It’s time to set the record straight: working parents do not walk around feeling guilty all the time and some of us – gasp! – don’t feel guilty at all.  If parents do feel guilty, it would seem that there is a whole industry committed to perpetuating, if not exacerbating, the notion that we should be/want/do something we’re not.   It's no surprise that mothers bear the brunt of the guilt, of course, for wanting more in life than housekeeping and child rearing 24/7.  Parenting is the most important, challenging, and rewarding ‘career,’ but please stop projecting your guilt or insecurity about your parenting skills on to everyone else who, by choice or not, combines career and parenting.  More often than not, personal, cultural or religious beliefs dictate that women should stay home with the children, and therefore, we should feel guilty for not doing so.  In my view,  ironically, the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s did little to dispel such beliefs.  In fact, I believe that a significant response to the women’s movement has been the “guilt movement.”  It was the women’s movement, after all, that led women of my generation and younger to believe the notion that women didn’t always work or contribute outside the home.  To hear it told, the women’s movement liberated women from their kitchens and gave them a choice: raise children, have a career, go to Law School, or all of the above.  Prior to the women’s movement we were all June Cleavers, hopelessly clinging to our starched white half-aprons, greeting the kids after school with cookies and milk and our dear, hard working husbands with a four course dinner on a perfectly ironed tablecloth.  And while it’s true that until the women’s movement middle and upper middle class women seldom had careers of their own, women have always worked outside the home.  In many of the picture-perfect sitcoms of an earlier generation, sometimes behind the scenes and sometimes not, a maid kept that apron starched-white and the tablecloth perfectly ironed.  Yet, we rarely saw the maid going home to her own husband and children to work the ‘second shift.’  Cue “Good Times” (1974-1979).

I read with interest a recent article in The Atlantic titled, “How to Land Your Kids in Therapy” by Lori Gottlieb.  The article discusses a trend among today’s parents to do anything and everything to assure their children’s happiness and cushion them from disappointment and failure. It’s like the athletics coach at a recent middle school open house who told me, “We don’t play to compete, we just play to have fun,” or my own decision to give my child a marshmallow before bed while on vacation because the campfire was postponed until another evening.  Ms. Gottlieb, a therapist, theorizes that such parenting efforts may lead to adult children who are unable to cope with simple challenges and who feel empty and depressed when they must deal with life on their own.   Furthermore, she writes, parent’s “overinvestment” in their children tends to lead to narcissism in adults. 

I had been contemplating the Atlantic article and reflecting on my own parenting style when a friend posted a Facebook link to the Wall Street Journal online parenting blog, “The Juggle” and a June 28 blog by John Edwards III titled “Do Busy Schedules Mean Lax Parenting?”  The blog was written primarily in response to the Atlantic article. Mr. Edwards’ blog seemed to emphasize parents’ desperate desire, borne out of busy (read: working) parents’ guilt, to make their children happy all of the time.  The message in reading Ms. Gottlieb’s article and Mr. Edwards’ blog is not that working parents are neglectful, distracted, or less than perfect parents, but that it is their guilt and tendency to overcompensate that raises a generation of unambitious, unhappy young adults.  It would seem that over-parenting is a result of not spending enough time and energy with our children.  In my view, the opposite would be true – the more time stay at home parents have with their children, the more likely (time, energy) they are to over-parent.  They are the parents who live vicariously through their children because they do not lead fulfilling lives themselves.  Or the parents who are overly ambitious for their children because they did not have the education or careers that they’d wish they’d had themselves. Could it be that some non-working parents feel guilty for not working?

I’ve often wanted to ask “them,” whoever they are: what do we feel guilty about?  Missing a child’s first step at daycare?  Forgetting to bring brownies to the 4th grade bake sale?  Not enough energy to help with homework at the end of a long work day?  Perhaps, but not for long, not long enough that I would say that I feel guilty for working.  If I forgot the brownies (of course, you could tell, that one was a personal example), then I would apologize and explain to my child that in Mommy’s rush to get to her important job which helps contribute to our family and pay for the brownies, I forgot.  And I would not repeat my mistake.  Every Mommy’s job is important and every Mommy makes a contribution, whether she works outside the home or not.  As for the media telling me that I feel guilty or that I ought to feel guilty for how I choose to make my contribution?  Heck, I’m so busy being a working parent, I don’t have time to feel guilty!