How to make home life a success when you’re both high fliers
How do some couples juggle two full-time careers with children – and stay sane? A new book by Christine Armstrong reveals all
‘We never had a conversation where he said, ‘You have to put yourself on hold, it’s all going to be about me and the children.’ It was just a given. I love my children and I’d die for them, but I don’t want to be with them all the time and I don’t want to sacrifice networking and nights out. But he assumes it will always be me that compromises. It kills me. I am ambitious, too…”
So says one exhausted mother in a household where both parents work full time. Her description doesn’t surprise me. When I tried full-time working motherhood with one and then two children, I could just about make it work, but only at the expense of getting enough sleep and my own sense of happiness and wellbeing.
Desperate for answers, I started to interview mothers and fathers who seemed to know how to do it – as well as those watching this play out, teachers, social workers, therapists, GPS and so on. Five years later – my husband Chris having taken the lead parent role while running a business at home, which enabled me to co-found a consultancy that helps people to work flexibly – I’ve written a book with my findings.
I describe working parents like those quoted above as Alpha/ Alpha couples, not because they are aggressive, or loaded, or particularly senior at work, but because they’re both busy with out-of-the-home work roles that have a tendency to dominate their lives. In the last 20 years, one million more mothers have entered the workforce, partly because house prices have quadrupled, meaning most households need both parents to be working full time to earn enough to maintain any semblance of a middle-class life.
But the mismatch between school hours and the expectations of a modern working day that has expanded dramatically, as mobile phones and email make workers constantly on-call, often creates stressed and exhausted parents who are living in separate worlds. For many, working like this is just not working. So the question, then, is: what does?
From interviews with hundreds of parents, what I see is that, while many struggle, the couples who seem to make this situation work most successfully have some things in common (beyond the obvious, like access to adequate childcare).
For one thing, they tend to see the household as one unit, rather than as two individual parents plus however many children they have – and decisions are taken in the context of the whole household’s wellbeing. One mother told me, for example, that they reviewed their – at the time, rational – decision to send three children to different schools, and credits the painful change of heart with making every day smoother.
These families are also much more likely to have conversations about who does what. Some plan the week ahead and allocate roles to avoid fights later.
Even with the most well-balanced couples, things can get very stressful, very quickly. Says one mother: “Oh yes, he is very supportive of my career and me working late, but assumes I will organise everything. He doesn’t get up in the night, he doesn’t put the washing on and appears not to see the mess that he generates. We both have big jobs, but in reality I have two jobs, one of which he doesn’t even seem to see.” Another says that, despite earning more than her partner, she’s still the one who it’s assumed will be home by 5pm for the children.
Stereotypically, it is the woman who ends up doing more and raging about it (although I have interviewed fathers who feel similarly). What it’s important to know is that the men in partnerships that work well, tend to have a high respect for what his partner does.
Erin Reid, an associate professor at Mcmaster University’s Degroote School of Business, explained this recently in a fascinating piece in the Harvard Business Review, based on research into how men view their roles. The article differentiates between men who see themselves as “breadwinners” – who have a traditional view of their responsibility for the household – and those she calls “breadsharers”, who see their wives’ contributions as equally important as theirs.
“Breadsharers sought to remain professionally flexible to maximise their ability to respond to their wives’ career opportunities,” said Reid. “Breadwinners, however, seeing no need to be flexible around their wife’s career, tended to be more committed to achieving [their own] success.” Being married to the latter can be tricky if the woman takes her role just as seriously, and/or the household depends on her income.
Those succeeding at the Alpha/ Alpha relationship are more likely to set boundaries around work: if you let modern workplaces decide your hours you may drown. These couples are more likely to agree proactive measures, like putting phones in a drawer, eating dinner together, and generally finding space to unwind and reconnect with the children.
These couples also take time for their own relationship. One of the hardest things about working full-time with children is that it can leave you like ships in the night. Relationship counsellor Karen Doherty warns that these couples need to put their love before work because affairs often happen when one of them consciously or unconsciously loses their love for the other. As one working mother put it: “All that s--- they say about date night? Yeah, we should have listened to that. Because it made it inevitable that, eventually, one of us would meet someone more exciting than a Scandi-noir.”
All of this is easier said than done, of course; more so, if one or both of you are particularly ambitious. It is perhaps worth bearing in mind the words of a City recruitment consultant: “To get the very senior jobs there are rules, codes and prizes. The deal includes 16-hour days and absolute focus. I see women as well as men at very senior levels who are happy and working very hard – if they have a partnership at home and they feel that running the ‘team’ of their family is a proper joint effort.”
She warns, though, that we shouldn’t be dewy eyed about life at the very top: “I’m not convinced it’s something we all need to aspire to. It has a lot of personal cost and that won’t suit most of us.” Which is one of the reasons I argue that we should hear more from the families trying to make it work within the ranks of work organisations than we do from those already at the pinnacle. I called a couple who have two children – he is in the police, she works in IT – but seem to make it work well, for final thoughts.
He said, “tolerate each other”. She said: “The number one rule is to never have the conversation about whose job is most important. It’s never worth the fall out. Oh… and my main hobby is making sure we never have another one.” And she’s not talking about a new job.
‘We both have big jobs, but in reality I have two jobs, one of which he doesn’t even seem to see’