The Price of Parenthood

Actress Emma Thompson recently took a year off of work to spend more time with her 14-year-old daughter, saying “I wanted to spend more time with my family. I highly recommend others to do the same if they can afford it.”

In the interview, Thompson went on to say that juggling parenthood and career isn’t always possible. “Sometimes in life you’ll have some things, at other times you will have other things,” she said in an Daily Mail interview. “You don’t need it all at once, it’s not good for you. Motherhood is a full-time job. The only way I could have continued working would have been by delegating the running of the home to other people. I never wanted to do this as I find motherhood profoundly enjoyable.”

Most of the chatter has been about her statement that mothers should take 12 months off to focus on their children, given that there are few women who could afford financially to not work at all for a year.

What’s not being discussed is whether or not it’s actually good for mother and child to have all that togetherness. Perhaps for Thompson (who, after all, is an actress who must spend weeks or months away from home on a movie set), this was what she needed to reconnect with her daughter. But most of us, we see our children day in and day out—if we took a year off to focus on our children, that would likely create an unhealthy relationship for both mother and kids.

We already spend way more time with our children than the women of the 1960s. A recent Pew Research study found that the amount of time parents spend with their children has continued to go up. Mother’s time with children has increased significantly over the past 50 years. Turns out, those 1960s women had lots more going on in their lives apart from their kids than today’s moms do.

A few years ago, we debated quality time versus quantity time with our kids, but that also misses the point that our kids don’t need us to focus on them much at all. What they do need is to feel secure by our presence in the home and our strong marriages. That’s what is key to healthy, well-adjusted kids—not the amount of time spent with them.

We enjoy spending time with our kids, but we also know that paying too much attention has the tendency to backfire and create attention-seeking monsters, who whine, beg and plead for more and more attention. Ignoring our kids isn’t a bad thing, but one that is essential to their growth. Not being responsible for their playtime, their homework, their lives is what helps kids take responsibility for themselves, to learn to stand on their own, and to stretch and grow.

So don’t fret about not being able to take 12 months off to focus on your child like Emma Thompson did. Instead, focus on developing a healthy life for yourself, one that includes your children, of course, but not one that has the kids at the center.

Until next time,

Sarah