Day 5: Work-life balance schmalance

I was in graduate school when "work-life balance" entered my vocabulary. I'm sure I'd heard it before, but it wasn't until I was married (and wanting kids sometime in the future) that I paid attention to the phrase. As such, anytime I was on a panel with other female engineers/researchers speaking to a group of young women, the topic of "work-life balance" always came up. We would say things like:

Work-life balance means not having to do it all. It's ok to ask for help.
Work-life balance means having a helpful and supportive significant other.
Work-life balance means working with your schedule so that you have time for xyz.

Sounds easy, right? Sounds doable...

But then I read a series of posts from A Cup Of Jo. She interviewed a few moms, who work full/part-time from home and have young children, about work-life balance. They all seemed to take the last piece of advice above about rearranging their schedule for xyz. Only one mom, I think (I didn't get a chance to read all of them again), mentioned making sacrifices in her life, which brings me to a fairly recent article about the misnomer, "work-life balance".

Believing that work-life balance is possible promotes one thing: self-flagellation...When asked to self-score themselves as parents, on a scale of 1-10, a mere 28% of full-time working moms gave themselves a score of 9 or 10. 41% of part-time working moms gave themselves a 9 or 10 and 43% of at-home moms gave themselves a 9 or 10.

On the path to raising good, decent, law-abiding and respectful children, why do we perpetuate this expectation of parenting perfection instead of accepting good enough -- and being proud of what we do accomplish?

...there are choices and those choices have consequences...Own your choice, accept that on some days it might not be great for your kids...but you might enjoy your career. And in other weeks, your career might be compromised but your children's needs aren't.

Isn't it not surprising that moms who work full-time (outside the home, presumably) ranked themselves lower as parents than stay-at-home moms? It's also a shame because no matter where you work, or what you do, you are the best parent that your child has!

So for all you moms and dads out there, remember that "work-life balance" is a misnomer. You can't give 100% of your time to both work and family -- you only have 100% of your time, right? Like the article says, you're going to have to make sacrifices in one area or another. One area will hurt today and another area will hurt tomorrow, and that's ok, that's normal. So just go out there, and do your best in "work" and "life". Don't compare yourself to other parents. And above all, enjoy yourself 100% of the time!

As a test, rank yourself as a parent below -- anonymously, of course! Hopefully, we're all 9s or 10s!

Rank yourself as a parent
	1, Who's idea was it to let me be a parent?
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	5
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	9
	10, I'm the best parent my child has
pollcode.com free polls

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