Working While Parenting a Teen: Not What I Expected
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deny, we argue, are the perfect person to have the conversion with amy gala.

I am so happy to be back here having this conversation with you.

You are a behavioral psychologist at absent, so, you know, work, you research work and motherhood. You wrote this amazing, but called maternal optimism, which encourages us to see the positives of being a working mom. And you were on our two thousand nineteen episode called the upside of working motherhood.

Such a good episode. I left that conversation. My daughter was twelve at the time. She's now seventeen, thinking that parenting and adolescent was going to open up all of this opportunity and freedom in my career, and that I was just gonna feel released from the burdens of early childhood parenting. I want to play a clip from that twenty nine episode because this is what I latched .

onto obvious in for me. There's this energy to engage in my research, in my riding, in leadership in the college in a way that I just didn't have before. And so it's a really exciting phase. There's also a lot of positive feedback that starts to come from your Young adult children that you don't get from a todder er or elementary school right when you're dealing with little children. There's often can be more anx ed intention and things that they say that make you realize or think, oh my gosh, they are set at work or why do you work for me or those kinds of questions that cause you when they're older, they're excited .

about you're working. So why did I feel so blindsided by how hard parenting a teenager is while working?

And you blame me.

I am blame you. No blame you. But I it's what I have been going back and listening to that previous episode because I like where did day I promise me that would get Better and that hasn't happened.

So I have a slight bone to pick with you about that. okay. So we'll get into .

that phone and we'll see if IT really is my fault or if it's just the realities of working mother hood. That's right. Working motherhood doesn't end, god willing. Our children continue to age and grow and our work and career ships and changed, but they are still very much in your life.

yeah. You know, when I thought about being a working mom of a Younger kid, free elementary school, navigating daycare and all that, one of the things that I was so frustrated by that I missed from my precious life was the ability to focus. And I didn't feel that return because at twelve he was more independent.

We could leave her alone in a house for short periods of time, right? There are things that that just felt a little more species. And I kept envisioning that being a clear trajectory toward freedom. And I think it's been bump here than I expected. And I don't think I quite understood the emotional effort and labor that parenting a teenager was going to be.

And i'm so bad you pointed out that issue of emotion. If we think about parenting, we have to think about the stage of the child's. And you said, IT right away, right in middle school, they're starting to have a little bit more freedom.

You can start to leave them alone. They start to feel like big kids because they've got some of that freedom. And they hit those late teens, right, that adolescent period in high school, and i'd consider even into college. And there is so much emotional turmoil of what they are doing is at a lessons as adolescence.

They are at that stage of trying to figure out, who am I going be? How do I start to become independent? I don't want to be with you, but I need to be with you and I want you. And so that's the struggle for them emotionally. And when we talk about family labor and family work, we're actually getting much more nuance than our understanding ings of what family work is.

We used to just talk about the idea of family and caregiving, and now we're dividing them up a little bit and talking about the difference between emotional labor at home and cognition of labor at home and manager erie labor at home. And we actually know emotional labor is the part that is most stressful for us when we come into our work. So this idea that you've got more emotional labor with this adolescents, g woman, has real implications for your experiences at work.

Where is when your kids were little? Maybe there was more manageable real work. And actually we know ma nigerian labor at home, positively ly effects are well being in our thriving at work. So you're seeing this rise and emotional labor, which then has real direct implications for how feeling .

about work yeah I mean, the emotional labor is just so real and that that makes me think about why have we invited you back? I have spent all week so excited to talk to you. And I think for me personally, I want to sort of unpacked this period of my parenting and working and understand IT a little bit Better, understand why I felt blind insider.

But I also want our listeners, if they're in the same phase of life, to have that same validation, but also for those who aren't yet there, to understand what's coming. And any apparently stage is a little bit like you can verbally tell someone it's gonna be hard, they're onna be new chAllenges, but they don't actually feel IT until they're in IT. But i'm hoping we can help people.

The last thing I really want to do with this show is I want to help people who work with parents of teenagers to understand that we're not done right. I think there's a sense, and you write about this in the book, we talked about this in our last conversation, that when you're the parent of a Young child, you have so many duties, so many things to take care of. And I think there's this impression that as your child gets older, those vaporing, I mean, I wouldn't even say the lesson. I think there's a sense that people sort forget that you are working parent. Is that what you're seeing in in your research, in your work, in your own experience?

absolutely. One of the things that we have been so focused on, and maybe IT, was a first step that we needed was to make leaders and organizations aware that working parents exist at all and aware particularly of issues of pregNancy and parental leave and return to work and how to support parents in that early career working phase and helping them and understand how critical IT is that parents reentry after having a child after being on maternity leave, sets the stage for their career trajectory and for their organizational commitment.

So we've made a lot of progress there, but we haven't made a lot of progress on those next stages. And when I look at the research that's out there, most of the research actually looks at the implications of working parents on the child um not of having an adolescent on the working parents so we actually have some great research that Kathy maginness done that looks at working parents and adult children and what are the implications for adult children in their careers? And I know we talked about that in our last episode.

There's also more recent research that looked at how people's experience of work, family, adult parents affects their adolescent childrens. And so we see something we call transferrence. When parents feel enriched about work, IT brings home positive feelings to their children and effects in adolescence well being.

We have not done any research that looks at the reverse, that says, how does the adolescence behavior? How does parenting the adolescence? How does parenting that a Young adult affect that parent at work? yeah. And that's the research we need to do. And I think the research then enables us to bring that conversation into the popular press, into organizations, to say these chAllenges are real and here's the Better ways we can be supporting these parts.

I want to end this episode right now until you to go and do that research immediately really needed.

And i'm on statical next year, and it's it's on my agenda. And so this conversation is definitely helping me think more. What are the key issues and questions we need to be .

looking at in research. And I know I could come up with a laundry list of complaints about being the working parent of a teenager, but you've already included to. And I want to make sure we don't miss the positive peace.

And that transforms. Like to see my daughter relish in my professional successes is amazing. I mean, that literally brings tears to my eyes. Thinking about the moments where she's been most proud of me.

Chicken to australia with me last yoga to see me speak in front of a large audience for the first time and just knowing he was in the room with the best talk i've ever given, right? So there are so many upsilon, and yet I do want to dig a little into the downside. We asked some of our listeners to to weigh in if they had similar concerns.

And we heard from this woman who actually worked in the military. SHE SHE had been deployed when her child was Young and was not happy about missing parts of her childhood. But he kept thinking that was gna get easier.

And now her worklife so disrupted by her teenage daughter, this woman, actually her teenager, is twenty. So I have the sense that continues on. And I know you all three of your kids are now and they're twenty. So I imagine you have a perspective on that, but let me share a little bit of what he says. SHE says while her physical needs have diminished over time, her emotional needs have increased dramatically.

I don't have to drop everything for an emergency, but I still find myself having to drop everything for the emotional meltdowns over grades, over friends, over boys, over her part time jobs, over whether he will graduate on time, over taking the wrong train, over getting a traffic ticket. The list goes on. SHE is called me in the middle of presentations, in meetings frequently with tears and high pitch squeak into the point I have difficulty understanding her.

While my company was very understanding, inflexible, this did not make for ideal working conditions. How do you think about that need to be present for your kid emotionally while trying to baLance work? And how do we Normalize that part of working parents is actually been available to your child.

And that availability, we know, is really hard with adolescence and Young adults, right? Because they have these moments where they wanted talk and you can't say, oh, let me finish this presentation. I'll call you back in a half hour because the moment is left.

And i've actually done that where I said, let me call you .

back until I ang feel really guilty about the whole situation. I think the other thing to be aware of what they are doing is there emotionally dumping in a really safe space. And so they may call you if it's a student who's in college, for example, they're walking across campus going to the class and they wanted talk to you about a meaning a teacher said are a bad greater problem they had with a partner the night before and they spill at you.

There's emotional retard c and then they hang up and you're laugh with this very heavy emotional state. Be aware they've gone on ah that's what they needed to do. They needed to get that emotion out there.

They needed to get IT out on a safe space and then they're off with their friends, are off doing their lives. And so I think attending to the fact that, that emotional roller coaster is part of where they're at and it's not as devastating as IT may feel in that phone call. And so that may enable 有点 厚度 less of that emotion as you go through your workday。

And even thinking of IT is a Normal you party. Normalize for me the fact that we have this cognitive emotional load with teenagers that wasn't the same when our kids were Younger, and that negatively impacts work. I think that's the part that I found really tough.

Is that why am I letting this bother me while i'm sitting here? Why can I return my focus? That was disrupted by this phone called by the series of tax rate.

I actually had this experience. The summer SHE went to a overnight program, a precollege program, where her first night he was in a single, in a dorm. IT was her first time ever sleep alone.

And SHE was great. He was happy to be there. And then at two A M, I left her, told her my phone will, beyond in case something comes up, two A M, I get a text that SHE doesn't feel well right.

And then I spent the next three hours sort of helping her figure out, is SHE actually sick? Is this just anxiety as they're tal health issue that needed to be addressed in? In that moment, there were periods of time where I got to go back to sleep, but then the text would come again.

And the interesting part of about IT was the next day, of course, I was exhausted. And when I told friends and co workers I am so tired this happen, the range of responses from fellow working moms went from, why didn't you go picker up immediately? To why didn't you just turn off your phone and tell your good night? And so there is this.

I think there is also embedded in this, especially for me. I tell you, i'm nervous about this episode because i'm nervous. People, listen to what is your problem.

Just turn off your phone when you're your network. Don't answer just a call from your teenager. Taller did solve in on her own director to another, her other parent, and all of which things I choose in the moment not to do.

I'm not sure what my question is in there. I am doing the emotional unloading on you the way my dinner on me. But I guess my question is, how do you guard against what feels like very harsh judgments from others about how we choose to baLance our parenting and working now?

And that harsh judgment you've probably been feeling for a really long time. yes. And this is the hardest part of being a working parent, is how do I figure out what is the right model for me? There are so many different ways to parent.

And I can tell you, with older children, I see that now that I have friends who managed work in parent in so many different ways, in parent in so many different ways, and their Young adults are all equally interesting and successful, whatever that means. But we live in a society where we feel judged, and we do get judged. And there is an idea out there, we call identities assimilate.

That idea of who I want to be as a working mother, maybe different than what my colleagues are saying, right? This idea of like why and you just turn off your phone or a friend who says were wide to just break her up. We have those judgements coming at us all the time from all directions.

And it's really important to remember they're not just coming from our work colleagues. They are coming from people in our home systems or in our family systems, right? And turning that off is the perpetual chAllenge, particularly for the working mother.

How do I say the path i'm choosing to take is the right path for me? yes. So if you have a relationship with harper and you've chosen to parent in a way that he knows you available, you have to stay true to that way of parenting.

And that may mean that you're gonna interface with your work in your colleagues differently. Then if you said i'm always onna turn my phone off at certain points yeah we have to stop judging and telling people what's the best way to into great work and family. We need to recognize different children have radically different needs.

To your last point about this issue of emotional, mental health, I think of families who have gone through traumas, yeah, there need to be available to their child is very, very different. And we don't know what their story is. And so I think the more we can stop judging other people who do IT differently, the easier we're going to make IT for a working parent of an adults.

As you're saying that, i'm thinking in my head the phrase that wouldn't work for us, someone who's like just picker up that wouldn't work for us, just turn off your film that won't work for us because this this is the relationship my child and I have developed my partner too, right? The way we've decided to parent is the way we've decided parent based on a lot of thought, be on right, a lot of thought and a lot of discussion. And this is what works for us.

So this way you've constructed, being a working mother feels good to you, and it's really hard to feel good about your path when you feel like you're being judged. A harvard business school executive education develops leaders who make a difference in the world. Their renowned faculty members are skilled educators.

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Okay, let's talk about boundaries um that you know letter I read from our listener about the constant interruption and in the middle a presentation i'm getting this call.

I don't know if it's genuinely an emergency because let's be honest, teenagers have really big feelings, and I think in the moment, they don't know if it's an emergency or not, right? So how do you respond in those moment? How do you set boundaries both with the kid in your own mind and with colleagues who may have to be interrupted in middle of the meeting if you have to take a call? What are your recommendations around those boundaries?

Well, I want to started out talking about that. Boundary issue can be harder for some of us than others. So I know, again, you've talked a lot about the idea of integration.

And I someone who puts work, family and community and can do them kind of like all at once interactively. Or am I someone who needs to create boundaries? And i'll tell you, I was someone who needed desperately boundaries.

I loved that. I went to work in the morning. My children were at school, they were in childcare, whatever that was. They didn't have access to their phone when they were in those Younger periods. And then when I came home, I could focus on them.

And in today's world, starting with a post covet world, right, where there is much less physical separation of work and family for so many people. And then at on, as you said, you've got an adult action or Young adult, they've got a phone and they need you when they need you. So for me personally, is someone who really likes to segment and life, that integration has just been personally hard to understand intimate sense and to figure out how do I parent and work in this new sequence and time. So for some people, this is gonna maybe really easy because they just fits with who they are. And for some of us who like the segment is much harder.

Yeah, i've been a integrated I work at home a lot of the time when i'm not traveling, and I have brought my daughter to each bears offices for days. Not like I just like IT to be a mix. And I like to have that flexibility.

But IT does mean I lose that ability to focus sometimes because, you know, I pick up my phone to send a what's that message to colleague and i'm seeing ten tax from my daughter asking me, you know, can you get back to me right now? I can you call. And I I think one of the sacrifices of that approaches is the focus for me. absolutely.

Because we know the switching costs. We know that kind of switching cost of moving from one activity to the next, whether their work activities or work family activities are really high. And so each of us has to figure out our own path of what that looks like.

You may need to say to your colleagues, look, I may need to step out, but don't worry, I will come back to this. So part of what you want to do is validate for your colleagues, your bosses. I'm getting my work done and focused on my work in career, and i'm sending for you expectations of where I am.

So i'll give you an example. I never step out of the classroom when I am teaching. I am all in. I am in the classroom. And I turned my phone off my daughter number years ago when he was a point to the school, was going to be getting her and cat score right, which is the absolute critical thing, defines where they can apply.

And I told my students I may step out of class today, because for me to be able to pick up the phone at the moment, when he found out whatever the outcome was gonna be, I knew I had to be there for her. I knew for me that was really critical apparent. So knowing those defining moments for use, a parents really important. When do I know I need to be available? And then how do I try to proactively manage my colleagues and buses, if I can?

Did you worry your students would think differently of you for setting that, that expectation that you might step out?

I absolutely thought my students would think different, right? And again, back to that idea of a sg venter. Ah that means I don't bring a lot into the classroom about my family, my children.

I bring a lot about my identity because I teach organizational psychology, and I want them to understand identity at work, but I don't bring my family. And yeah and so this was going to be a very transparent moment for them of understanding this was a family situation. And I needed to be apparent in the moment, right? And so I didn't think a lot about IT in. And I think that that idea of proactively managing when you know you're at those points, you I can .

imagine doing that even with a with an understanding boss. I think there is something so thing to me about like the pro activity of IT as opposed to like, oh, gosh, I get this, tuck them looking around in the meeting. Can I leave? Can I not? And I trying to do both things. Now, as everyone worried, i'm distracted with the keep and frowning at my phone and texting furiously um and I not giving my child my full attention because I am also trying to participate meaning but pro actively setting the expectation this interruption might happen and for someone who works individually, which I often do, even setting that expectation with myself, right like i'm sitting down to do this thing and I got to turn off my phone, not be available at all at the expectation with my kid that I am not here for this time or am I gonna say, you know, it's okay if I get interrupted. I just have to accept that as part of the course of this particular moments or this particular stage of parenting.

and we've been talking a lot about proactive with your boss, but you also need to be proactive with your family, right? And so really thinking for yourself, are there there's moments in your work, well, you really just need to be present something really important going on. You mentioned before the idea of an understanding boss.

Well, maybe you don't have an understanding boss or maybe you don't have an understanding colleague. Maybe you have a new boss or building a relationship. And so also being proactive in terms of at home, is there somebody else harper can call or reach out to if he needs somebody in that moment thinking about the fact that in that moment he really needs emotional support yeah and who are the best emotional supports that you have in your network?

And so one of the things, again, that's really important to do is to keep building those relationships yeah, not become so hyper focused on your child, on your nuclear family, on your work, that you don't have that broader system of support to help you and figure that out. One of the things that I think is fascinating that we know from research is the adolescence when they have those emotional needs. If IT is a head oro sexual couple, they do tend to go to the mother.

And so how do you switch those dynamic around emotional labor, right? And how do you help your partner engage in some of that more emotional caretaking that they may not be as comfortable doing, but you're now empowering your partner to say, I trust you to do this yeah and to do this kind of caretaking in your unique way. And so can you really help build and continue to build that compares ting relationship well.

to build that really with the child and the other parent, right? And there's been incredibly lucky in the partner I chose who is just incredibly smart emotionally and cannot be really present, partly because he's a therapist rate can be really present with our daughter. And you know, there's time SHE wants to come to me about stuff, but this time he goes to him and I have said, I can't talk right now.

Can you call that a and he does or SHE does that? And then he realized he didn't actually need help or whatever. It's just I can be able to read director, which really, really helps.

That's right. And if we go back to watch the job of the adolescent, it's to become independent. You are saying that span a cordial family. And so in a lot of ways you're also teaching them they can be independent in these moments.

Yeah, I think the other thing that we ve forgot about is that we're teaching ourselves we don't need to micro manage and that has implications for our network. That idea of same before a partner or a friend or someone else is gonna handle this situation. They're gg.

Onna do IT differently than me, and it's gonna turn out OK. That has implications for how we are at work. We have to let people who work for us, who work with us also do things in ways that are going to be different than how we do IT and knowing it's still gonna successful.

And I think that's something that's probably different for you and I at this point in our career, as i'm a division chair and associate dean, i'm working in my division with thirty faculty and I worked with a hundred faculty across campus. How they teach him what they do is very different than what I do, but it's positive. And so giving up control at home is really helpful for me of giving up control at work also.

I mean, i'm sure people that you work with have made mistakes, have not done the thing that was best for the students, are best for the university. And then they learned from in, the mistakes are valuable. We have to let not just adolescents, I mean, it's a huge part of adolescents to take risks and fail and learn from them.

That's just that's part of the work too, but it's also part of a delta. It's part of living life. Part of working is to make those mistakes and learn from them. And I think we really demonize mistakes in the workplace in a way that's really unhealthy. absolutely.

I've got a lot of research actually, our management education and the importance of mistakes and what we have, critical incidents and those failures in the classroom that are so critical to our growth in our resilience and our developing that entrepreneurship mindset.

And I think we've been talking a lot about adolescence, but when we think about that idea of Young adults, when you're a worker mother, you've got a long career, you have a lot of knowledge, you know a lot of things. You've work with a yet lot of Young people who have made a lot of car, and you watch your Young adult starting to embark on their own career journey. And there is a part of you that wants me to go, well that doesn't want them to make the mistakes you made or the mistakes you see other people make, or the you have about their long term happiness and success.

However, you define success. And a reminder that. Those mistakes are absolutely critical to that journey .

can be really helpful. Yeah, yeah. That would be a lifelong lesson for me. I can tell.

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I want to go back to the relationship with your boss and your colleagues around us, and we talked about being proactive around a meeting. I might get interrupted. Do you recommend having a lot of larger conversation about this phase of parenting and what that means? Like there's some education we might do of our colleagues or bosses or is not not appropriate?

I think it's like everything else that we ever talk about IT depends, but there's not a one size fits all, right? I mean, we've talked about the idea of if you have a boor colleagues, where you feel confident about who you are and where you're add and you feel good about your work and you're being recognized to your work.

Those are places where I really do encourage people to have those more explicit conversations cause back to our our conversation is invisible in the workplace. And the only way we start to make working parents of a adolescence visible is by having those conversations. But you can do that when you're in a place of power.

And unfortunate many people are not in that place. They're in a place where either they have a boss who who has a more difficult relationship with them or they have colleagues who they may not entirely trust yeah and if those are the situation during being that transparent may not be what's most successful for you to do in those moments. And so figuring out ways to create boundaries for yourself that you're not being inauthentic to who you are, but perhaps you're not entirely revealing, right? This goes back to the same old choices we have about identity that we've talked about.

Do you pass, do you reveal or you can seal? And a lot of that has to do with how much power do I feel like I have in the system, how much confidence do I have that people trust me and know I do a good job. And when you feel that way, I do encourage you to be more authentic about those conversations because they are going to help the next working parent.

Yeah, and I imagine you can test the waters a little right? Like I am tired. I was up with my kid who was struggling a little bit and just see what happens not having this big conversation. And let me tell you how hard that is compared teenager right now or and I actually I I want to catch myself there too, because in the way that you really try to focus on both the positives and negatives of being working mother, I think we often demonize teenagers, and we talk about how terrible they are. I actually find my teenager pretty down the late fall and fun to be around. And, you know, are there moments that, yes, of course, the moments that I could list lots of them, but i'm trying to embrace the chAllenge is presenting me as a professional, as a working mom, as a person, instead of focusing on just like how terrible IT is.

I think one of the things that's most fun about parenting a teenager is you get to practice some different skills. And I I actually teach first year students, and I love them. A lot of people look at me and go, oh my god, how do you spend a year with 4 year old and eighteen year olds， not unlike fifteen year old or twenty one years old, are trying to figure out who do they want to be in this world.

And so as a parent, even as an educator, a lot of what i'm doing is no longer telling them who are gonna be. You don't know harper, but coaching her, throwing right, and coaching them through those processes of who do they want to become and giving up the idea that I can control who they are going to become, they are going to be different than me, and that has to be okay. That's really hard. And so many pieces to the puzzle that I don't even want to go into, right? But IT doesn't able you to think a little bit more of i'm not the energy now I not telling them, but I have to come at them from a different angle, a more creative angle yeah and that can be a lot of fun to play with yeah.

Well, and this is something I take away from every conversation I have with you, and certainly from you are writing and research, is that the best thing I can do for her is to be a satisfied, fulfilled person. I have a friend who always says parenti is a relationship, it's not a task, and I love to turn things into checkless, into this. So I really would love to treat them like a past that I could achieve.

But it's a relationship. And so by be my best self in that relationship as often as I can, and not always, but that is nurturing and inspiring and supportive to her. You see these moments like a bad grade, you know, friendship rupture, a heartbroken, right? Where you, what can I do to fix IT? And what can I do to shape her in this moment and to give her the life lesson? And sometimes it's just about showing up and just being emotionally present, cause he needs to learn.

Anyone who knows me knows that my family lives and dies by our calendar. We have like a shared fairly calendar where everything goes in. And this has been one of the big lessons is that I no longer have control over what my daughter is.

SHE has a driver's license. SHE has preferences. SHE has opinion.

And so IT used to be like, I could say, here's what you do after school every day, right? You're going to our class are here. You're doing six weeks of our camp right now.

He has A A lot of opinions about what he does. And a lot of IT she's creating and organizing, actually, most of IT she's creating, organizing herself. And that is in some ways a big freedom.

But I also introduced a lot of uncertainty into our family schedule. And so I don't always know if she's coming home right after school are going to band practice. I can ask you to to inform me, but I also this may be the product of being in the chaotic public school system, but things change so fast.

So sometimes being practices cancelled, sometimes the after school, our program is closed, right? And we just don't know right away that's gna happen. Any advice about what of managing that uncertainty? I know in that elementary school middle years, this is a lot of stress for parents of I was my child getting this care unless concerned about her safety, but i'm more concerned now about how do we sort of organized ourselves and flow.

And I love your comment about a calendar. right? Is a color coded to i'd see that with working parents, all so for short, all color coded right. One of the device we often give to early stage working parents is the importance of creating that structure and routine is one of the things that takes stress off of a working parent, is one of the ways that we can ease work family conflict and enable parents to more successfully navigate work and family.

And what you're pointing out is at this point in time, you don't have a lot of control over that, right? So you've lost structure, which eases conflict intention and you can bring structure back. That's not going to change.

I can't tell you, oh, creates some m structure into your life. What are you doing wrong? I think the thing you have to think about is how do I best manage chaos, not control in chaos or not kindly change the chaos of harper's life.

You're not going to be able to start to dictate to harper. But what kind of management of that do you need so that you can do your work? I think that's the question to really ask. Not so that you can control the calendar, yes or not, so that you can control her.

Why can I control everything in.

but bring, in fact, to work? What kind of control do I need to know in order to manage my work schedule? So that could be eat everything from looking at your work schedule out.

And okay, this week I have some flexibility and so I can let harbor be a little bit more independent that week and know that if bam packed this is cancelled, then SHE needs a last minute pick up. I've got some flexibility in my schedule and having some conversations with her in advance about where you don't have flexibility and with your partner yeah right. So I don't know if you know your partner when your kids were little did monthly meetings.

Perhaps that can be really helpful if you did weekly meetings but doing similar kinds of things. But now bringing harper into that conversation, you or hearing harper, what are the days where there is something really important? Maybe it's about trios.

That's a high emotional intensity. Maybe that's the day you want to line. So trying to start to do some calendar planning with you're adolescent and bringing them in as part of that conversation.

you can be really helpful. Yeah, I have to say I was so excited. I bet when he got to the age, he could like participate, we call a calendar and SHE.

We calendar like A A verb and so like, sure and SHE is totally developmentally appropriate was like, I don't want to do that. That's your thing. I'm not into that.

And the more we enjoyed IT, no SHE enjoyed IT because you you know teenagers are also like agenda detectors. If they detect you have an agenda there, like i'm out. So there was a good, I would say, six months where I was sort of this real struggle.

And we'd like her calendar and SHE just roll her eyes. And then what turned the page on IT was that SHE IT became about the car because, SHE, we have two cars for three drivers. And so we said, okay, we have to figure who's get in the car.

And that means whether you're not, you can drive to school. And he was like, okay. And SHE, as long as he said, the premier SHE said, sunday afternoons we can have a calendar and in session and then SHE now is like, I have to admit, I enjoy IT and so will start with the car.

But then it's also like, what do you know about after school schedule? What do you know? Can you add that then you have video with your called cancer.

Can you put that on like it's not perfect? And I love your distinction between managing chaos verses controlling chaos, because IT is chaotic. Did you have any tools that you used when your kids were teenagers that worked for you?

I think I try to give myself Grace so Graceful and talking to them about whatever season you're in cross country. I am not going to be at every cross country. Me and I know i'm gona feel judged by the parents working or not working, who are IT every cross country meet 可以， but i'm not.

And so which ones might be important to you trying to understand that from them or knowing for myself? What were these things that were priorities? My middle one did cross country ski race employed on the cross ski race was the priority for him.

That was the important sport. And so I really tried to manage my calendar in a way that I was like, i'm going to be present for those activities and not these other ones. And that's okay because in our parent child, as you say, relationship, I know the priority for her, him is for me to see a ski race yeah, it's not to show up at across country, me.

And so that was really important to understand what is important to them as an adolescent, and then important to my relationship. That was one piece of IT, similar to thinking about back up care, thinking about what will they do? What will they do if they are not a driver and you can pick them up?

Is the school a place where they can stay for a little while? Are they walking distance to library? For example? Are they walking distance to a coffee shop?

What does that look like if there are days where that chaos is going to emerge and you are not going to get there? right? And so thinking through those dynamics, even in your own head, you're not gone to tell them because they are just gonna ll their eyes and be like, why can't you pick me up any time at any employ, right?

You're my mother, you should be able to do that. You're my parent. You should be able to do that.

But knowing in your head what is back up look like in those chaotic moments yeah that look very different. And so some planning can be helpful. Yeah.

well, and I think about what we're about earlier about integrators. I have been the flexible parent part because of the way my job works and verse of the way my partners does. So I think there is some expectation that all I shouldn't just be able to drop everything and show up if need be.

And so that's definitely taken some conversations around like I just can't this is an important meeting or I need the time to focus today. I have on on deadline for an article. Whatever IT is I actually think of those is really good conversations because one is sort of level sets, our relationship and the expectations. But IT also is modeling of negotiating with people in your life, teacher's friends about what you can and can't do. I think those are really important lessons that we don't actively teach adolescence that just coming so handy, especially as they start center at the work world.

right? And one of the things to remember is they're always watching you, all right? And so we always talk about that idea of the moment you, you and your partner go to whisper harper all was having, can hear everything.

What you wishing out in the backroom. And vicarious learning is just as real for adolescence, says that is in the workplace. And so harper, observing how do you make those choices in this moment will influence the choices that they are going to make down the road.

yeah. And so that clip you played about me, ying, you know, my kids are older and i'm feeling more excited and energized, and work was definitively true. I not line in that moment, but that does create some tensions.

And it's important for adolescence to see you enjoy work and you get satisfaction out of that and that you're having an impact through the work you're doing. And so that doesn't mean that you might be making different kinds of choices then if you didn't have work in your life. Yeah, that has really important model .

in imitations down the road. So can we talk your kids are now older. You've made IT through adolescence, but i'm sure there are other issues that come up. Tell me what's ahead and paid me the most realistic picture, the realistic picture.

right? Maybe you'll want to go to the next stage. I don't know. I think one thing we have to start with what's going on, just like we start with what's going on for an anal lesson.

I think we have to start with what's going on for twenty somethings and twenty somethings in our current modern world. Certainly when I was at twenty something, my parents paid absolutely no attention to me. I went off, got a job and no idea what my career was spent to look like.

I could pay my rent and they were kind of like, up you're launched. Yes, that launch process is much delayed for our emerging adults today. The twenty is because of economic situations, political uncertainty, constant changes in the workforce.

In the workplace is still very much a place where there is a need for active parent tiny. Again, we know that from psychology research, that act of parenting extends far into the late twenties, and a way that decades ago IT just didn't. We also know that because of housing costs, which we're talking a lot about these days, one of the repercussions is some of that emerging adult child is spent in your home.

And so active parenting isn't just active parenting on the phone. Active parenting is that in your house. And so current team really does very much continue into those twenties period.

And the chAllenge is they are asking hard, big questions and there's no more certainty of what the next stage of life looks like. So you mentioned before that harper's now starting to think about next face plans. And like many of our are yg adults and analysis harbor sounds like next place plans or college yeah, you finish college and now it's completely instruction.

And that sense of who do I want to be, what I want my career to be like, career is much more uncertain today with many more changes to IT. And how do we start to parent them through these really significant choices around work, around relationships, around lifestyle and when they're making choices that are really different. And so I always say there is a part of me that worries about them far more now than I think I ever worried about them when they were zero to fifteen or eighteen.

And I also want to go back to that similar to you. And I am a fortunate person in the sense that we have economic stability in our house. Our children are fairly mainstream in terms of their educational needs, their their interests and and we have our up and downs.

But we haven't dealt with very significant mental health issues, right? And so perhaps the worries that many other parents have, I didn't have, but they're creating lies for them, and I want them to create independent lives where they are thriving, whatever those choices are. And IT takes a long time to make those choices. Yeah.

I feel I probably warned that there will still be involvement actually had a little bit of preview with us with a friend and colleague reached out, said my daughters doing her first internship and it's a remote internship because of the way the work world works now and i've become her defeat boss because she's in the house, were both working.

If something goes wrong, SHE comes to me, right? And so I keep trying to get her go, to go back to her boss. How do we not become their defect boss when when they started off in the work world?

So the first thing I want to say to your friend is congratulation, right? Because in a certain unit doesn't feel that way, right? Like.

so you're like what like? That's unterrified terrible.

But congratulations because you've established a relationship with this emerging adult that they do want to come to you for advice. They have a choice of whether they're going to come to or not and for whatever reasons you've created. The kind of trusting relationship that they want to come to for not for everything is you know they want to go to other people for different things, but that's pretty an important to recognize and feel good about.

Yeah okay. So then the problem, right, if you don't want to be the boss, you want to be maybe a voice of advice amenti a support remote work has its really unique chAllenges. Around this particular question.

You mentioned a remote work with an early stage career person, right? And there in your home while you're working. So you're kind of in the shared code worker .

space their own.

We work your, we work your own little home, we work environment. And we know actually from research that co working space builds relationships and at boards of advisers and developmental networks. And so there is this natural tendency, because you are in the shared workspace, for anybody to go to another person is just so happens this, anybody is your kid, and you don't want to be the only person in their network.

The other chAllenge of remote work for early career workers is they don't yet have a strong relationship with their boss, and they wanted do a good job, and maybe they worried about getting not return off. And so they're afraid to ask their boss or to tell their boss I don't know something. So as a parent, if you can redirect them, that can be really helpful even if you know the answer yeah right to say he look, I really don't know the answer to that or I don't work in your organization so I don't know how your organization does IT have you asked your boss because asking for help is one of the things that we wanted see people doing.

And I love Wendy morphs work on the idea of a network of developmental relationships. We can't, any of us have one person in our life, our worklife, that we go to for everything. No one is going to be our mentor, our sponsor, our ally.

We need that network of developmental relationships. And so helping your child understand, it's great you come to me for some advice, but who's in your network and starting to help them understand? I need to create that developmental network because down the road, continuing to build developmental networks is going to be helpful for them in their careers here.

So helps them build their own personal board of directors, right? Who is in that cabinet? I feel like I I need to have that conversation without or now, right, like I think even starting early of not just for work questions but life questions, right? Like who do you go to cause you come to me? I'm and give you one perspective and maybe it's helpful, maybe it's not, but you need to have other perspectives.

And I know things I won't understand, the things things I don't know. So I love I love that I do wanted ask A A sort different line of question because I think you and I both have been people who have taken this at least ent moment of parenting and double down on career. But I know of people, and i'm sure many of our listeners are thinking, you know, I got two years left with my kid in my house or I want to take this as an opportunity to scale back so I can be more present for my kid. Any advice for a woman who are in that position?

absolutely. And I got to ask the question because I actually I have a family member who's just made that that choice. So one of the things that I think for us to remember and maybe learned from our Young adults is the career is not linear.

We are still of that generation where we think, oh, I have invested all of this time of my career, and if I step away, even for six months or a year, what does that mean about what I have done about the career I ve built? And I letting down women? Am I letting down the next generation? Am I not modeling what that means to be invest in one's careers? All of those questions come out for you right now.

And I think the generation behind us, we know, is doing caa gradually differently. They don't have the sense of linearity to korea. There are way more absent flows and changes. And taking time out of work to do other things maybe has nothing to do with caretaking traveling and seeing the world and experiment in doing different things in coming back into paid work. And so I think reading yourself up from that idea, if I didn't take any time off when they were little while I doing that now, well, my needs are different.

Now I think one of the things that you need to proactively do is think about when I returned to work, how am I going to prepare myself for going back independent work? So we actually unfortunately know that women who have gaps and their resumes due to care taking um are less likely to be employed than individuals who have gaps for other reasons. So thinking a little bit about if if your real decision is around caretaking, maybe you don't articulate ate that when you return to work, if you have to go into the interview process, if is not your own company, how do I think about meaningful things? I could be engaged during this point.

If your child is a Young adult in high school, well, there is still a period of time they don't need, right? So is there interesting different kinds of hard work you could do during that time? Is there a community engagement passion you could explore? Are there other things that you can do that will build up and continue to use that works that that you have but give you more space?

Yeah I you make me think of a friend who took a SHE called IT a reverse maternity leave, which is he had an only child in his senior year in high school. SHE didn't 听 take work off completely because he said I had time。 I wasn't going to network, but SHE was able to work very part time. And he said, I never took the long eternity leave I wish I had when he was born on doing that. Now.

good for her. yeah. And that's the anything to think about. Can you negotiate something with your employer right back to that idea? Sometimes we think it's still has to be all or nothing, even if doing remote work, even with flexible work, we always think everything has to be full time work.

If this is a brief period time a year, maybe two years, trying to negotiate with your employer as a good start, they may say no for sure yeah, or taking advantage of the good works yeah. Are there ways that you could continue working during that time on a project basis? So IT is becoming more open and flexible about what you're thinking about with regards to work at this moment in time and not being stuck in our old traditional than your career models.

Yeah, I have found this conversation so comforting and validating and inspiring. It's just been so helpful. So thank you.

My pleasure. I always love having conversations with you and you've said an agenda for me as well as I think about going on subtile another year, some things that really we need to Better understand from an evidence space perspective. So thank you for the insights conversation.

Yeah thank you. Again, dana's book has called the maternal optimism, forging positive paths through work and motherhood, SHE wrote with her colleague Jamie large. You can hear both of them in our two thousand nine episode the upside of working motherhood.

Or they give advice about managing expectations, transitions and difficult times. Along with listening to that episode. I recommend reading the series of books that h we are created for working parents. There's a book on managing your career.

Another one on doing IT all as a solo parent, and one on succeedin as a first time parent, I contributed to the one title, communicate Better with everyone, lots of sample language and practical solutions. Throughout all of this women networks editorial and production team is the man to cursy marine hoot AOE mac robber car, air construct ler, ian fox and hand bates. Robin Moore composed the seam music, i'm in the gallow, and you can get in touch with me as well as they may be by e.

Mail and women network at each V, R. Dot work. And thank you di hug, and why you professor an author for suggesting we do this episode and realizing how much I needed that.