Is Mum Guilt Limiting your Career?
Imagine that you have a work trip coming up. It is an exciting opportunity! You know how important your job is, you know how many lives you can touch by fully investing yourself into it. With this trip, you will advance your career and truly make a difference. BUT this also means you’ll spend a few days away from your family. Your spouse already told you they’re more than happy to step up and solely manage the kids and the household in your absence, but still… YOU FEEL GUILTY.
Mum guilt is such a common feeling! Guilt is practically ingrained in motherhood. Yet, this guilt is doing us a disservice, so let’s have a look and see if we can approach work-family clashes differently.
What is guilt?
Guilt is a moral emotion we experience when are conscious that our behaviour did not meet our ethical standards. Guilt is different from shame, although we often put these two emotions into the same box. Guilt stems from a specific action and the belief that our behaviour might have hurt someone else. By contrast, shame implies a condemnation of ourselves. The negative value judgments arising from shame are deeply damaging for our self-esteem (Tangney et al., 2007).
Jean-Anne Sutherland argues that when mothers say they experience guilt, they usually experience both guilt and shame (Sutherland, 2010). If we were to make a strict distinction, taking the example of the mum who has lost her cool (as this for sure happened to all of us), the mum who focuses on the impact of her yelling on her child is experiencing guilt whereas the mum who tells herself she is a terrible mum for yelling at her kid is experiencing shame. And of course, guilt and shame often go hand in hand.
Why is guilt deeply ingrained in motherhood?
In my opinion, most of the guilt we feel as mothers is rooted in the intensive mothering ideology. “Intensive mothering” has been described by Sharon Hays in 1996 as the belief that a mother should be entirely centred on her child. This ideology dictates that mothers should devote all their time, energy and money to their children to the point of sacrificing their own needs. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of intensive mothering is the belief that any deviation to these “perfect mother” standards will have long-lasting negative consequences on the child’s development (Hays, 1996) - and although we perfectly know that’s not true, we end up feeling terrible for any little mistake we make!
Intensive mothering is an unattainable goal, even for stay-at-home-mums. And the myth of intensive mothering is totally incompatible with mothers having their own career. We surely can’t devote ALL our time and energy to our kids if we have to spare some for our job. But most of us still strive to this unrealistic goal, and then we beat ourselves up for falling short. Actually, research has shown that even mothers who consciously rejected intensive mothering standards had subconsciously internalised those ideals and therefore felt guilty for not meeting those parenting expectations (Handerson et al. 2016).
The negative impact of guilt
You might think that guilt is just part of motherhood. Why do we need to get rid of it, we could just accept it after all? While I agree that, as mums, we’re probably never gonna get rid of all those guilty feelings, we still want to work on alleviate them for the simple reason that guilt is bringing us down. Guilt has a massive negative impact on our wellbeing, and it can also push us to give up on our career and dreams.
It has been shown that guilt triggered by the intensive mothering ideology left employed mothers feeling stressed and inadequate (Gunderson). Maternal guilt has also been associated with depression and anxiety (Constantinou et al., 2020). Overall, guilt takes a toll on both our mental and physical health. So can we agree that feeling guilty does not make us better mums?
Moreover, even if our society has become more equalitarian, gender stereotypes dictate that women, but not men, should prioritize their family over their career. As a consequence, when work responsibilities interfere with family responsibilities, mothers are more likely to experience guilt (Aarntzen et al., 2020). To mitigate the guilt, mothers tend to reduce their work hours and skip their own leisure and self-care activities (Aarntzen et al. 2019). That’s how guilt can lead us to abandon our dreams for the sake of our children. If our dreams have changed, that’s certainly fine - our priorities and values do change when we become mothers. The problem is when we think that we HAVE TO give it up, when we’re renouncing to a part of ourselves because it’s the right thing to do (according to society or others’ opinion) and not because we want to. In such circumstances, we’re likely to feel resentful and unfulfilled. And those negative feelings are not gonna help us be better mums!
Liberating ourselves from the guilt
Guilt is not helpful, we know that now. So how do we alleviate this guilt?
Become aware of gender norms and biases. Nowadays, Western societies aspire to gender equality. Yet, most of us hold implicit biases associating women with family and men with career. If you want to test your own unconscious biases, I invite you to take the Harvard IAT gender career test. We want to develop awareness around our own biases because it is those internalised beliefs, rather than the ideology that we stand for, that has been linked to feelings of mum guilt (Aarntzen et al., 2020).
Acknowledge that most societal standards are unrealistic. Intensive motherhood demands sacrifice and devotion to a level that is unattainable. No matter how hard we try, if we hold ourselves to such standards, we’re condemned to fail. More importantly, there is no evidence that intensive motherhood is better for our children. For instance, when the achievements of children from unemployed mothers were compared to those of children from employed mothers, no differences were observed (Goldberg et al., 2008). So no, you’re not gonna mess up your child if you’re not there for them 100% of the time!
Stick to your own values and stop comparing. We can’t do everything perfectly so our values determine what we prioritise. For some of us, having nutritious home-cooked meals every night is essential, for others daily playtime with the kids is a non-negotiable. Some might want to spend an extra hour at work while others would prefer leaving work earlier to exercise. The point is: you can’t do all of those, you have to choose. And choosing means relinquishing the “less important” to you. For instance, if advancing your career is a big priority, you might skip cooking and order a not so healthy take-away meal so you get to work on your promotion… There is no right or wrong here. Only you can decide what is best for you.
Prioritise quality over quantity. The time you have with your children is precious. And for this time to matter, you need to be present with them (not lost in your mind rehearsing your next board meeting). There is no point of spending more time with your family if this is not enjoyable. It’s ok if all you have during weekdays is only 15min at bedtime. Just make it count! Ensure that for those 15min you’re giving your child your undivided attention, that this is your special moment. Remember, your worth as a mother is nor determined by the amount of hours you spend with your kids.
A final note: that might sound cheesy but whatever you’re feeling is ok. A mum once told me that she felt guilty about “not feeling bad” when driving away from daycare after dropping off her kids. This guilt stemmed from all the messaging out there telling us it’s ok to feel sad when leaving our kids at daycare. So yes, it’s ok to feel sad, it’s also ok to feel relieved or overjoyed (because sometimes being able to sit at our desk with a hot coffee is just what we need). Every mum’s experience is different and there is no universal way to be a good mum - you get to choose your own way!