost of childcare would be a big factor in their decision to go back to work, while 30% were concerned about being able to find a suitable carer for their children. Another 24% said they might reconsider returning to work if their employer was unwilling to offer flexible working hours.
When it came to the support employers give to new mums, it seems there’s still room for improvement. Just over half (52%) of mums surveyed said they were satisfied with their workplace’s maternity support - including factors like length of paid leave, flexibility to work around appointments and cooperativeness in general. However, just 42% were happy with the level of childcare support they received after they returned to work.
As well as the financial pressure to go back to work and earn money to support children, today’s mums have high-profile celebs to live up to: people like the Duchess of Cambridge, JK Rowling, Holly Willoughby and Victoria Beckham are just a few of the supermums who make it look easy! To find out what real women think, Vertbaudet asked some bloggers if they feel pressured by the women they see in the media to “have it all”.
Kirsty and Clara Taylor-Gallop, of parenting blog My Two Mums, said: “We feel that there is an immense pressure placed by the media on mothers who wish to return to work whilst their children are young.
“Living is expensive and we feel there is a desire to want to provide the best, which almost always involves a return to work eventually. It’s great to get the time with your children at home, but making sure we have the best future provided for us is also a bonus.”
Stacey Priestley, Ecommerce Manager, from Vertbaudet said: “Working mums come under a lot of pressure to support their families, both by earning a wage in the workplace and by looking after their children at home. We encourage employers to do everything they can to support mums and recognise how hard they work to strike the right work/family balance.”
So what do you think? Would you choose to return to work if money wasn’t a factor? Does society need to offer more flexibility to mums returning to work, or are we asking too much of our employer’s?
All the research within this article is credited to Vertbaudet.
