People ask me all the time: “Can I be an entrepreneur and a parent?” I’ve spent almost a decade working with founders who are also parents, and over time, I’ve developed a checklist for what makes it easier—and what makes it harder.

Here’s what I tell people when they ask me what to expect if they’re trying to build a business AND a family at the same time:

Yes, you can do this.

Yes, it’s possible. But it will depend a LOT on a number of factors, because every situation has a different “difficulty level” and that will make all the difference.

But every situation has a different DIFFICULTY LEVEL

How difficult the journey is, and whether or not it feels absolutely impossible, will vary a lot from person to person. Below, I’ve outlined the ten questions I’d ask to discern how hard it’s going to be.

For each one you say “NO” to, the difficulty factor goes up.

This is not a judgment. It’s a map.

WHAT LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY ARE YOU PLAYING AT?

1 — Do you have a partner / who is supportive? Do they take a good balance of the household work and parenting labor?

2 — Are your job(s) flexible and supportive? Sometimes there are “greedy jobs“ in the picture. Greedy jobs take an outsized amount of the attention, energy, or resources in a partnership.
​
​3 — Do you have extended family that’s supportive? Grandparents, local relatives, etc that you can lean for any type of support?
​
​4 — Do you have strong community? Ideally with people who are also doing some of this adventure around the same time as you, so fellow parents, caregivers, and/or entrepreneurs.
​
​5 — Are YOU stable and secure — mentally, emotionally, physically? Your body and mind are part of the operating system of your business, and they’re also the backbone of your parenting journey. If you have a chronic illness, postpartum depression, mental health challenges, trauma, or other challenges, this could be harder.
​
​6 — Are you financially supported? If you have a well-paying job, savings from previous work, access to resources, a low rent or mortgage, or any other resources that support you, you’ll be in better shape, and can afford to pay for household and childcare support.
​​
7 — Do you have access to paid parental leave? Ideally, you have access to 6 to 12 months of quality paid leave to support you and your family. America is woefully bad at this (human rights level bad), and so this makes everything so much harder.
​
​8 — Is your baby an easy baby? A lot depends on the kind of baby or child you have. Some babies are ‘easy’ babies that sleep well. The rest of them? Not so much. And if you have a more challenging child, a kid that won’t sleep, or a child with extra needs, you’ll have even more demands placed on you.
​
​9 — Are YOU able to sleep? This could be the most important thing. If you’re not sleeping, everything will be a thousand times harder.
​
​10 — Do you have access to quality, consistent childcare? Is it reliable, affordable, trusted? Half of Americans live in “childcare deserts” where there is not enough childcare for the people who want it.

I’m curious what else you would add to this checklist, by the way. Something I didn’t add was whether or not you have more care-taking responsibilities, like taking care of aging parents or other family members. What else would you add? Tell me in the comments.

Next, add up all the times you said “no” to the questions above. That’s your difficulty rating for your adventure ahead.

This checklist is here to acknowledge that each journey in parenting and entrepreneurship will be different. You might be playing at a Level 10 difficulty and need far more support than you currently have. You might be building a business with only a fraction of the hours you need.

Or, you might be building a business with a huge amount of savings on hand, local grandparents, and your kids in daycare 45-50 hours a week. This is also a reminder not to compare yourself to someone else — they are living a completely different life. Each story is different.

What level of difficulty are you playing at?

(Also, If your difficulty level is at max, then please apply for one of our 🎁 Founding Member Scholarships 🎁 to be a part of the Founders With Kids community!)

Your story is yours.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
​Startup Parent​

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I’ve met all kinds of founders—solo indie builders, authors growing speaking platforms, friends launching coffee shops with babies in tow. Some are bootstrapping, some are on their third venture; others are pivoting or responding to a fast-changing market. Many are scaling teams, navigating payroll, hiring, and dealing with investors. Entrepreneurship covers a huge range of builders and doers. To be successful, you need an experimental mindset, a lot of grit, and a healthy dose of luck.

But running a business and a family? That’s next level.

Now you’re dealing with payroll AND daycare. You’re negotiating with two-year-olds AND your clients. The learning curve is twice as steep. You have limited hours, reduced energy, and a more than double workload. I hear so often how lonely it can be when you’re both a founder and a parent at the same time. Finding parent friends who understand what you’re doing in your career—or business friends who get how challenging it is to do while parenting? That can feel impossible.

Wherever you are in your entrepreneurship journey, you don’t need trite business or unhelpful life advice from people who don’t get the demands of trying to start, grow, and manage a family.

When I had kids, I had to re-evaluate past advice I’d gotten about running a business. A lot of the advice wasn’t useful anymore. And on the parenting side? My neighbors and local parent friends didn’t always get what I do for a living. It was like living in between two worlds, never fully fitting into either. But like every light-bulb moment that happens after years of experimentation, I realized that I could actually do something to support founders with kids.

And like every light-bulb moment that happens after years of experimentation, I realized that I could build a community space to support founders with kids.

So, after years interviewing parents and building Startup Parent, I launched a private community for business-founder-parents to connect and support each other. It’s a paid, invite-only community where business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders can give each other real support to navigate the twists and turns of parenting life while growing sustainable, profitable businesses. We kicked off the first cohort last Fall, and I’ve been building out the community with our initial crew.

The magic, of course, is always in the PEOPLE that come together. I launched it with a Google form and a basic set of chat rooms. At the outset, I wanted to spend time listening to folks, and learn more about what they need as a way to inform what I build. The first cohort started with ~20 people, and these early members have been instrumental in contributing ideas, participating in the chats, and sharing feedback.

It’s called Founders With Kids.

Since the launch, it’s expanded beyond just chat rooms. Now we have weekly coffee and coworking (which is quite fun!), as well as two mastermind calls each month for strategizing with other business owners. If you want the full run-down, there are more details down below about what’s inside, how it works, and the kind of people we’re looking for.

Also, I would love your help sharing this with folks who are founder parents, if you know of people that would benefit from this type of place! We are putting together the second cohort to join us later this month, and folks can apply to join us here.

APPLY TO JOIN FOUNDERS WITH KIDS

WHAT IS FOUNDERS WITH KIDS?

CHAT ROOMS

Online, private digital space with real talk and memes.

Our online community has dedicated chat rooms to talk about growing your business, the parenting juggle, to share a laugh and even to scream into the void on the days you need to (if you know, you know). Oh, and memes. On the weekends, we post a thread dedicated to humor to laugh at the chaos of it all.

COFFEE & COWORKING

Monday Mornings at 11am Eastern

Start your week off with community, coffee, and co-working. We meet for one hour, commit to the work we need to do, and work alongside each other. Getting your most important work done first? Gold. Doing it alongside others? You’re flying.

MEMBER MASTERMINDS

First Fridays at 12pm Eastern
Third Wednesdays at 3pm Eastern

Twice a month, we host calls to talk business with other folks. On the calls, we use small group breakouts to mini-mastermind with other members. Exchange knowledge and get the support you need to move forward in business, life, or parenting.

THE PEOPLE WHO JOIN US

The first two criteria are straightforward. We’re looking for people who are:

BUSINESS OWNERS with experience. You’re a founder or business owner, and you’ve been in business for a while. This isn’t your first rodeo.

PARENTS OR A CARETAKERS. The people who join us are folks who are providing a significant caretaking role in their family lives. We welcome moms, dads, step-parents, and caretakers alike.

But we’re looking for a special sauce, a certain blend of brilliance and kindness, in the members that join. The folks who join us are curious, creative, encouraging, and kind. Seth Godin taught me about both the demographics (age, gender, location, etc) and the psychographics of an audience, and why knowing how people think is often more important than the census stats they carry.

WE ARE LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE…

• Tired of hustle culture advice and maximalist productivity tools, and more interested in refined strategies that help you focus and succeed in your particular business, in your unique life.

• Experts in their individual fields. Most of us have been in our industries for a long time, and we can stand in front of a room or on a stage and give you a masterclass on our area of specialization.

• Open, kind, and caring. People who are willing to give and receive support, and don’t judge others, because parenting and business are huge realms with lots of different paths and ideas.

• Building businesses that fit within your life goals in more holistic way. A lot of folks 35+ have been around the block before, and they want to build sustainable, profitable businesses that provide them with freedom, energy, or time.

• Interested in learning from other parents about what they do (and what they don’t), and eager to share ideas for doing work-life in new ways. Build an amazing babysitting swap for weekend hours? Tell us all the ways you’re creating your life successfully!

• Eager to share strategic insights about what’s working, what’s not working, and how you’ve grown your business.

• Looking for more connection and community in life, and excited about talking shop (and life) with other entrepreneurial parents.

WHERE WE ARE TODAY

EARLY RESPONSE: Apparently this idea hit a nerve, because in the first three days of our soft-launch last Fall, we received over two hundred applications to join us. We started with a small group of about 20 folks in the first cohort, and we’re getting ready to add a second cohort to the mix at the end of March. If you're a founder parent, if you love playing in early spaces as an active participant, and you crave more community, check out what we’re building and apply to join us!

EARLY BIRD PERKS: I’m keeping the pricing lower in the early stages of building this special place. Folks who join an early cohort will get early-access pricing as a thank you for being an early adopter. Over time, as I build out the community and the benefits, the price will likely increase.

IF YOU ALREADY APPLIED: For all the people who have already applied, THANK YOU for applying, and thank you also for your patience as we roll this out slowly. If I haven’t replied to your application yet, please know that we’re still in early build mode. We've received 249 applications so far, and we are reviewing them about 20 at a time. If you're champing at the bit to join in this next cohort, shoot me an email if you'd like.

I want to write a longer behind-the-scenes to capture what I’ve learned with this latest community creation, and share some of the lessons learned about community design, marketing, the tools I used, and what I think makes a community really sing. (If you’re thinking of starting a community, or you’ve run one before, I'd love to know what might be most helpful for me to share—tell me in the comments!)

I’ll share more behind-the-scenes soon, but for now—cheers to experimentation, iteration, and building together. 💛

— Sarah K Peck
Leadership ☀︎ Business ☀︎ Parenting ☀︎ Mindset ☀︎ Humor

Startup Parent (Podcast)
Founders With Kids (Community)
Wise Women’s Council (Leadership Incubator)
You can also find me on LinkedIn, Substack Notes, and Threads.

Here are the six steps I use to get writing done with children around—it’s so simple and easy!

Step 1: Wake up around 5am or 6am, depending on when the children wake up. Try to wake up before them. Creep down the hallway. Why are the wooden floors so loud? They are rustling. You freeze. Do not wake the children.

Step 2: Acquire coffee.

Step 3: Try to write through depression and discouragement. Your eyes are tired. You drink water. Wonder what you should write about.

Step 4: Read the news.

Damnit. DO NOT READ THE NEWS.

Step 5: Six words. Now ten. Maybe an idea. Is this working? You decide to write a post about how working parents are doing right now. But will posting regularly make it seem like everything is fine—everything is just as usual?

NOW YOU WORRY, WILL EVERYONE THINK THAT WORKING PARENTS ARE DOING FINE RIGHT NOW?

Worry about the existential angst.

Begin writing a post that says “Working parents are not okay.”‘

Delete sentences because no one is okay. There isn’t really a comparison game to be played here. Try again. New post: "Someone please take my children. Anyone, take them?" 

Delete that, too, because someone might take that literally and or report you to the authorities and you love your children, you just need a 24-hour break, and one day to sleep in. Although, to be honest, sleeping in sounds like a fantasy—could you even do it anymore if you had the chance?

The bedroom door bursts open and the stampede of children’s feet come racing down the hall. Your heart leaps in panic as you realize your time is now done. They run to the living room. They’re doing okay. You exhale. Maybe you can keep going.

Step 6: Go back and count previous steps, because you forgot where you are.

Step 7: Call your friend who is ALSO awake this early with children—you realize that you’re having trouble stringing words together. Hang up the telephone because both of your children and pushing buttons on the phone and you can’t actually have a real conversation while children and buttons are in close proximity. What was it that your friend said right before you hung up? Oh yeah: WHY DOES OPENING MY COMPUTER EQUAL A PAVLOVIAN RESPONSE FROM MY CHILD?

Step 8: Try to disentangle children wrapped around your legs. Realize they need to be fed.

Step 9: Have one child scoop the coffee for you (yes, the second coffee). They should be fine playing with the grounds, right? Right? What are they LICKING? For effs... FML.

Step 10: Create breakfasts for children. String cheese and apples it is. Put them at the table. They are sitting at the table. They are sitting on the table. They are on the table. They are standing on the table. Ask yourself if you really care—can you write an email from the kitchen while watching them?

But you also wonder if a one year-old falling off a table would be bad enough to go to the ER. You do not want to go to the ER. So you walk to the table. Say “Sit down please,” at least twelve times. Sit at the table with them. They scream at you that you're touching them. You're too close. "GO AWAY MOM STOP TOUCHING ME"

What were you doing?

Step 11: What were you doing?

You decide to take selfies to accompany the post. People like posts better with images of faces, or something like that. Now you'’re on your phone. Realize half the selfies you took your eyes were closed. Do you post the eyes closed version?

Step 11,458: It is now 1:08pm.

You have spent the last six hours writing a handful of paragraphs in between the constant stream of tiny—but very loud—demands. The three-year-old had a meltdown because the apple was too red. The one-year-old gleefully crushed the banana between his fingers and ran shrieking down the hall with banana mush covering everything. You changed them. You are now exhausted. The children are now in their beds. They are supposed to be napping. You open your laptop. You are writing.

What are you writing? You don’t know. 

It is now 1:38pm.

You also need a nap.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

Learning isn’t always pretty. In the moment, growth can feel a lot more more like chaos or failure. But the truth is, you are gaining skills so rapidly you don’t have time to catalog your own transformation. Plus, you’re too tired to pause or think. Yet through trial and error, through sleep deprivation and tears, and through those thousands of hours of bouncing and sweating and swearing, you’re undergoing massive growth.

Here are just some of the tools and skills you learn through parenting.

Parenting is a time of deep transformation, but we don’t publicly celebrate the growth you undergo when you become a parent.

The ability to tape, glue, or MacGyver your way out of nearly anything. Yes, my child's current puffer jacket has been reinforced with duct tape.

The superbly developed, pressure-tested skill of ultra-creative negotiation. Formed from years of dealing with unreasonable, fickle, tiny human beings, you know how to coax them to eat, bribe them out the door, dangle choice ideas in front of them, and even—gasp—get them off of devices. The forced choice, the psychological incentives, the dangling bribes: you can do it all. 

The ability to move and live within uncertainty. "I'm not sure when that's going to happen, sweetie. I can't tell you or promise that for you right now."

The need to be impeccable with your word, because if you make a promise to go to that amusement park tomorrow and you fail to keep that promise, YOU SHALL NOT PASS that exit on the highway ever again without hearing about it. You are forced to keep promises or you'll never let it down—eventually making you a stickler for precise language and much more cautious about making any hand-waving promises.

The ability to say no better than your last boss. Was it hard to say no before? It isn’t any more. That amusement park—NO. WE ARE NOT GOING TO THE PARK. STOP ASKING. Nope, no way, sorry kid. Now? Now you can say no to anything and everything. Don’t touch that. Stop that. Get off there. Put that down. No you cannot touch the stove. No you cannot climb on top of the car. We are not having candy for dinner.

The ability to empathize and understand so many people. "That looks like it hurts so much. You really didn't like it when your brother punched you in the face. I'm so sorry that happened to you."

The amount of stamina, resilience, and adaptability needed. So, real talk, I never realized that a 2-year old and a 4-year-old are like walking around with animated dumbbells, and that parenting was actually weighlifting, and that at the WORST times, I'd be carrying 75+ pounds of wiggly, defiant humans in both my arms while they tried to escape. When the 2-year-old dissolves in a puddle in the middle of the crosswalk and your 4-year-old is gazing at the birds, and the light changes color, you’re bending over with double backpacks on trying to scoop them up and carry them across before you all get hit by cars. Are they helpful? No.

The ability to put others before yourself. Oh you need to poop? Go ahead, I'll just cross my legs in a pee dance for the next twenty minutes. Or refer to adaptability, above, when you pee in your sink instead (I’m not telling) or you use an old coffee cup or the bathtub or … well, anything. CREATIVITY. THIS IS CREATIVITY. Yes, I bleached the sink afterwards. If you know, you know.

The skills of tending, befriending, and community building. You're going to see these parents everywhere—school, around town, after-care, and they're probably going to be in summer camp with you. You learn the range of skills required: tolerating people you dislike, making small talk on the daily, escaping the chatty ones, corralling them together for parties, kicking them out when you’re tired…

But there’s something bigger about all of these skills…

Parenting is mostly made invisible, so we don't recognize & celebrate any of this growth in public.

These are all leadership skills and CEO skills.

Everything listed above? These are also the skills that we need in leaders and CEOs.

• Empathy. Patience.
  Parenting expands your ability to understand other people, to weather the storm, to attend to internal and external emotional hurricanes, and it asks you to cultivate patience like none other.

• Clarity. Definition. Boundaries. Saying No.
  Parenting asks you to say no at least a million times. The reason it’s so hard sometimes is because it asks us to develop top-notch skills in setting boundaries, rules, and regulations for an entire family system and beyond.

• Flexibility and Adaptability.
  Nothing ever goes according to plan. That’s basically the job description of a CEO: make a plan, communicate it, and then herd all of these cats into the same direction towards the same goal—oh, just kidding, all the container ships in the world stopped working. GAME TIME: WHATCHA GONNA DO?

• Resilience and Stamina.
  Parenting asks you to steel yourself, be resilient, flexible, adaptable, clear, boundaried, and to dig into the depths of your abilities beyond what you thought possible. Parenting is more challenging than a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Jack Kornfield even said that you couldn’t hire a live-in Zen master that’s better than just trying to deal with kids. No joke.

Parenting teaches you to say no, to quit, to pivot, to resource yourself more fully, to persevere, and it demands that you create solutions in the times when you don't have the luxury of quitting or stopping. You have to learn on the job, every day, and you probably feel like you don’t know what you’re doing half the time.

“So, kids. You could not hire a live-in Zen master that was better, I tell you.” — Jack Kornfield

Parenting is mostly invisible, so this growth goes unrecognized or celebrated in public.

In Western cultures, most of parenting is made invisible. And in many cultures, mothers and caretakers are in the “private” sphere, more bound to the home, and then isolated from one another.

As a result, this type of skill-building is often invisible and unrecognized. That's why here Startup Parent, we want to remind you of all of these newly-acquired skills. Your journey in parenting is building you into the next-level leader our world needs.

We believe that parenting is an unrecognized leadership incubator for what the world needs next. Parenting is so much more than taking care of the kids in front of you. It's also building you into a next-level leader. It’s giving you the skills you'll need—the skills we all need—to be incredible leaders for the rest of our lives.

Over to you: What skills has parenting taught you? What life lessons, spiritual teachings, wisdom, or business savvy have you gained through all of this?

I'd love to hear what skills you're gaining in parenting.

Leave a comment below.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

"Tell me, what has parenting changed about the way you work?" I asked Jay Acunzo, dad to a 2-year-old and 4-year-old and the co-founder of Creator Kitchen.

He laughed. "The real question is, what hasn't changed?"

"For those of us that are hard chargers, people who like to take life on at a run, parenting is something else entirely,” he said.

We talked about fatherhood and work, sharing an unfiltered look at how parenting had affected their work and careers. Towards the end of our conversation, Jay Acunzo shared a metaphor that was so spot-on for what it’s like to parent and work that I asked him if I could share the story here.

“How would you explain parenting to someone?” I asked him. “What advice would you give to someone else thinking about starting their parenting journey?”

The story below is from Jay.

For those of us that are hard chargers, people who like to take life on at a run, parenting is something else entirely.

All of our lives, we've been running. Trying to max out everything. We didn't let ourselves get the C+ or the B grades in anything. It was always a pursuit.

For the most part, running has been something we’ve done all of our lives. We’re used to running, it’s a great pace, we’re comfortable with our shoes and the goals and the game we’re playing.

As we keep going in life, we learn how to face hiccups while still maintaining a running pace. We take on challenges. These challenges are like sticks and branches and rocks on the trail. We learn how to dodge and jump and throughout it all, we're able to keep running.

But for those of us that are hard chargers, people who like to take life on at a run, parenting is something else entirely.

But when you become a parent, it's like the ground itself completely changes.

The world is now different. You are now different. Your relationships change, your emotional life changes, your responsibilities change, your inter-personal navigation changes. Everything changes.

To use the running metaphor, it's like the ground itself has completely shifted. It's no longer solid ground. The ground below you has become mud. And so you can't run anymore.

If you're a hard charger, if you're someone used to running, the temptation is going to be to try to find ways to keep sprinting.

'Of course I can keep running,' you'll believe. You'll try everything.

But you can't run through mud.

For a while, you might try to run, but you’ll end up thrashing. You keep pushing harder, but it’s not working. You end up flailing and tiring yourself out.

If you keep trying to run like you used to, you’re just going to end up stuck.

That’s when I realized that trying to continue to sprint in the mud was the cause of my anger. I was stuck. The thrashing made it worse. I had to come to terms with the fact that nothing was solid ground anymore.

So what do you do, as a new parent trying to survive and build?

Here's the most important thing you can do:

Embrace that you're in mud.

Realize that you can't sprint on this kind of ground. Instead of trying to run at top speed, the way that you used to, you'll need to embrace where you are.

In fact, all the thrashing makes it worse.

What you can do now is trudge.

Your life now is learning to trudge through the mud.

Trudging is an entirely new skill.

And if you can trudge gracefully? That makes all the difference.

That is what parenting and working feels like.

Jay Acunzo is the co-founder of Creator Kitchen, a place where content creators, marketers, and entrepreneurs learn to stand out. You can find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

PS: To listen to our entire conversation, with advice, stories, and wisdom from the entire group of dads I interviewed, upgrade to become a paid backer on Substack. Next week I’ll share the entire conversation and the stories on the Ask Sarah Podcast.

Subscribe now

Be a little more messy. A little more loose.

Why?

It’s not only because we need sleep.

It’s because the people and systems of power want you tired. When you’re too tired to fight back, that keeps you where you are.

Rest, not just because every human being deserves rest, but because rest is a form of action. Filling your own cup will help you have the energy to fight. And we’re going to need you to fight.

So let those pajamas be worn five times. I sniff them and as long as they don’t stink, back they go into the laundry pile. When you wash them, toss them into the wash inside out. Leave them inside out. Don't fold them. Put them on inside out. There’s no one judging you for how your kids wear pajamas. Keep a sloppy basket for clean laundry in their room and toss things in it.

File it under "good enough" because really, it is good enough. Perfectly folded toddler pajamas are not what’s going to get paid leave on the agenda in congress, and it’s not going to pay for maternal healthcare.

Your house is supposed to be a place to live. It’s not supposed to be a display case. Perfectly folded toddler pajamas aren't going to move the needle. They're just going to make you tired.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

PS: I love asking people what they don’t do. What are all the things that you let be messy, chaotic, or never done in your house? Turn those guilts into brags on this thread dedicated to all the things we don’t do.

ANNOUNCEMENTS & INVITATIONS

• LEADERSHIP MIXER FOR BUSINESS MOMS — On Tuesday, March 7th, 2023 at 1pm ET, I'm hosting a leadership session mixer with a focus on reconnecting to your values. If you’re a mom in business, join us.

• PANDEMIC STORYTELLING CIRCLE — On Friday, March 10th, 2023 at 1pm ET, we’re hosting an event open to the broader Startup Parent community—moms, dads, pet parents, caretakers—anyone who would like to can attend our special pandemic storytelling circle.

• DR. POOJA LAKSHMIN — Excited to announce that Dr. Pooja Lakshmin is our next guest on The Startup Parent Podcast this week, with a deep dive into why doing more doesn’t make us feel better—in fact, it might result in rage, depression, exhaustion, dissociation, and more. Her book comes out next week!

• THE WISE WOMEN’S COUNCIL — Interested in joining us in The Wise Women’s Council? Applications are open for our Spring Cohort until Tuesday, March 14th, 2023. There are scholarship opportunities as part of our work towards social justice and social equity.

A parent races over while the rest of us adults hover around awkwardly, nervously anticipating the fallout. His face is red and angry. He looks equally mad and surprised, which makes sense—I too would be both furious and bewildered if my face was used as a brake against a nasty fall. But what happens next to the child is all too common.

“You’re okay,” the adult says. “Stand up, you’re okay, you’re okay.”

Even with affection and love, I see grown-ups head straight to their kiddos, pick them up, hold them, hug them, and then murmur into their ears, “you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.”

What do we mean when we rush to say “it’s okay” to our kids?

What is disconcerting about this phrase is that the kid may quite literally not be okay. They are bleeding, they are angry, they are hurt, and they are a whole swirl of emotions.

Yet in this bizarre contradiction, we tell the kid they are feeling the opposite of what’s actually going on. We don’t say “gosh, that looks like it hurts,” or “ow, that seems incredibly painful.” They might feel okay in the future, and things will likely get better, but the experience right at this exact moment? Pain, hurt, embarrassment, surprise, discomfort, frustration, or annoyance are some of the possible feelings.

It made me wonder why we’re using this phrase—“you’re okay”—with each other. In part, it feels soothing and safe, the warm arms of a parent holding you, letting you cry, and telling you that things are going to be alright. On the other hand, it seems as though it’s the parents that are uncomfortable, hurrying their kids along towards “better,” forgetting to sit with the emotions at present. Are we helping our kids or are we dismissing their lived experienced?

Why do caregivers so often use this phrase “you’re okay” as a knee jerk response?

Curious about why parents so often use this knee jerk “You’re okay” parental reaction, I reached out to clinical psychologist and emotional fitness expert Dr. Emily Anhalt to ask her perspective. She explained that both scenarios are likely possible, and it has to do with the relationship we have to our own feelings, as well as the relationship we have to the child.

According to Dr. Anhalt, in parenting psychology, attachment and attunement are ideas about the connective quality of the relationship between the kid and the adult. When someone is attuned to you, they understand and sense what’s going on, and can feel what it’s like to be in your skin. It’s a quality of emotional empathy where we connect to the person in front of us. 

An important part of attunement less talked about is that we also need to pay attention to what is going on inside of us—as the parent—in these moments. Recognizing and being more aware of what feelings we are having in the present moment will help us see both sets of feelings as distinct, instead of conflating our feelings with that of the child. Perhaps we are scared, but they are not scared. Perhaps we are not worried, but they are very worried.

“Sometimes it can be helpful to tell kids ‘you're okay’ as a reassurance that you've assessed the situation and they're safe,” Dr. Anhalt said, “although I also agree that when used too much it can invalidate their experience.”

“There can be a sense that as parents we are supposed to make tough emotions go away for our kids, but we don’t have to do that,” Dr. Anhalt explained. It’s more important to be with them, right there in that space, than try to “fix” what’s going on. One of the hardest things to do as a human being is be present with our own emotions, and as parents, we have double the job: to be there with our own experience, and to support and be there with our children as they go through the world, too.

“If you notice that you always race past the ‘feelings’ space with your kids, or you always want to make everything ‘okay' right away, that’s an important piece of feedback for yourself,” Dr. Anhalt said. “It might be a sign that you yourself weren’t given space to feel your feelings when you were younger. Were you allowed to feel sad or scared as a kid?” If you weren’t, then this might be brand-new for you, and the first step might be learning to become more comfortable with our own emotions.

Sometimes it’s actually us that’s uncomfortable—because for some reason or another, we’re not used to being around other people’s big emotions.

Sometimes when we aren’t uncomfortable with others’ emotions, it’s actually our own emotions about the situation that we’re uncomfortable with. Put in plain language, sometimes when other people are hurting or in pain (or happy!), it can be hard to be around. There are so many reasons why it can be hard to be around other people’s feelings, and yes, therapy can be important to figuring out the root causes. But before that, it can be helpful to get curious and ask, “When was I allowed to feel this feeling? What did I learn about this feeling or situation growing up?”

So at the playground, when the kid is screaming “I’m in pain,” our job as parents is to assess the situation, and to be there for the kid through the experience. Sometimes that might mean reassuring them that everything is okay, but often, it may mean spending time with them as they feel their feelings and process what’s happened.

And if we find ourselves tempted to reduce their emotional outburst, to “fix” them, to tell them to skip past what they’re feeling and go directly to “okay,” then that likely means there is work we must do to heal our own inner child.

So what do you say to a kid who just fell? Start by giving words to possible feelings.

So what do you say to a kid who has just fallen and is running towards you? Start by narrating their experience. “Oh goodness, you just took a big fall, didn’t you!” “That looks pretty painful, I bet it hurts right there on your knee and on your head. Does it hurt anywhere else?”

We’re making a best guess at what they might be feeling. “If you don’t know what their experience is, you can give words to these big feelings they may be experiencing and then ask if it’s true for them,” Dr. Anhalt said. For example, “I think you might be feeling hurt and angry, is that right? Is that true for you?”

Listen to what the kiddo says and what they say they need, too. Having a big feeling is a big deal, and humans need other people around to help us process and make sense of these emotions. As caregivers, part of our job is teaching our kids about their feelings and emotions, and helping them with the language to understand and describe the way they feel.

Of course, it is hard to see our children in pain. All I want to do is scoop my kids up and protect them when they are hurt! But if we race past the feelings of the moment and ignore what’s going on in the “right now”—the scraped knee—we might be teaching our kids to ignore the signals and sounds of their own bodies. Pain is not the enemy, and feelings are not meant to be erased. Therefore, it’s important, although certainly hard at times, to listen to our feelings and hear what they have to say. 

The next time my kid falls down, I hope I ask him how he’s feeling and what the experience was like for him. I also hope that I listen to him.

While it may seem easier to try and erase the pain with a cacophony of “You’re fine, you’re fine, it’s okay,” it’s not always the right phrase. Sometimes we need to be comforted, and sometimes we need to know that even when things are rough, we’re safe around our people.

Just as you do not wish to have your feelings trivialized, the same goes for our children. Being seen, validated, and supported by others can do wonders.

It’s okay to not be okay, too.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

I had a hard day, I fell down, and right now I’m not okay. I will be—but right now, I need a good cry, a long shower, and then to sleep. We’ll try again tomorrow.

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.

• Are you already a fan of the podcast? Become a paid subscriber and get access to our exclusive bonus podcast, Ask Sarah, a show made just for our backers.

• If you're a working mom looking for a community that understands you, apply to join The Wise Women's Council, our leadership incubator for entrepreneurs, executives, and managers who are also moms. The program runs annually and we open for applications twice per year. Click here to apply.

The other day, I had the pleasure of catching up with a friend I hadn’t spoken to in over a year. Nothing bad happened to keep us from talking, just life. One of those life events was that she had a baby, and as I know all too well, postpartum is an absolute vortex.

I’m about six years away from the stage she’s at in her parenting journey, and as far as child development and rearing goes, we are living very different experiences. I remember being in the wildly exhausted and sensory-overloaded first years so vividly. No one was sleeping through the night. The spawn required constant supervision so that nobody stuck a tongue in a socket or put dog poop in a mouth. Someone always needed something from me.

On one of those days, I was sitting in the passenger seat of our car feeling like an absolute sack of tired garbage, with the baby and toddler in the backseat. We were waiting in a parking lot while my husband ran into a store, and I had my window open to relieve some of the echo of the kids crying/yelling. Again. For reasons I could do nothing to help with.

I looked over to the vehicle parked beside me and saw another mom sitting in the front seat with two kids who looked to be early elementary age sitting in the back. Her window was also open, we made eye contact, she gave me a sympathetic smile, and I said, “please tell me it gets better.”

She didn’t say that.

What she said was, “it gets different,” and we both laughed because I knew exactly what she meant — and, it helped.

The hope of different can sometimes be enough hope to make a difference.

​Fast forward seven years—my kids are now five and seven, and those newborn days are no longer. And as I chatted with my friend, I talked about some of the fun I’m having with my kids at the ages they are now. It feels strange to reflect on those early years. I know my kids are still so young and there is a lot of life to do — and — it’s hard to believe that those years are already over.

The whole “days are long but years are short” cliche is apparently true.

At times I feel a little shell-shocked by the passing of time, and grief for moments I won’t get back, especially because they didn’t always go the way I’d wanted them to go and there are no do-overs. I definitely don’t romanticize those earliest parenting years because I know exactly how much I struggled with the baby and toddler stages. Even with the perspective of those days being over and feeling brief in hindsight, when I talk to someone who is in the midst of the sleepless nights and full dependence, I know what they mean.

It feels never-ending, until one day, it doesn’t.

I didn’t imagine early motherhood coming with so many tears and emotional outbursts (from me). Instead of the baby years being painted with giggles and heart-eyed moments, my memories carry the weight of postpartum depression, anxiety, and shame.

And. I know that it wasn’t all bad, even though my brain seems biased towards recalling the hard times. There were so many great pockets nestled in there, even if I wasn’t always able to take them in.

So when my brain starts to ruminate on wishing that I hadn’t yelled as much, or that I’d been more available for tension-free snuggles, I close my eyes and try to switch the channel by focusing on a memory of being calm and present during a meltdown, or falling asleep together on the couch.

The cost of my grief was presence, and when I look back, I feel like I missed out on something during those first few years—And.

I don’t want to miss the magic of the years I’m in right now because I’m stuck dwelling on the past and the things I can’t change.

These days, I’m trying to focus on presence and the things I want more of instead of dwelling on old, unmet expectations. I love that my kids tell me excitedly about what they learned at school, that they still let themselves relax full weight into my arms when I hug them, that they still want snuggles at night, and that sometimes, my kisses are still enough to make their hurts go away. I know that if I spend this stage stuck thinking about the one that passed, then I’ll probably spend ages nine and eleven wishing I had been more present for five and seven.

I’ve processed and sorted through and replayed the millions of ways things could have gone, and when I paint the full picture of those butterfly effects, none of them would get me to where I am now. When I find myself sitting in a hard place — because, life — I remind myself:

It will get different.

It always does.

— Justine Sones
Wise Women’s Council—Class of 2022
Startup Parent

Justines Sones is a stress management and self-care coach who writes about feelings, boundaries, and life. She helps burned-out humans reduce overwhelm and get more space to breathe, think, and sleep.

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.

• If you're a working mom looking for a community that understands you, apply to join The Wise Women's Council, our leadership incubator for entrepreneurs, executives, and managers who are also moms. The program runs annually and we open for applications twice per year. Click here to apply.

I'd been told—by society, by culture, by workplaces—that once I had kids, I'd probably want to stay home and focus on being a mom. From small comments to outright assumptions, people told me that I wouldn't want to work, and that workplaces wouldn't want me. It was frustrating because I love work, and I like going fast. As a somewhat Type-A overachiever, I thought I could approach starting a family like most other projects. Surely with enough grit and skill, I could master this, too.

What wasn’t talked about was how to make it work, or what we could do differently to make pregnancy and work more manageable. There was so little education about pregnancy and fertility—did you know it’s way harder to get pregnant than you might think?—and there’s an abysmal lack of support for parents in America. “Any nation where it’s easier to get your hands on an assault rifle than baby formula, where health care, child care and paid leave are considered luxuries rather than guaranteed rights, where the government would rather force birth (and possible death) than allow women to make decisions about our own bodies, is a terrible place to be a mother,” writes Reshma Saujani for Time.

I didn’t know any of this when I thought about starting a family. Pregnancy and parenthood rocked me, and asked me to question so much of what I thought I knew.

HOW PREGNANCY CHANGED ME

Pregnancy asked me to slow down, and it showed me in painstaking detail how the systems I'd built so far didn't work. I had a difficult pregnancy the first time around, and I faced depression and anxiety alongside debilitating nausea. Pregnancy can be tough as nails, and I didn’t hear enough people talking about it. Telling the truth. Being honest about everything it took.

Pregnancy is really hard work. It makes sense when you think about it: you’re growing a human being from scratch, with every ounce of your body’s energy. It can vary wildly for people, with some pregnancies smoother than others. Mine was more challenging than I’d expected. I’ve come to appreciate the people who describe pregnancy as “violent,” inasmuch as nature can rip women’s bodies to shreds in pursuit of creating offspring. It reminds me of the animals that die shortly after giving birth—the creation of babies an enormous feat.

I still wanted to work—but on things that mattered. Getting pregnant shifted my focus, but not in the “I never want to work again” kind of way that employers often fear. Now that my ability to work was so limited, I knew each minute was precious. I also knew how much I would need help to be able to keep going. My bullsh*t meter grew, and my disdain for busy-work and needless panic-and-sprint modes became apparent.

My ability to say no grew stronger. I became more discerning about the decisions we made at work, and I gained clarity and focus. Yes, I was exhausted. Yes, I missed deadlines and I struggled to keep up at times. But at the same time, I learned a new power over my command of the word “no,” and I adopted new strategies to negotiations. Over time, I was surprised to notice that while it made me slower at first, in the long-term, it made me a better leader and a more efficient employee. Learning to say no when you’re a “yes” person that prides oneself on doing everything that’s asked of you, and doing it fast, is a tough wake-up call. I also think it was a short course in executive leadership training.

WHY I CREATED STARTUP PARENT

When I became a parent for the first time, I needed a place where people understood me and what I was going through. That's why I created a space for working parents to imagine new futures of work—and to support each other along the way. Startup Parent is a place for parents to talk about leadership, life, and work while also being honest about what it takes to raise families at the same time.

Over the past five years, I've interviewed 200+ parents about building businesses & raising kids. The Startup Parent Podcast is an award-winning podcast ranked in the top 1% of podcasts globally, and it was named on of the Top 50 Podcasts for Moms by Podcast Magazine.

On the show, we interview folks about the future of work and the truth of family life. Episodes range from interviewing Xploding Unicorn about writing about your family when you have a million followers on Twitter, how to navigate a business when both co-founders are pregnant, thinking about how to work two days a week, studying the lopsided nature of parenting, exploring gender creative parenting, or understanding the complications of infertility.

IT WAS ALSO A WAKE-UP CALL

For me, getting pregnant and becoming a parent were huge wake-up calls that showed me how much work has crept into all areas of our life. We are living in a world of massive overwork, where people wake up thinking about their jobs, leave early to go to work, sign on to “prove” they’re working, stay late, and then socialize and attend events at all hours, all in the name of “doing the job.” Parenthood revealed to me how much workplaces have crept in and taken over everyday life. Work wants to blame parents for being a problem for having basic boundaries around life, when in reality work has exploded across every facet of life like glitter after a kid’s birthday party. It’s crept in, it’s everywhere, and it refuses to leave.

For too long Silicon Valley and work culture have mythologized the idea of hustle and overwork, and frankly, hustle culture is tired. We can do better than overwork as a strategy. We want to imagine a new future of what it looks like to be a working parent, a business leader, and a woman in today’s world.

The old ways aren’t working. We can’t force ourselves into the old models of parenting or the past models of a work world that was designed for “Ideal Workers” and expect it to work. Ideal Workers are people with the flexibility to work at all times, who aren’t beholden to anyone else in their lives. This is a historic assumption that men can work in offices and women will stay at home—a relic of the 1940s-1960s era that’s been mistaken as a presumed normal in our society.

At Startup Parent, we believe it’s time to radically rethink what parenting and working can and should look like. 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 know that the majority of people are burned out from traditional work systems, and that an enormous number of people have caretaking responsibilities in their lives. It’s time for us to figure out new models for work and life going forward. The future of work must include women, children, families, caretaking, and everything currently left out of our made-up economic models.

We can’t keep doing things the way they’ve always been done and expect new results.

WE NEED THE MOMS, THE DADS, THE AUNTIES, THE UNCLES, AND ALL THE FRIENDS AT THE TABLE

When I started this company, we were initially a space for mothers only. Our first identity was as Startup Pregnant, which you’ll likely see around the web and in podcast archives. We started by interviewing women about pregnancy and leadership on the podcast. We created a community for business moms that supports parents in connecting with other parents learning their way through parenting and business.

The Wise Women's Council is a leadership incubator and community for ambitious women navigating the transition into parenting. Instead of leaving women alone to undertake this massive transition in both work and life, we bring women together so they can feel better supported, understood, and valued.

After hundreds of interviews, however, I started to notice an important theme: if we only created a space for women, we would miss out on how much the problems of parenting affect dads and the wide range of what it looks like to be a caretaker. Caring for other people isn’t something done exclusively by mothers, and it’s almost a pathology in our society that moms should be there to bolster and fix everything for everyone.

We need to support and hear from the dads. We need dads at the table if we’re going to make real changes for all of us. In 2021, we pivoted and re-branded as Startup Parent. In the fall of 2022, we’re doing an interview series with dads and piloting a dad’s group over the winter to support men in connecting and building community. Life as a parent is hard and can be lonely, and dads are often left out of a lot of the support services created for moms.

PARENTING CAN MAKE YOU A BETTER LEADER

Motherhood and fatherhood should be seen as an incubator for new leadership skills, not in opposition to it. If you can keep kids alive, you have all the skills of a project manager. If you can communicate with toddlers, you're capable of negotiation and more. If you meet daycare pickup deadlines daily, you can rally people around hard deadlines. If you can persuade tiny children without pre-frontal cortex abilities to listen to you, you've got chops.

There's such cool research today that shows how parenting is a prime period for brain growth. "Our brains can change more during the year surrounding the birth of our child than at any other time in our adult lives," explains Amy Henderson, founder of TendLab. "This is true for both moms and dads, regardless of whether the baby they are raising is their biological child." When parents are well-supported by society, and are supported in their role in caring for our youngest children, they develop better emotional intelligence, courage, efficiency, productivity, and the capacity to collaborate, she shares. There's a caveat, however, to this research: when parents are not well supported, these benefits don't hold true.

Henderson is vocal that it's time to debunk the myth that when a woman becomes a mother she will be less effective at work. Yet mothers—when supported by basic social and civic infrastructure, like high-quality childcare options, paid leave, and school—consistently show increased performance in their careers. "Motherhood teaches us where we need to grow," writes Henderson, "and gives us the opportunity to stretch past what we think are our limits to meet the challenge of raising our kids." Fathers also undergo brain changes and growth when they are active, involved fathers. In fact, the leadership skills that are often missing in male-dominated industries (empathy, collaboration, soft skills) are precisely the ones that parenting can unearth. By taking time to be a parent, it turns out, you grow your leadership capacity.

Despite recent research that shows how parenting can positively affect our careers and leadership abilities, discrimination against mothers is sadly real, and anti-mom bias is considered an "open secret" in the workplace. We know that sexism and racism are intolerable, but mothers are not a protected class in the workplace—so many women that want to work are forced out of work, with no workplace protections.

Fathers are also given short thrift: while we support fathers on paper (they're seen as better leaders)—they aren't actually given time and space to do the job of parenting. Dads receive a superficial benefit to gaining the label of parent, but aren't given space to actually be parents. More millennial men—82% according to some surveys—want to be involved fathers, but workplaces and stigma continue to prevent fathers from doing so. Despite evidence to show that parenting can augment our leadership journeys, workplaces continue to discriminate against parents, and the United States is abysmal when it comes to basic support for new parents in their transitions.

OLD IDEAS OF PARENTING NEED AN UPDATE

These ideas about parenting, and the separation of parenting and work, are long overdue for renovation. It’s time to radically rethink what parenting and working can and should look like. We can’t keep doing things the way they’ve always been done and expect new results.

We want a place for parents to be their full selves, and to tell honest stories about what parenting really looks like. We know that parenting is as incredible as an MBA in teaching you new leadership and executive skills, and we believe that you should be seen as someone valuable and important to the workplace, because the skills you’re growing are exactly what the workplace needs.

We believe that by telling true, honest stories of parenting, and by creating community for parents to come together, we can create an amazing new future of work. In our accelerator, we the breadth of ways that people are doing work differently. One member, Alicia Jabbar, said "I had so many models of women doing entrepreneurship and parenting that it freed me to find my own way. I was also pushed to think bolder around boundaries and skillful ways of saving time and energy.”

These are the reasons I created Startup Parent.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

PS — Will you share your story? I am always looking for more stories and ideas about the future of parenting and work, and I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

• Are you in a workplace that supports parents and caretaking? Leave a note in the comments with how your company or workplace is changing the game.

• Are you an advocate for working parents and caretakers? I'd love to know about the work you do and the work your support.

• What wonderful models of work and parenting have you seen? What work styles, programs, policies, or templates have made parenting better for you?

• Have you experienced toxic workplaces or discrimination against you because of your parenting and caretaking roles? Let me know if that's happened to you or someone you know.

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.

• If you're a working mom looking for a community that understands you, apply to join The Wise Women's Council, our leadership incubator for entrepreneurs, executives, and managers who are also moms. The program runs annually and we open for applications twice per year. Click here to apply.

“I hear women say all the time, ‘I wish that I could only take 6 weeks of maternity leave, but then take every Friday off when my kids are little because that would make a difference,’” Morra Aarons-Mele shared with me. Fathers and mothers will confess things like, “Honestly, leave was great, but I rather be able to come in later or leave earlier going forward.”

Morra Aarons-Mele is an Internet marketer who has been working with women online since 1999. She is the founder of digital cause marketing agency Women Online and its database of women influencers, The Mission List, so she has worked with a lot of women, and knows their stories intimately. She’s also a parent to three kids who are all well past the toddler stages, and she took some time to reflect on setting up parental leave—and parental life—in today’s world of work.

Morra Aarons-Mele is the author of Hiding in the Bathroom, and the host of Hiding In The Bathroom— the podcast. This interview was originally published in July 2017.

Tell us about your book!

MORRA:  So my book is called “Hiding in the Bathroom” and it is an introverts roadmap to getting out there when you’d rather stay home.

Oh my goodness, I love that so much. How did you come up with the idea?

I don’t know, I guess just my life. Because I’m an extremely anxious introvert / almost recluse who has to go out and sell all the time. And so I developed all these skills and coping strategies. And that’s pretty much what the book is.

Tell me about your kids.

I have three kids and my youngest is two. I kind of want to have more babies, but I’m done. Toddlers are hilarious, but there is something so precious about babies. My oldest is in elementary school, so that’s as much as I know. My kids are 8, 6 and 2.

Did you take maternity leave? How did you decide what to do?

Well, I worked for myself, so I didn’t have any institutional maternity leave. Which is very different. For my first kid I was just graduating from graduate school when I got pregnant and it was a very uncertain time. But I was younger and really determined to not go back to work for anyone right away. So I basically scraped it together doing freelance consulting and just made it work. I would say that with my first, I didn’t really go back to work until he was 6 months old. I did maybe 15-20 hours a week of consulting at most in that period.

Then my freelance business really started to pick-up, becoming a full time gig with a good income stream.  I lost my father to cancer when I was 8 months pregnant with my second son. So I don’t feel like I got any “maternity leave” as I was grieving and working on his estate — that whole time was really just a blur. The good thing is that my business is cyclical and both my sons were born at the end of the year, so I was able to slow down and not renew certain contracts. But I don’t even remember a leave, I was just breastfeeding and sitting on my laptop and trying to make it all work.

My third kid was born two years ago and I finally had a very intentional strategy. At that time my business was five employees, so I decided to work like hell and store up enough cash before the baby came so I could actually take a leave. Miraculously, it worked. She was born in early December and I was able to sustain the business for 5 months based on the cash that I’d stockpiled.

Again, I wouldn’t say I took a full-time leave (I moved to LA when she was 5 weeks old which was it’s own kind of shit show). But when you’re an entrepreneur or a freelancer, maternity leave is messy. If you work at Google like some of my friends do, they get x weeks off during which they just get to say “goodbye work.” But that was never going to happen for me; I was too insecure and felt too responsible to make money.

I was anxious the even during that third more official maternity leave, trying to do business development just a few months from my laptop while nursing.

What was the impact on you having so much going on while your children entered the world?

I sort of believe we all f-ck up our kids in different ways. I’ve always worked from home and had a nanny full-time. So for us it’s always been this weird thing that mom’s at home but she can’t talk to you right now.

A lot of people were really jealous of me because when I needed to nurse, I could just walk upstairs. It was such an incredible gift all three times. I’ve never had to have that heartbreaking separation. I’d bring them traveling with me when they were little — just wrap the baby up in the Moby wrap and go. So I feel like when they were tiny babies it was wonderful because I could just stay at home and not get dressed, but still nurse and work.

It was actually harder when they got a little bit older and I had to go back out into the world. I found that harder in a way, when they were too big to take with me.

Image from Distributed.blog — Creator: Tony Luong — Copyright: © Tony Luong 2019

Could you expand on that, the kind of help you have?

I’m a big believer in my nannies. I pay an outrageous amount of money for my nannies and I always have, but I just feel like it’s a gift for me and I honor it.

I’ve always been shocked when people think that since I work from home I’m also taking care of my baby.

Exactly! You know for me, I work so hard at my business so that I have control over my time and I have the autonomy. It’s sort of ironic because I work a lot, but I feel like as long as I am the one deciding that, I’m fine.

It sounds like you were able to take more control of your leave as your business grew — is that true?

Absolutely, but I would say that the pressure actually grew at the same time. As I had more kids I had more financial pressure. Also, I have to say that I’m super fortunate to have a husband who is also a great breadwinner. But with my first kid it felt the most like I was making it up as I went along but there were fewer responsibilities. The second two it was more like, “I have a family to support at home and I need to keep this business going.”

If you could design a maternity leave policy, what would it look like?

For me it’s all about the individual fit and flexibility. I understand that this is hard at larger companies, but that people were able to really understand their personal fit and what would work for them. For example, I know so many people who would be happy to take less of a maternity leave upfront but then have more flexibility as their kid got older. I’ve heard that more times than I can count. “I wish that I could only take 6 weeks of maternity leave, but then take every Friday off when my kids are little because that would make a difference.” or “Honestly, leave was great, but I rather be able to come in later or leave earlier going forward.”

So I’d rather have a system where it actually worked in a holistic way that suited us. For some women maternity leave is really generative and their ready to get back, for others it’s physically deeply demanding and they need more time. I think the construct of asking for more maternity leave—which is amazing—unfortunately keeps us in this pigeon hole instead of increasing flexibility in an on-going way, so that they can work their best all the time with kids.

As an entrepreneur you learn that. Like I know that from 4PM to 7:30PM I’m brain dead, so I don’t work then. I hang out with my kids and I exercise and then I hop back online at night. As an entrepreneur with kids, you’re forced to find to work that works for you.

As an entrepreneur with kids, you’re forced to find to work that works for you.

I know so many women who would want to negotiate for more flexibility to make work feasible.

Oh my god, yes. If it was up to me, everyone would have unlimited, paid time off and a chunk of leave to take off as they wished. For me, my dad was dying too. I think that if everyone everyone had time off that would do a ton to remove the caregiving stigma. I think that people without kids should be able to work the way they want. Same for people caring for aging parents.

Here’s the thing, I totally respect women who want to completely disconnect from work. I just think we all deserve flexibility to do what suits us.

— 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.

• If you're a working mom looking for a community that understands you, apply to join The Wise Women's Council, our leadership incubator for entrepreneurs, executives, and managers who are also moms. The program runs annually and we open for applications twice per year. Click here to apply.

When I was in my twenties, I brazenly thought that pregnancy would be a breeze—the real problem I was focused on was finding a partner. In school and society for so many years, we'd been taught not to have sex, and that any procreation activities would instantly result in pregnancy. By the time I decided to have kids in my thirties, I figured that I'd get pregnant according to plan, and all of the skills and tools I'd used to succeed in life so far would translate readily into managing this next chapter of my life.

Goodness, I was in for a wakeup call. I got pregnancy and parenthood so wrong.

Pregnancy was nothing like I expected, and my Type A organizational skills were useless when it came to managing morning sickness or colicky babies. Shortly after giving birth to my first child, I felt overwhelmed, abandoned, and ashamed. I believed that if I just hustled hard enough, and I pushed through, then I would succeed as a working mom even though other people didn't before. I had no clue how much this was a failure of society—all I’d gleaned was that to have it all, you had to be well organized, work hard, and push through. But when my kid was six months old, my overwhelm was so big that I reached out to fellow parents and asked them to share their advice and secrets with me.

Since then, over the past four years, I've interviewed 200+ parents about building businesses & raising kids. Our discussions go in depth, from fertility struggles, to wondering if having kids is the right choice for you, to the ways in which society is broken when it comes to raising our future generations.

Eventually, I turned these private interviews into a public show called the Startup Parent Podcast—which has now surpassed 1 million downloads and is rated in the top 1% of podcasts globally. After interviewing hundreds of moms (and many dads), here's what they consistently tell me about parenting while navigating business and leadership at the same time:

1: IT’S LONELY

What people don’t tell you about running a business—or even any high-powered leadership track—is that it’s really freaking lonely. In our executive leadership incubator, we consistently hear from people that leadership is incredibly challenging and tough. Being in a position of making decisions that affect other people's lives is deeply stressful.

Plus, if you have kids, your life doesn't always look like your colleagues. After your day job, you go home to another 90+ hours of your second shift. Parenting young children is overwhelming, and any extra time you used to have—for catching up on email, sorting through your todo lists, or getting a workout in—are now gone.

2: PEOPLE CONSTANTLY SHAME YOU FOR DOING THINGS WRONG

The world is full of intense criticism and free-flowing advice for parents. Much of this advice is contradictory, making you feel completely nutty for trying to understand it. Every step of your parenting life is heaped with critique, and nearly everyone thinks they can do parenting better than you.

From the time you get pregnant or the day you bring your child home, people warn you about terrible things that can happen, they offer unsolicited advice, and they readily complain about any kid that isn't perfectly quiet and still.

The same goes for business leadership: the influx of complaints or critiques is loud, while the positive feedback loop is often quieter. The emotional challenge of doing both at the same time asks you to develop a thick skin, and tap into a deeper resource of self-confidence and wisdom that you can lean on. 

3: HUSTLE CULTURE MAKES YOU WANT TO BARF

There's a mythical idea of having it all, and achieving the perfect elixir of "balance." It seems like "do more" is the only answer people have, and yet there's no way you can do more. Some days it seems like everyone on the internet is screaming at you to hustle harder.

How on earth can you hustle any more? You literally work from the crack of dawn until the wee hours of the evening, and parents come to me in tears, asking how they can possibly get it all done. My response is this: parents, you are already the definition of hustle. You can't hustle any harder, you literally work 16-18 hours a day, 7 days a week. You're a parent. So instead of pushing harder, your next step is to find what you can do less of. This is not comfortable for any Type-A overachievers out there: finding what to cut and how to reduce your workload is a tough skill.

→ If you're struggling with overwhelm, I wrote a short book on how to reduce your workload and streamline your business, which you can get for free here - Do Half: Work Better By Doing Less.

4: BUSINESS ADVICE THAT DOESN'T TAKE PARENTING INTO ACCOUNT IS MOSTLY USELESS

What I wasn't prepared for was how much basic business advice would have to be thrown out the window. So much business advice is offered by powerful, white, un-encumbered men (also known as "Ideal Workers") who can work 50+ hours per week, who have wives  assistants or fewer responsibilities in their communal acaretaking lives. But for involved dads, for millennial parents, for single parents, or dual-career households, this idea of a one "breadwinner" and one "at-home manager" is not representative of the modern family.

This advice, these historical stacks of business books, they do not work for people with caretaking responsibilities and pregnant bellies and breastfeeding and bottle feeding and single motherhood. They don't work for involved dads, and it doesn't really work for equal co-parents, either. When you add caretaking into the mix and stop relying on a economic safety net of stay-at-home-parents (usually mothers), the world of work and the way we look at economic contributions needs to change.

What people tell me is they wish they'd known how much their work lives would change when they became parents, so they could be better prepared for the transition.

Here's the truth: the work world is not designed for working parents

The world of work as we know it today is not really designed for women, and it's actively biased against parents, especially moms. So many people tell me that they wish they knew more of this before they became a parent. It feels like people either minimize it by saying "It's all worth it" or they try to terrify you and create a panic response. People come to me bewildered, then confused, and then angry as they start to see how the world around them is not designed for working parents.

5: WE’D BE BETTER PREPARED FOR MOTHERHOOD IF PEOPLE TOLD THE FULL TRUTH.

One of the biggest challenges of becoming a working mom—and a working dad, and a working parent—is confronting the myths, cultural tropes, and falsehoods about what it's really like to be a working parent. I’ve come to see the lies of motherhood as a trap, and these lies are woven together to keep parents (mothers especially) underpaid and stuck.

When we unconsciously subscribe to these myths without challenging them, women end up competing with each other to uphold these standards by striving to do it all (sending thank-you notes, looking cute, losing the weight, home for dinner, intensive parenting, plus a top job, then making it look easy to others, not admitting the tough parts).

When we all do this, even just a little, the effect is huge: we set up the next set of new parents for total failure, and we don’t make the broader cultural changes we need to make. The media messages about pregnancy and parenting (“it’s all worth it",” “you’ll want to be just a mother,” “pregnancy is glowy and natural,”), in conjunction with our own complicity in hiding the truth, ends up perpetuating these myths about what parenting is supposed to be like. This sets us all up for failure, because when working parents thrive, workplaces get better for everyone—and there's research to back this up.

6: GOING IT ALONE IS IMPOSSIBLE — GET AS MUCH HELP AS YOU CAN

I see new moms everywhere fighting to keep their jobs while staying afloat the first year of their kids' lives. Our culture rewards and prizes people who are able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and "make it work," and so, as a result, we leave moms very isolated and alone during the first year of a child's life when they so desperately need support and community. Our culture prizes individualism and independence at the cost of communal health.

Parenting doesn't work well in this environment. Parents need community, support, and interdependence. Parenting taught me the value of community across all levels of my life: the support I need specifically within the home, the people my kid needs to be connected to, the local parenting groups to share stories, the local people to stay in touch with my own identity, the virtual communities of other business parents, and the business forums that are talking about a future of work that includes people with caretaking responsibilities.

What parents—and leaders—tell me time and time again is how much they wish they'd asked for help earlier, and more often. If I could give new parents advice (only if you want it!), I’d tell you that when someone volunteers to help you, say yes. Accept any offers of help (as long as it's actually helpful), and hire sooner, as soon as you can, to get support in your life and business.

Your life and your business won't work if you run yourself to the ground. “Being resilient doesn’t mean you do things on your own. It means you leverage the community and the power of the people around you,” says Jess Sims, one of my favorite Peloton instructors. Parents—mothers in particular—need more support and community.

We need other people.

So, to wrap it up:

1. Parenting can be intensely lonely, especially if you’re a founder or a business leader. Find your people, and keep joining groups until you find them.

2. People will shame you for everything under the sun when it comes to parenting. Ignore what most people say except the people you trust the most. There are thousands of ways to parent.

3. Hustle culture is all over the place, especially in business. As a parent, you’re already hustling and working from 6am until 10pm. Hustle culture advice doesn’t work for parents. Instead, you need a rest culture.

4. Most business advice is based on an outdated model of work. The old models were breadwinner husbands with wives at home. Business advice that doesn’t take parenting into account is mostly useless.

5. Most of the cultural stories around motherhood are myths. We’d be better prepared for motherhood if people told the full truth.

6. You can do it all if you work hard enough. Going it alone is impossible. Get as much help as you can.

— 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.

• If you're a working mom looking for a community that understands you, apply to join The Wise Women's Council, our leadership incubator for entrepreneurs, executives, and managers who are also moms. The program runs annually and we open for applications twice per year. Click here to apply.

Getting pregnant means entering into a world of advice and fear about all the things that could potentially go wrong.

But what does the data say? Are these “pregnancy rules” based on truth or myth?

When economist Emily Oster got pregnant, she also got curious about the advice she was getting. Some recommendations were based on her age alone, and sometimes she found it difficult to get any answers at all. So, she started digging into the data.

Eventually, Emily’s research became Expecting Better: Why Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong—and What You Really Need to Know, a book about how to make your own decisions, the things that matter most when it comes to pregnancy, and why it’s not so easy as just making blanket rules for everyone.

Emily Oster is a highly-respected economist and professor at Brown University. Her research interests range from development and health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Emily’s work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the bestseller SuperFreakonomics, and FiveThirtyEight, and more.

This interview originally aired in October 2019.

FULL SHOW NOTES: https://startupparent.com/080

STARTUP PARENT NEWSLETTER: https://startupparent.com/newsletter

THE WISE WOMEN'S COUNCIL: https://startupparent.com/wwc

DAD'S GROUP: https://startupparent.com/dads

The problem with conventional policy and food guidelines for pregnant women can be summed up like this: the current recommendations for prenatal nutrition were estimates based on men’s bodies, not women’s. Early nutrition recommendations were adjusted mathematically for a smaller frame—and then modified again to account for fetal growth.

This is… not great.

In this interview (originally aired in 2018), Lily shares how she put these books together: she reviewed 934 studies on food and health, as well as her successful pilot programs that helped people cut gestational diabetes by half.

Plus, we talk about the entrepreneurial path Lily took in her own life, how she figured out a “pieced together” childcare plan while writing her books, and why she decided to become an entrepreneur.