Working Mom Guilt and "Quality over Quantity"

How something that was meant to alleviate my working mom guilt ended up making it way worse (and how I'm recovering).

My oldest child has always been intense. Even if she didn’t have ADHD I think she’d be just an intense, “spirited” kid. Big emotions. Big tantrums.

And honestly, I handled it badly.

I was raised by an extremely hardworking single mom who did everything possible to give our family a good life. She worked multiple jobs but I never remember feeling like we didn’t spend enough time together, or wishing she worked less. I just admired. her work ethic and to this day, working - whether on home stuff or work stuff - really does make me happier.

So I’m not entirely sure why I felt this intense drive to spare my own daughter from the fact that I work, and that means leaving each morning and coming home every night, while she spent the day with her dad (who has been a stay-at-home parent since she was born).

Maybe it’s just because I didn’t expect her to cry SO hard every day that I left in the morning, and for her to persist for literally years, begging me to stay home and not go to work.

I thought, wow, I’m really traumatizing this kid! Of course, my husband would say she immediately stopped crying as soon as I was out of sight, and she was always happy as a clam when I got home. I think now that her separation anxiety went on longer than it needed to because she sensed *my* ambivalence about leaving for work, and missing out on time with her.

I researched whether or not working moms somehow emotionally harmed their kids. I found a lot of articles like this one that said things like:

Building relationships, seizing quality moments of connection, not quantity, Milkie said, is what emerging research is showing to be most important for both parent and child well-being. “The amount of time doesn’t matter, but these little pieces of time do,” she said. Her advice to parents? “Just don’t worry so much about time.”

Of course, I conveniently glossed over bits of advice like this - because yeah yeah yeah I’m stressed out who isn’t, who cares:

“Mothers’ stress, especially when mothers are stressed because of the juggling with work and trying to find time with kids, that may actually be affecting their kids poorly,” said co-author Kei Nomaguchi, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University.

So, I dutifully didn’t worry about the amount of time quite so much, but constantly questioned whether the time I was “quality” enough to offset the amount of time I was working. I engaged with her relentlessly. We read books. I played pretend (and did my best to play the “right way” when my daughter went through the phase where she wanted to demand I follow her script perfectly or would completely melt down). I absolutely despise playing pretend, but gritted my teeth and told myself I needed to for QUALITY. I cleaned the house and did other daily responsibilities only after she was in bed, so I didn’t take away from our “quality time”.

I look back now and see how over-intense I was. How I put her entirely at the center of my life, following her lead out of guilt that my job was harming her. I thought if I didn’t play the way she wanted I was depriving her of some kind of deep connection we were supposed to be making. How could I do housework or, heaven forbid, read a book while she played, when we needed to be spending “quality time” together?

My ADHD comes into play here - it’s actually really challenging for me to spend 1:1 time with someone and really, really pay attention to them. I didn’t start ADHD medication until my daughter was about 5, and I remember the only effect it really seemed to have is that I could really listen to what she was telling me without finding it incredibly hard to pay attention to her fully.

Basically - I was “stressed because of the juggling with work and trying to find [quality] time with kids” and it was affecting her - poorly.

I’m paying the price for it now - and so is she, unfortunately. Lessons my daughter should have learned as a toddler about not bossing people around while playing, accepting that other people play differently, and just generally being more selfless, helpful, and flexible around other people are things she is still learning. We are getting there and her behavior improves every day, but I really wish I had handled those toddler years very differently.

What the heck even is “quality time”?

Photo by Chloe Skinner on Unsplash

I have been reflecting that I don’t remember any adults playing with me when I was a kid. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house while my mom worked, especially in the summers. Neither my grandmother or grandfather ever played with toys with me, pretended with me, or did other kid-centric activities with me. I’m not remotely sad about that, and I never felt lonely as a kid. I am an introvert so perhaps extroverts would feel differently.

My grandmother seemed to do a lot of laundry all day (I’m sure she did other stuff, but I just remember seemingly endless laundry), and then watched Jeopardy and Star Trek while eating a Drumstick ice cream cone.

My grandfather did a lot of grandpa stuff. His hands were always covered in oil or otherwise blackened with dirt from various car repair projects and other DIY work he got up to. He took me out to breakfast with his chain-smoking grandpa buddies, and I colored a restaurant-provided coloring sheet while they talked, mostly ignoring me. My grandmother chewed him out every time we came home from those breakfasts with my hair “smelling like a damn ashtray!”. I have a very clear memory of sitting on my grandpa’s lap “driving” his truck around an empty field while he floored the gas (at least it seemed so to me at the time). He died of cancer when I was 8, so I must have only been 6 or 7 when he let me do that.

He had made me dollhouse and my grandmother liked to buy me Barbies, so I played with those in a dusty area underneath the stairway. I ran around outside by myself, digging in the dirt, picking flowers, eating tomatoes from my grandmother’s tomato plants straight off the vine. When I was old enough I swam by myself in their pool, my grandmother watching me from a window next to the constantly running washing machine. I helped fold laundry and load the dishwasher.

I feel like we spent quite a bit of quality time together, even though my grandparents were just living their lives, doing their normal stuff. I wasn’t neglected, I was just part of the house’s daily ecosystem, with everyone doing what they were interested in. Those were quality experiences - I just wasn’t at the center of them, and no one bent over backward to engage with me.

I’m raising adults - not kids

Photo by Vivek Kumar on Unsplash

My primary mistake was trying to meld my adult self into my daughter’s kid world, rather then melding her into my adult world. As a kid myself, I tagged along with the adults in my life who did what they wanted - or needed - to do. For some reason I felt I had to shield her from my adult responsibilities and be a kid *with* her. Ultimately, that taught her that others should do everything to center and accommodate her, rather than teaching her to go along with the flow of other people’s needs and wants (even if they seemed boring at the time - like tending to laundry endlessly).

I’ve completely changed my approach with my younger child, and he’s so much more independent even at his very young age than my daughter even is now, despite their significant age gap. I clean while he plays, either in the same room or a different room. I don’t intervene when he’s frustrated and help him figure stuff out - he’s really good at figuring things out himself. He loves to sweep the floor and help me pair up socks while folding laundry.

When we play together, it’s low intensity, and I feel free to walk away from the playtime once he gets engrossed in it and kind of forgets I’m there. I don’t need to feel guilty that he’s playing on his own - that’s an important skill that will serve him well in life. If he complains and asks to be picked up, I pick him up, hug him, and then put him back down again and say “I love you! Go play.” And usually, he does.

He’s welcome to follow me around the house while I get things done. I read books I want to read on the floor with him while he builds with his blocks. I’m there, but I’m not all up in his business.

I felt validated in this approach when I listened to an interview with the author of Hunt, Gather Parent: What Ancient Cultures can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans. I haven’t read the entire book myself, but in the interview, she describes the TEAM acronym she uses to remember the lessons she learned while researching the book:

• T: Togetherness

• E: Encouraging vs. Forcing

• A: Autonomy

• M: Minimal Interference

So T is togetherness, and this means doing chores and activities together. So then E, which I think is the hardest one by far, is encouraging versus forcing. So A is autonomy. What it is — it's, yes, it's the right to self-governance to make your own decisions, but you're also constantly connected to the group and you're responsible to the group. So you're wanting to help, you are required to be respectful, and you're required to share with the group. And then finally M is minimal interference. So the idea behind this, it kind of fits with autonomy, but it's like this is not free-range parenting because the parent is always kind of there — or some caretaker, you know, an older sibling, a neighbor, a friend or relative — but they're not interfering with the child's exploration. There's this idea that the child knows what they're doing, but I'm there in case they want to engage with me or they need help.

I am not raising kids to keep being kids forever. I’m raising happy, independent, self-sufficient adults who know they aren’t the center of the universe and that’s OK.

I just wish I had learned that lesson much, much sooner.