As a mother who loves her kids and her career, she points out how there are obvious answers …

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Consistency is often touted as the key to success for content creators and business owners. Consistency can be beautiful. Julia Cameron is a champion of the daily morning pages. Jerry Seinfeld writes material almost every day, never missing m…

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About eight years ago I was at a conference that was mostly a waste of time until the last day when I found myself at a round table with the Patron Saint of Relationship Wisdom,  Dr. Esther Perel. 

I couldn’t tell you what someone like Esther was doing at this awful conference, but I’m thrilled she was because now I get to tell you this story.

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Last week, we explored what it means when women ask women, “So…do you work?”

We geeked out on the devaluation of domestic labor. And asked, “WHY IS THIS QUESTION BEING ASKED?!” Especially from women to women. But also AT ALL!! WHYYYYYYYY.

We have answers and awesome discussions which you can find and join here.

Today, we’re going to d…

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Oh haiiiiiii

here, back with your weekly dose of awesome insurrectionist delight.

[Reminder: I’m Sarah’s Friend, and I took over her Substack last year when she was out recovering from spine surgery.]

This week, I’m pulling a piece from the vault. It’s a piece I wrote in 2022 about what people mean when they ask if you work and why no dudes ever get asked this question.

ALSO, what the heck is supposed to be my answer?

Rhetorical. I have an answer, and I used it on my PCP who asked me if I worked with children when she saw I had the latest flu-de-jour. I said, “Yes, but unpaid.”

She did not laugh so she’s fired now.

Below is the full story of how a simple “just being polite” question turned into a social awakening for me. It is one thing to intellectually understand devaluing domestic labor. It’s another thing to actively participate in the devaluation, while elevating “not working for money” as a low-key status symbol of socioeconomic privilege.

[LOTS TO UNPACK THERE YALL]

I wanna hear your thoughts, but first, read the piece.

- Margo

When Other Women Ask Me “So, Do You Work?”— Here’s What I Need To Say

I remember where I was the first time it happened. We were in someone’s backyard. Our kids were playing together on swing sets and slides. We were engaged in small talk when she said it. I honestly think I froze in disbelief because it was 2021 and the last question I anticipated hearing was:

“So… do you work?”

My face looked like that emoji where your eyes are busting out of your head. The person asking me this was my age. She was my age! Once I got over the initial shock of impropriety, I became curious: What was she actually asking?

The next time someone popped the “do you work” question, I was prepared. This time the woman volunteered that she had three children and did not work herself, which is why she was asking. I looked at her sideways and began my inquisition.

[clears throat]

I asked her who keeps the mental tally of which kids prefer which snacks? Who knows when and where soccer practice is, and who transports the soccer kid to soccer practice? And who is responsible for figuring out what to do with the other two kids while the soccer one is at soccer practice?

I asked her who is aware of when kid #2 needs a new winter coat?

I asked who writes thank you cards, buys presents for birthdays, and keeps up with grandparents.

Who notices that kid #3 is afraid of rain and kid #1 is struggling with reading?

Who schedules doctor’s appointments (and who attends them)? Who RSVPs for playdates? Who notices when food is running low? Who keeps tabs on whether there is clean underwear in the closet and everyone has brushed their teeth?

In my experience, these tasks are rarely shared equitably between partners in homes that maintain a “traditional” structure, where one parent makes money and the other parent manages the domestic sphere. My suspicion was confirmed when this woman answered, “Me. I do all those things.”

“How is that not work?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I mean, it is, but it’s not like I’m going out of the house and making money.”

“I’m not sure what that has to do with work,” I replied.

Devaluing domestic labor is an American cultural relic I naively thought only men did. But this question was coming from women my age with an alarming frequency that had me wondering what exactly was going on.

What do we mean when we ask other women if they are working?

Are women trying to find solidarity or belonging in finding other women who “aren’t working?” Are we asking about that person’s socioeconomic status? (Probably.) Do we think we’re being polite? Or (my personal suspicion) are we still living in a confusing and outdated view of what work is?

The Second Shift—the seminal book by Betty Friedan about all the extra unpaid work that women do in the domestic sphere—was published in 1989. Countless other books have demonstrated domestic labor is labor. Mental labor is labor. Emotional labor is labor. Psychological labor is labor. Relational labor is labor. These types of invisible and unpaid labors are well documented, proven, and acknowledged in the literature. But not, it seems, in the zeitgeist.

Which is a problem thanks to “white feminism,” the breed of feminism that suggested that women “be just like men.” Women have been trapped in this type of “equality” ever since. Instead of accounting for all of the invisible household labor and childcare that women do, women continue to measure their worth by metrics that do not apply to them or the type of work they do.

Domestic labor is labor.

What, I believe, was supposed to happen was we were going to rally for why women should be afforded the choice to pursue their lives as they wish, with the freedom like men to decide whether they will opt into domestic life or not. To be entitled to an education, a vote, rights to property, and the right to work.

But what actually happened— was a complete EFFING DISASTER. They put down what was traditionally women’s work and placed “paid work” (aka: men’s work) on a pedestal.

[ This is not to ignore the ongoing battle between “stay-at-home” moms and “career moms” for first place in the Best Type of Mom Competition. It’s to say that this is why the battle exists in the first place and it’s a profoundly stupid and dangerous battle. ]

While we’re fighting against each other, we are missing the bigger picture.

Paid work was seen as real work. Legitimate work. Fulfilling work. It’s right here in this sentence: Women should be able to do “more” with their lives than “just be a housewife and mother.”

Paid work was seen as real work. Legitimate work. Fulfilling work. It’s right here in this sentence: Women should be able to do “more” with their lives than “just be a housewife and mother.”

Therein lies the problem.

Whether you choose domestic labor or opt out of it, you are certainly not better than it. What white feminism failed to do that it should have was elevate the domestic sphere. In trying to “prove” women can “do anything men can do,” white feminism inadvertently promoted the very ideas it sought to dismantle.

In trying to “prove” women can “do anything men can do,” white feminism inadvertently promoted the very ideas it sought to dismantle.

There are very rarely people who don’t work. But there are an enormous number of us who aren’t paid for our work.

We see this effect in action today when we boast of girls who are into Legos and schools that have STEM programs. It is ok for “girls to be into boy things,” but it is not ok for boys to be into “girl things.” The second anyone socialized as a (cis het) boy begins to love musicals or wants to play with a kitchen set, we are “worried” about him. Boys are supposed to enjoy toys that are violent, traditional, and masculine—things like cars, trucks, guns, alligators, rocket ships, trains, and dinosaurs. They are NOT to debase themselves with things like dolls, unicorns, cooking, or cleaning.

This is not equity.

This is a division by sexes, with one sphere on a pedestal.

Until our children are shown that cooking, cleaning, and caregiving are on par with economic work, and respected as much, we are not fixing this problem. Boys who are not allowed to play house or with babies and dolls, grow up to be a parent who doesn’t either.

A boy who is mocked for cooking and cleaning grows up to be an adult who treats these things with contempt.

We cannot move forward if we continue to devalue what is traditionally considered women’s work and insist it is not work but “a labor of love” that a “good mother” does willingly and voluntarily, as penance for “being supported by my husband.”

That isn’t a partnership. That is extortion.

Even if you love what you do, and you feel fulfilled by it, it does not mean it should be invisible or free.

In 1870, the United States decided to shift our census from households to individuals. As part of this change, alongside the movement of men to work in industrialized factories, men’s (but not women’s) work was now tallied and accounted for—making the family’s money now his money alone. By 1900, women and children were newly classified as “dependents.”

When the system of GDP was created, the men in charge debated including women’s labor and work. They determined it was “too hard” to account for the work of the home, and purposefully excluded it from our economic tally. As a result, virtually all of women’s work was dismissed as irrelevant and made invisible [See: Ann Crittenden’s work and every other historian on this topic].

The primary units of our economy are skilled, productive workers—precisely the things that caretaking creates, because children become these skilled workers when parents bring them into society. As it stands, women create the backbone of the economy, raise them, perform labor for decades, and are never compensated.

To reiterate: our GDP is a made-up number to estimate how much we work as a nation. From the beginning, we willingly ignored the work of the home and of raising children. This was not an accident or an oversight. For more on this, read the incredible book by Ann Crittenden: The Price of Motherhood.

Saying “I don’t work,” isn’t accurate. It’s a form of cultural gaslighting.

Until we treat domestic labor with the same reverence as we do “real work” we will remain in this cultural culture-de-sac we inherited from our predecessors. For as long as we believe mental, emotional, relational, familial, and psychological work is not “real work,” we will continue to perpetuate the very status quo we seek to dismantle.

Until we treat domestic labor with the same reverence as we do “real work” we will remain in this cultural culture-de-sac we inherited from our predecessors.

So, to the next person who asks you if you work - please hand them this essay. Remind them that there are very rarely people who don’t work.

But there are an enormous number of us who aren’t paid for doing our work.

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This piece was originally published on Startup Parent.

For more cultural diatribes from , head to www.thatseemsimportant.com and get on her email list.

Or so the theory goes.

For too long, this theory has been used to support the idea that their are “natural” gender roles and clear divisions of labor between men and women.

But what if that theory is completely wrong?

Nurith Aizenman wrote about the fallacy of the hunter-gatherer gender assumptions for NPR this week. It turns out that the widespread belief that men were predominantly hunting and women were mostly gathering was only studied through observational and anecdotal impressions. That is, scientists made conclusions based on what they saw without actually collecting hard data.

They didn’t actually count how many men and women were hunting.

In new research published in the journal PLOS One on June 28, 2023, a team from the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University challenges the long-held belief that early humans had a division of labor with men as hunters and women as gatherers.

The study, led by biological anthropologist Cara Wall-Scheffler, reexamines ethnographic accounts from various hunter-gatherer societies by doing a systematic tally of what the observational reports share about women hunting.

Turns out, women were hunting all the time—scientists just didn’t account for it.

Their findings — published in the journal PLOS One this week — is that in 79% of the societies for which there is data, women were hunting.

Previous assumptions about gender roles in early human societies were largely based on anecdotal impressions and personal fieldwork. Wall-Scheffler and her team sought to go back to the original ethnographic reports to assess the evidence for women's involvement in hunting.

Not only were women hunting, they were often hunting with their own tools. They were training their girls to make tools and to hunt.

“Grandmas were the best hunters of the village.”

One of the problems with scientific studies can be the bias that people hold going into any kind of researcher. For decades, the idea that men are the “natural breadwinners,” and are more violent and aggressive has led to many in science to see only men as hunters.

In one example, a team in Peru “found a 9,000-year-old person buried with an unusually large number of hunting tools.”

"We all just assumed this individual was a male," [Randy Haas, an antrhopologist at Wagne State University] recalls. "Everybody is sitting around, saying things like, 'Wow! This is amazing. He must have been a great hunter, a great warrior. Maybe he was a chief!'"

Haas didn't even think to question the person's gender until about a week later, when a colleague who specialized in analyzing bone structure arrived and delivered a bombshell assessment: The remains seemed to be female.

The team then used a technology newly available to the field. Scraping the enamel from the teeth found in the grave, they found proteins that confirmed it unequivocally: This apparent master hunter was female.”

These findings have significant implications, particularly in challenging gender stereotypes and societal norms.

The belief that men are natural hunters and women are natural gatherers has been used to influenced policies that prioritize men as breadwinners and limit their involvement in caregiving responsibilities (by denying them paternity leave, for example), while also imposing traditional motherhood roles on women.

There are likely lots of subtle and nuanced differences between genders, and much left to be studied. The troubling implications of this research—and our widespread default beliefs about gender—often get reinforced by those at the top of the food chain [pun intended]: when the majority of researchers are from one gender, there is a tremendous amount that might be missed.

It’s too easy to be blind to the existing cultural assumptions and find the results that you’re unconsciously looking for, rather than seeing what’s actually in front of you.

Better go back and check again.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

1. The entire article on NPR: Men are hunters, women are gatherers. That was the assumption. A new study upends it. July 1, 2023

2. The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. June 28, 2023

In late 2022, President Biden signed the Pregnant Workers Fairness At (PWFA), which will go into effect this month. It is a new law that requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to people when it comes to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medication conditions.

“The PWFA is a federal law that requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers, unless doing so would cause an undue hardship. The law applies to all employers with 15 or more employees. It covers all aspects of employment, including hiring, firing, promotions, and pay.” — Winnie

If you believe your employer is failing to provide reasonable accommodations, know that you can file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Read below to find out what’s covered by PWFA.

What is the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act?

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) is a United States federal law designed to protect you and allow you to get additional support for doing your job while pregnant, recovering from childbirth, or other related medical conditions.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) is a new law that requires covered employers to provide “reasonable accommodations” to a worker’s known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless the accommodation will cause the employer an “undue hardship.” — U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Here’s a closer look at each of the terms:

• Covered employees mean all private and public sector employers with at least 15 employees; as well as Congress, Federal agencies, employment agencies and labor organizations.

• Reasonable accommodations are anything that supports a worker’s known limitations related to pregnancy, defined as “changes to the work environment or the way things are usually done at work,” as long as it does not cause the employer an “undue hardship.”

• An “undue hardship” is when an accommodation would result in “significant difficulty or expense for the employer.”

What are some examples of reasonable accommodations?

If you need to adjust your work environment in order to do your job while pregnant, you should be able to do so. This includes changes to the way things are usually done at work. The House Committee on Education and Labor Report on the PWFA details examples:

“The ability to sit or drink water; receive closer parking; have flexible hours; receive appropriately sized uniforms and safety apparel; receive additional break time to use the bathroom, eat, and rest; take leave or time off to recover from childbirth; and be excused from strenuous activities and/or activities that involve exposure to compounds not safe for pregnancy.” — U.S. EEOC

In order to be a reasonable accommodation, “the change must be necessary for the pregnant worker to perform her job duties. It must also be effective in mitigating the effects of her pregnancy-related limitations,” according to a post from Winnie, a childcare marketplace.

Here are some additional examples of reasonable accommodations:

• Adjusting work schedules; allowing flex work.

• Reduced lifting and physical or manual labor.

• Acquiring accessible equipment.

• Providing lactation spaces and breastmilk storage.

• Allowing for additional breaks.

What your employer is not allowed to do:

In addition, if you are a covered employee (15+ workers), the PWFA prevents employers from deciding what accommodations you need without discussing it with you; they cannot deny you a job or employment for needing an accommodation; they cannot require you to take leave; and they cannot retaliate against you.

Here is the language from EEOC website:

“Covered employers cannot

• Require an employee to accept an accommodation without a discussion about the accommodation between the worker and the employer;

• Deny a job or other employment opportunities to a qualified employee or applicant based on the person's need for a reasonable accommodation;

• Require an employee to take leave if another reasonable accommodation can be provided that would let the employee keep working;

• Retaliate against an individual for reporting or opposing unlawful discrimination under the PWFA or participating in a PWFA proceeding (such as an investigation); or

• Interfere with any individual’s rights under the PWFA.”

How to file a complaint against your employer

You can file a complaint if your employer doesn’t provide reasonable accommodations for you. If you're pregnant and your employer is unhelpful, you can file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC is a federal agency that enforces laws prohibiting employment discrimination. Your employer is also prohibited from retaliation.

Plus, there are several more protections for parents & pregnant workers. While PWFA is a new law, there are several laws that provide additional coverage. These laws include two that are also enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and two that are regulated by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Protections from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC):

• Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects against pregnancy discrimination and sex discrimination. This includes discrimination based on past pregnancy, potential pregnancy, medical conditions related to pregnancy and childbirth, breastfeeding and lactation, having OR choosing not to have an abortion, and birth control/contraception.

• The Americans with Disabilities Act, also known as ADA. This is a more general law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. What’s not as well known is that disabilities related to pregnancy—like pregnancy diabetes—can qualify as a disability under the ADA. The ADA also requires all medical records and information about employees to be kept separate and confidential.

Protections from the U.S. Department of Labor:

You are covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (enforced by the U.S. Department of Labor). From the website: “The FMLA entitles eligible employees of covered employers to take unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons with continuation of group health insurance coverage under the same terms and conditions as if the employee had not taken leave. Eligible employees are entitled to twelve workweeks of leave in a 12-month period for:

• The birth of a child and to care for the newborn child within one year of birth;

• The placement with the employee of a child for adoption or foster care and to care for the newly placed child within one year of placement;

• To care for the employee’s spouse, child, or parent who has a serious health condition;

• A serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform the essential functions of his or her job;

• Any qualifying exigency arising out of the fact that the employee’s spouse, son, daughter, or parent is a covered military member on “covered active duty;” or

• Twenty-six work weeks of leave during a single 12-month period to care for a covered servicemember with a serious injury or illness if the eligible employee is the servicemember’s spouse, son, daughter, parent, or next of kin (military caregiver leave).

The PUMP Act (also enforced by the U.S. Department of Labor). From the website: “The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires employers to provide reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for their nursing child for one year after the child's birth each time such employee has need to express the milk. Employees are entitled to a place to pump at work, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public.”

Additional resources and support:

I follow Daphne Delvaux, Esq. on Instagram as @themamattorney and on Substack here: to watch how fierce some lawyers can be about demanding that these laws be upheld. If you have additional resources, please leave them in the comments as well and I’ll add to this list.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

“That’s not fair,” he said.

“What is it, sweetie?” I asked.

“How come there are bathrooms for boys and girls, but there are no bathrooms for people who are both or neither?”

He sees it. He gets it. And he made it simple to understand and talk about.

Sometimes the grown-ups are the ones making this harder than it needs to be.

This belief is deeply-rooted in internal systems, too. I hear mothers that say “As a working parent, I feel like I’m never around,” and “Oh, I don’t want to have someone else raise my kids,” or “My kid has the rest of her life to be in school, shouldn’t they they spend more time playing at home?”

There are so many mothers made to feel guilty for getting basic childcare support.

I’m going to skip past the problematic roots of these statements (I’ll rant more on that later), and instead start with something that I love, and that’s math.

Math? Yes. Stay with me. In this piece we’ll look at three components of a parent’s life that don’t add up:

1. The actual week itself

2. The length of a weekend, and

3. The reality of school schedules.

Let’s do some parenting math.

There are 168 hours in a week.

If I put my kid in daycare or any other form of childcare from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on weekdays, they’re in childcare forty hours a week.

We’re going to use 40 hours as a baseline for most of the following scenarios, but swap in your scenario, whether it’s sixty hours or twenty hours.

However many hours you’ve signed up for childcare support—I’m going to use 40—the first thing to remember is that this number only happens on a mythical perfect week.

These forty hours happen only if (iff or ↔ for my math geeks) childcare is open every single day of every week of the year. PSA to anyone thinking of having kids: daycares are not open every weekday, for some centers it’s not even close—get the school calendar when you tour new spaces. You’ll get 40 hours of coverage only on weeks when they don’t close early, and only during weeks when the kid is not sick.

Given the fact that kids catch every cold known to humans (and then some), they’re probably in daycare an average of 30 hours a week, practically speaking. This accounts for the weeks when you get zero hours of coverage because your kid is home for five days straight for the flu, or hand-foot-mouth disease, or norovirus, or any other germ. (The frustrating part of this is that it’s not terribly avoidable—it’s either preschool or school, but living in society as it is today comes with a lot of germs.)

But let’s go with the perfect number—40 hours of childcare—to start. Even in the perfect world where they attend every single hard-earned day of beloved forty-plus hours of childcare support, there are still one hundred and twenty-three hours remaining in the week.

If my kids go to childcare 40 hours a week, that means I’m still with my children 128 hours of the week.

This is the math that doesn’t add up. For all the shame and guilt parents (mostly mothers) are given about not spending time with their kids, there are plenty of hours in the week that they are caring for kids. A whopping hundred hours every week, to be specific. Adjust this number as you need if you’re pulling longer work hours or if you’re using less coverage to fit your life.

“But Sarah, they spend most of that time sleeping—that doesn’t count as quality time,” some parents might object.

Sure, a lot of that time is for sleeping. Let’s say the kid sleeps 11 hours a night (oh what a gift, kid, if you sleep 11 straight hours for me). That’s 77 hours of sleep time. If we somehow don’t “count” the sleep hours as time with our kids—then even subtracting sleep time, there are still 51 hours a week with your child while they are awake (168-40-77=51).

But why isn’t sleep quality time? You don’t leave your kid when they’re sleeping. It’s not like you put the kids to bed and suddenly you get to jet off to Las Vegas and frolic around unfettered for eleven hours and then pop back in at the moment they’re going to wake up. This is not “free time” by any stretch of the imagination.

This also assumes that any parenting dealing with night wakings, nighttime nursing, potty training, bad dreams, cuddles, or sickness in the night doesn’t count that as quality time being there for your kiddo. In my book, having the security of someone around at night is a big deal. Who else is responding when the monsters come?

In fact, you have multiple jobs to do during those night hours: your job is also to figure out how to get the grown-ups enough sleep while providing space for your kids to get sleep and comfort, too. That’s a lot of work.

If I was a lawyer and I told you I worked 123 hours a week, you’d be flat-out impressed. You might even tell me I work too much.

But PARENTS? We tell parents that no matter how much time they dedicate, they’re not spending enough time with their kids.

Despite the fact that we live in a country with zero support for having children, despite the fact that parents, majority mothers, are staying home 120+ hours a week holed up with their children, despite the fact that most social programs like community childcare and library services disappeared in the pandemic, despite the fact that motherhood is one of “the hardest jobs in the world,” (another cliche that’s used as a cultural excuse to turn a blind eye to the enormous amounts of work done by parents), we still tell parents they should want to stay home with their children 24/7.

If a mother dares to get any form of structural childcare support—especially if she makes it visible, or speaks of said childcare—we tell her it’s basically a personal failure of a lack of love and dedication to her children.

By “zero support,” all I mean is that this country offers no universal paid leave, that most women return to work still bleeding, and that there are no government-supported childcare options until kid turn five—think of old Uncle Sam tossing you a kid and cackling, “you’re on your own, kid, until you turn five and we finally recognize you, but not your parent, as an actual person!”

A brief rant on zero support, aka, the dollars and cents of motherhood.

Let’s look a little more closely at the lack of social support and what it costs parents, mothers specifically. Ann Crittenden’s book The Price Of Motherhood lays much of this out, but when women become mothers in a society that offers zero support, it also costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars in many different ways.

In addition to the immediate failures of what’s known as “caretaking infrastructure,” or basic social support for bringing new people into our society during the acute periods of birth, death, and sickness, there are also the massive economic losses that women suffer by becoming parents.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

1. Pregnant people who get discriminated against and fired for being pregnant, resulting in lost immediate wages and income from lost jobs,

2. Mothers who are penalized for having kids both in being rejected during the hiring process and refused promotions at work (while some fathers get a “fatherhood bonus,” for the same children),

3. The massive wage gap between working moms and working dads—the majority of the gender pay gap is actually in large part between women who have kids and women who don’t have kids, resulting in an average of $17,000 in lost wages for mothers every year. This is way worse for Black moms, non-white mothers, and single mothers. (Fatherhood can actually boost men’s earnings, by comparison.)

4. Mothers who then suffer long-term career losses for “taking time away from work,” to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost career earnings in a lifetime. When a woman has one child, her lifetime earnings are 28% less than childfree women; each additional child reduces lifetime earnings by another 3%.

5. Plus, none of the statements above consider the costs incurred for actually supporting the children.

6. Then, to rub salt in the wound, there are more older women are in poverty precisely because they don’t get to accrue social security points when they’re home parenting because “they’re not working,” and so those years are docked from our system of support for old age—only people who do “real work” will receive benefits from the government in the narrowest eyes of economists. Women who have one child receive 16 percent less in social security benefits (with the exception of those eligible for the social security spousal benefit, which women are much less likely to receive today).

We can go deeper into this, but when our culture says that you should “stay at home with your kids,” because it’s “what’s best for everyone,” because it’s what “superhero moms” do—but you live in a country with zero support for working mothers, it’s important to know all of the costs involved.

This country benefits from having mothers at home, unpaid, profiting off of your free parental labor—and then it’s actually going to deduct benefits from you in the future, too. You won’t get basic government support systems that are readily available in every other wealthy country in the world, you’ll lose jobs and money, and it’ll dock your social security benefits in old age.

This is why telling parents they should “just spend more time with their kids” and “not miss milestones,” and “savor it while it lasts,” is so deeply problematic.

When parents work 100+ hour weeks, people turn around and tell them that they’re not spending enough time with their kids.

The culture we’re swimming in likes to tell parents that they’re not dedicated enough. That you should be sure to stay home with your kids if you have them. That you shouldn’t have had kids if you were going to just “leave them with someone else.” That working—if you’re a mom—is selfish.

We tell parents that leaving them in daycare is BAD. (Great daycares can be wonderful, finding great daycares can be incredibly hard.) We load mothers up with guilt and shame by telling them they’re bad moms for wanting to do anything else within the 168 hours of the week. The bad mom trope is a tool used to keep mothers in line.

Now, if you’re a parent that stays home with your kids and you love it, and you chose it, and you have a set-up that works for you (there are so many amazing at-home parents that take their kiddos to music class and library sessions and out to the playgrounds and the parks), I want to make sure to say under no uncertain terms that you are a wonderful parent.

This is not an essay to shame at-home parents. You’re doing an extraordinary job, you work your buns off, and I happen to think that you should be recognized, celebrated, and paid for the work that you do. The math applies to everyone who has kids and caretaking duties: the week has a LOT of hours in it, and you deserve support, rest, and time off just like anyone else. We are on the same team.

In fact, if you’re an at-home parent and you feel like no one sees how much work you do, and you feel like you need more help from a spouse or friends or babysitters, I hope this essay supports you in making the case for taking a break on the weekend and in the evenings if you’re able to.

{To listen to Kathleen Shannon and I talk about how much we love daycare, and how important it is for our mental health and wellbeing, listen to Episode #051 of the Startup Parent Podcast.}

Getting childcare support and taking breaks are reasonable requests in the face of an enormous job.

To all the moms out there patching together work in between naps and half-time childcare and partial babysitters because people are “should-ing” all over you about being home with your kids, if you are miserable and exhausted and in need of time for yourself, that is a reasonable ask.

It is not unreasonable to need a break if you’re doing 128 hours of parenting and 40 hours of working in any given week. Any other job, we’d call this a human rights violation.

But for mothers, we gloss over it by tossing words like “superhero” over to her as a consolation prize, reminding her that motherhood should only ever be a labor of love, warping our stories around motherhood to describe it as not labor at all, and then telling women that they don’t deserve recognition or support because “um, actually you chose this.”

[Nevermind the fact that 30% of pregnancies are unplanned, or that abortion rights are being stripped away from people so fast that the number of people who don’t want to be parents and have to be is about to skyrocket. Read Abortion, Every Day by Jessica Valenti for news on abortion rights and access.]

I want to write this on t-shirts and post a sign outside my office that reads:

I WILL CLAW MY HANDS TO 40 HOURS OF SUPPORT EACH WEEK OF MY CHILDREN’S LIFE AND I WILL LOVE THEM EVEN MORE BECAUSE OF IT.

Okay. What’s the next math problem?

The next math puzzle: that thing we call the weekend

Do you know how many hours are in a weekend?

From five o’clock on Friday afternoon until 9 o’clock on Monday morning there are 64 hours in between. That is sixty-four intense hours of parental work and house work and minivan driving and nap coaxing for any parent with small children. Multiple small children increases the complexity level of the game.

There are 64 hours in a weekend.

Any job that’s 64 hours would also be seen as an achievement in our productivity-oriented culture. But not parenting.

When I put this together, it became abundantly clear to me personally that I would need three to six hours of babysitting and alone time on the weekend to not be a complete disaster come Monday morning. I need these hours to take a brief break in the form of a walk, to throw some heavy weights around at the gym, and to slowly re-assemble my brain so that I can hang on to my own sense of self.

These weekend support hours don’t spontaneously arise. This is also where parenting gets really personal and individual. As someone who interviews parents for a living and builds community for working parents, I know how different the lives of families can be.

Some folks have kids that nap for four hours on the weekends until they are seven years old (BLESS THOSE KIDS), some people have youthful grandparents with a spring in their step that happen to live around the corner and take the children for weekly overnights (These unicorn grandparents do exist, I’ve heard!), and some folks have set up systems where they share housing with other single parents to help lessen the demand load of individual parenting.

Other parents have kids that may require more hands-on support. They may have special needs, they may have a spicier personality, they may be going through a challenging growth phase, and so much more. I know parents who have immunocompromised kids who can’t use germ-filled daycares, I know single moms, military moms, and parents who have lost their own parents struggle deeply with the weight of the work in front of them.

“I remember the first work meetings at our all-hands after we had kids,” one dad told me. “Everyone asked how the weekend went, and people talked about going on ski trips, reading books, working on building a house, and I tried my best to keep my face neutral. They had no idea what I’d been through the last 64 hours.”

When someone tells you that their day job is the easiest part of their lives, that’s saying something. Parents, you work a 64-hour job from the end of Friday to early morning Monday. That’s why it can feel like a relief to go back to work on Monday.

Alright, the last math puzzle: school math.

“When the kids go to school, I’ll finally be able to get some work done.” It sounds like a such a dreamy time, right?

There are 365 days in a year.

For any given school, there are approximately 180 school days in the calendar year. That means that there are 185 days when they are not in school.

Now, this isn’t quite the right math—we need to break it down by weekends and weekdays. In a calendar year with 365 days, approximately 260 of them are weekdays. Since school days land on weekdays, the difference is how many weekdays are not covered by school (260-180=80).

That leaves eighty (80!) weekdays when the kids just don’t go to school.

Because not only is school only part of the year, the days are not structured anything like a typical workday. School ends between 2pm-3:30pm most days, and then it also comes with half days (where your kids are sent home early, around 12pm).

In addition, there are super-early dismissals, late starts, and parent-teacher conference days. Just the other week, our kids had school from 8:30am-10:45am. The school day was over at 10:45am. This doesn’t include days missed for snow or rain or illness, either.

180 days of school is wonderful, but it does not line up with the American expectations of work in any way.

Here’s the takeaway:

• There are 168 hours in a week. Using 40-50 of them for childcare is a reasonable baseline, especially given the likelihood that you’re going to have 120+ hours of parenting work ahead of you each week.

• There are 64 hours in a parenting weekend. From Friday night to Monday morning is more than most full-time jobs. If you need support on the weekend, congratulations, you’re just like us.

• There are only 180 days of school in any calendar year. That includes half days.

Why do I bring all of this up?

The other day I was talking to a parent that was waxing nostalgic about how little time they’d have with their kid when they went to school. In my personal opinion (and everyone’s allowed to have a different opinion, you do you) there is actually plenty of time with the kiddos, it’s about how you spend the time. Moreover, it’s about not shaming parents for needing basic time off, and it’s about not buying into the massive guilt trip shoved on the shoulders of working mothers.

It’s not about reducing the number of days they’re in school or the number of hours in childcare. It’s about recognizing that the hours of school and daycare are actually severely limited, and the idea that sending them to after-care or childcare somehow makes you a bad parent is frankly ridiculous. In my experience, increasing my quality time is more important than increasing the quantity of time.

So when someone tells you that you’ll miss this time, or that you’re a “bad” parent for putting your kid in daycare, or they don’t understand why your kids keeping being out of school, send them this essay.

Getting full-time coverage (which is only 40 hours) for your children in a 168-hour week can be an immense challenge as it is. Explaining to people that you’ve started working 168 hours a week can feel impossible.

In spite of this, we gaslight parents and tell them that wanting work hours or personal time is “bad parenting” with the underlying assumption that if you wanted to have kids, you should devote all hours of all days exclusively to parenting. Telling people they should feel guilty for getting barebones support is just plain mean. We do this mostly to moms, if we’re being honest.

If you feel like you’re struggling and you need more childcare, you probably do.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

I remember exactly where I was the first time it happened. We were in someone’s backyard. A bunch of kids were playing together on the swing sets and sliding raucously down a slide. We were engaged in banal small talk when she said it. I honestly think I froze in disbelief because it was 2021 and the last question I anticipated hearing was:

“So… do you work?”

My face looked like that emoji where your eyes are busting out of your head. The person asking me this was my age. She was my age! Once I got over the initial shock of impropriety, I became curious: What was she actually asking?

The next time someone popped the “do you work” question, I was prepared. This time the woman volunteered that she had three children and did not work herself, which is why she was asking. I looked at her sideways and began my inquisition.

I asked her:

Who keeps the mental tally of which kids prefer which snacks? I asked who knows when and where soccer practice is, and who transports the soccer kid to soccer practice? And who is responsible for figuring out what to do with the other two kids while the soccer one is at soccer practice? I asked who is aware of when kid #2 needs a new winter coat? I asked who writes thank you cards, buys presents for birthdays, and keeps up with grandparents? Who notices that kid #3 is afraid of rain and kid #1 is struggling with reading? Who schedules doctors appointments (and who attends them)? Who RSVPs for playdates? Who notices when food is running low? Who keeps tabs on whether there is clean underwear in the closet and everyone has brushed their teeth?

In my experience, these tasks are rarely shared equitably between partners in homes that maintain a “traditional” structure, where one parent makes money and the other parent manages the domestic sphere. My suspicion was confirmed when this woman answered, “Me. I do all those things.”

“How is that not work?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I mean, it is, but it’s not like I’m going out of the house and making money.”

“I’m not sure what that has to do with work,” I replied.

Devaluing domestic labor is an American cultural relic I naively thought only men did. But this question was coming from women my age with an alarming frequency that had me wondering what exactly was going on.

What do we mean to ask when we ask other women if they are working?

What do we mean to ask when we ask whether or not women are working? Are women (like my new friend implied) looking for belonging and solidarity and trying to find other women who “aren’t working”? Do we seek to confirm a suspicion about that person’s socioeconomic status? (Probably.) Do we think we’re being polite? Or (my personal suspicion) are we still living in a confusing and outdated view of what work is?

The Second Shift — the seminal book by Betty Friedan about all the extra unpaid work that women do in the domestic sphere —was published in 1989. Countless other books have demonstrated domestic labor is labor. Mental labor is labor. Emotional labor is labor. Psychological labor is labor. Relational labor is labor. These types of invisible and unpaid labors are well documented, proven, and acknowledged in the literature. But not, it seems, in the zeitgeist.

Which is a problem I blame what is now known as “white feminism,” because it was the breed of feminism that suggested that women “be just like men.” Women have been trapped in this type of “equality” ever since. Instead of accounting for and daylighting all of the invisible household labor and childcare that women do, women continue to measure their self-worth and value on metrics that do not apply to them or the type of work they historically did and still do.

Domestic labor is labor.

What I believe was supposed to happen was that we were going to rally for why women should be afforded the choice to pursue her life as she wishes, with the freedom like men to decide whether she will opt-into domestic life or not. To be entitled to an education, a vote, rights to property, and the right to work. But what actually happened—and the way this transpired—was a complete EFFING DISASTER. They put down what was traditionally women’s work and placed “paid-work” (aka: men’s work) on a pedestal.

This is not to ignore the ongoing battle between “stay at home” moms and “career moms” for first place in the Best Type of Mom Competition. It’s to say that this is why the battle exists in the first place and it’s a profoundly stupid and dangerous battle.

While we’re fighting against each other, we’re not actually seeing the bigger picture.

Paid work was seen as real work. Legitimate work. Fulfilling work. It’s right here in this sentence: Women should be able to do “more” with their lives than “just be a housewife and mother.”

Therein lies the problem.

Whether you choose domestic labor or opt-out of it, you are certainly not better than it. What white feminism failed to do that it should have was elevate the domestic sphere. In trying to “prove” women can “do anything men can do,” white feminism inadvertently promoted the very ideas it sought to dismantle.

There are very rarely people who don’t work. But there are an enormous number of people who aren’t paid for doing work.

We see this effect in action today when we boast of girls who are into legos and schools that have STEM programs. It’s ok for “girls to be into boy things,” but boys cannot be into “girl things.” The second anyone socialized as a boy (cis or trans) loves musicals or wants to play with a kitchen set, we are “worried” about him. Boys are supposed to enjoy toys that are violent, traditional, and masculine—things like cars, trucks, guns, alligators, rocket ships, trains, and dinosaurs. They are NOT to debase themselves with things like dolls, unicorns, cooking, or cleaning.

This is not equity. This is a division by sexes, with one sphere on a pedestal. Until our children are shown that cooking, cleaning, and caregiving are on par with economic work, and respected as much, we’re not fixing this problem. Because any boy who isn’t allowed to play house or babies grows up to be a parent who doesn’t either. A boy who is mocked for cooking and cleaning grows up to be an adult who treats these things with contempt.

We cannot move forward if we continue to devalue what is traditionally considered women’s work and insist it is not work but “a labor of love” that a “good mother” does willingly and voluntarily, as penance for “being supported by my husband.”

We cannot move forward if we continue to devalue what is traditionally considered women’s work and insist it is not work but “a labor of love” that a “good mother” does willingly and voluntarily, as penance for “being supported by my husband.” That isn’t a partnership. That is extortion. This is the free labor of women to support the roles of men, full stop. Even if you love what you do, and you feel fulfilled by it, it doesn’t mean it should be invisible or free.

In 1870, the United States decided to shift our census from households to individuals. As part of this change, alongside the movement of men to work in industrialized factories, men’s (but not women’s) work was now tallied and accounted for—making the family’s money now his money alone. By 1900, women and children were newly classified as “dependents.” And when the system of GDP was created, the men in charge debated including women’s labor and work. They determined it was “too hard” to account for the work of the home, and purposefully excluded it from our economic tally. As a result, virtually all of women’s work was dismissed as irrelevant and made invisible.

“Wives are the only workers in the economy expected to work for no remuneration.” — Ann Crittenden

The primary units of our economy are skilled, productive workers—precisely the things that caretaking creates, because children become these skilled workers when parents bring them into society. As it stands, women create the backbone of the economy, raise them, perform labor for decades, and are never compensated.

To reiterate: our GDP is a made up number to estimate how much we work as a nation. From the beginning, we willingly ignored the work of the home and of raising children. This was not an accident or an oversight. For more on this, read the incredible book by Ann Crittenden: The Price of Motherhood.

Saying “I don’t work,” isn’t accurate. It’s a form of cultural gaslighting.

Until we treat domestic labor with the same reverence as we do “real work” we will remain in this cultural culture-de-sac we inherited from our predecessors. For as long as we believe mental, emotional, relational, familial, and psychological work is not “real work,” we will continue to perpetuate the very status quo we seek to dismantle.

So, to the next person who asks you, “So… do you work?” please hand them this essay. Remind them that there are very rarely people who don’t work. But there are an enormous number of people who aren’t paid for doing work.

This is a guest post by Margo Aaron. Margo is a recovering academic, accidental marketer, and full-time writer. She likes to get to the heart of the matter over at That Seems Important. Her newsletters are some of the best on the web.

More specifically, we should be able to do it all with a quiet baby—one that’s never seen or heard from much, kind of like Jennifer Aniston’s magical baby in the final seasons of Friends. In her latest book, Reshma Saujani asks us just where that Friends baby was all the time whenever we didn’t see it. The pop television show gave no mention of childcare—and certainly very little crying. Only a well-behaved baby, onscreen occasionally, to give the mirage of a family life without the logistics or the truth.

When I first became a parent, I tried so hard to keep running at full speed. That's the pervasive myth of Lean-In Motherhood—that you can do it all, if you work hard enough and have enough systems in place. It was frustrating and led to a lot of exhaustion. The problem with pictures of modern parenting is that they treat motherhood as an image and a status symbol—or a place to retreat and go spend the rest of your life. It’s not integrated within American society, and that creates a huge problem that’s shouldered mostly by new parents.

The truth is, trying to be everywhere at once and doing ALL the things is just impossible for most people, and especially for parents. The idea that you can "do it all" and "have it all" is a very damaging myth that we share. Most of the people who purport to do it all have unequal amounts of wealth and support, or they’re not sharing the full picture.

So here’s what I wish someone had told me earlier about parenting and working:

1. It's not about getting all the work done and doing all the things, it's about getting one important thing done and leaving the rest.

It’s not about getting all the work done. It’s not about doing all the things. Doing it all is an impossible goal.

We aren't going to win at the speed or volume game. We can't. Parents are already hustling, as they work 7 days a week, from the break of dawn to the dark of night. Telling them to do more or hustle harder is a recipe for burnout. Which means we need to find different ways to have a competitive edge.

Doing it all is an impossible goal.

When it finally dawned on me that “doing it all” was an impossible goal, I had to get more strategic about the way I showed up to work. I still wanted—and loved—to work, write, and create things, but now I had way less time and energy. We need to play a new, smarter game. If you haven't recalibrated yet, it's still important to do.

So I asked myself: How can I do this differently? What's not working about right now? The most radical question to ask in a world that prioritizes hustle: What about doing less work? It felt terrifying to ratchet way back, and focus on just one (maybe two) things and just doing those things. The first few times I started operating this way, it was hard. It was awkward.

There were so many things I wanted to do—be on all the channels, show up everywhere, say yes to everything, have a weekly podcast AND a daily email AND a live event AND a community AND run a facebook group AND have paid programs.

But even massive companies with giant teams aren’t able to do everything they want to do. If a big corporation can’t do it, how am I, as an individual, going to be able to try to keep up with the Joneses? (In this instance, perhaps the better metaphor would be keeping up with the Gates.)

2. Things that used to work (relying on memory, pushing through at night, catching up on the weekends)—won't work anymore.

I also wish someone had told me earlier was that it’s perfectly reasonable for your work to change and adjust to the new realities of your life. So often we ask people not to change after they have kids, as though they should stay exactly the same as before. But what if we do change, and what if we make that change a normal part of life? And as a bonus, what is some of that change is actually a competitive advantage?

After having two kids and living through a pandemic—my kids were born in 2016 and 2018, and then we got walloped with the pandemic in 2020 and lost childcare for eight months, yes, I’m still recovering—my life impressed upon me the fact that I cannot just do things through sheer willpower and determination. I had to come up with a new structure for figuring out how to decide what to do and what not to do. I had to learn how to say no more.

3. Setting boundaries and saying no are going to become even more important than ever.

The competitive edge you build as a parent is the ability to say no. What’s important sharpens into focus, and the busywork and bullsh!t of modern life becomes even less tolerable. Saying no is really hard at first. It can be even harder across class, race, or gender norms. Women, for example, are often expected to say yes to others and do work that’s invisible. Plus, saying no when you’re in the haze of sleep deprivation is a challenge. A big one.

But the skill of saying no will become your superpower. Luckily, you’ll have a toddler to assist you in your learning curve. If they can do it, so can we. “That’s not the right fit,” and “Thanks for thinking of me, but I have to decline,” are two of my favorite scripts for saying no.

If you can’t compete on doing it all, then you’ll need to get better at having radical focus. Radical focus means getting specific and clear about what you will do, and more importantly, what you don’t do. Radical focus means saying no to a huge number of things (across both parenting and work expectations) and focusing on the few things you can do better than others.

Getting better at radical focus: specific examples

What does radical focus look like? I’ve asked hundreds of parents to share what they don’t do—and the answers delight me. As part of my work, I interview parents for a living on the Startup Parent Podcast. During the interviews, I often ask parents to tell me what they don't do, and how they're streamlining their lives.

Here are some of parenting ideas they've shared with me:

• Only do one kid activity per season.

• Wear clothes twice (half the laundry!). Dress the kids in tomorrow's clothes for pajamas.

• Systematize lunches and meals as simply as possible.

• A smaller house is less stuff to buy, less stuff to clean, and less money.

• Reduce commutes however possible!

• House-sharing, nanny-sharing, and babysitting co-ops.

And some of the business ideas:

• Only do one social media channel (or quit entirely).

• Cut business projects that don't fit 80/20 rule.

• Eliminate time-wasting clients.

• Change from "every week" to seasonal or biweekly.

• Have "no meeting" days or weeks.

• Schedule your vacation weeks into your calendar before the year starts.

There are even more ideas I’ve heard, too. After interviewing dozens of parents and navigating through two postpartum periods as an entrepreneur, I created a roadmap for how to get clear, focus, and cut back on non-essential work. Click this link to check out the book and read more of what people aren’t doing.

It's okay if you change because of parenting.

It’s okay if your work process changes because of parenting. It's okay if you slow down and focus on a few things that really matter. It's okay if you get rid of all of the crap work (including those 12 Facebook Groups you no longer need).

That’s what I wish I’d heard more—not that ‘motherhood would make me totally and completely fulfilled and I’d want to be a mother and nothing else forever until the end,’ and not that I should bounce back and keep working and driving like nothing had changed, either. Those two extremes aren’t reality.

I wish someone had told me that parenting is a huge undertaking, and it’s okay if you shift and adjust and adapt because of it. That you’ll probably get stronger and clearer at work, even if you feel like you’re stumbling through. That you’ll probably need to edit some things out of your life.

The idea that your work won't change—that YOU won't change—when you do the most radical thing of bringing a new person to the world astounds me.

Of course you will change.

Of course your work and life might shift.

Why not embrace it?

Accepting that change happens is one of the critical mindset shifts to make parenting a little more do-able.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

A FUTURE OF WORK TO BELIEVE IN

• At Startup Parent, we believe that parenting shouldn’t be at odds with work—and the insights from your parenting journey propels you as a leader that this world needs. We disrupt the myths of parenting to tell true stories of motherhood, fatherhood, and parenting today.

• The Startup Parent Podcast is an award-winning podcast ranked in the top 1% of podcasts globally. Join us as we interview parents about what the future of work, life, and leadership look like. Click here to add the show to your player.

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