AMY GALLO: Danna Greenberg, you are the perfect person to have this conversation with.
DANNA GREENBERG: Amy Gallo, I am so happy to be back here having this conversation with you.
AMY GALLO: You are a behavioral psychologist at Babson, so you know work, you’ve researched work in motherhood. You wrote this amazing book called Maternal Optimism, which encourages us to see the positives of being a working mom, and you were on our 2019 episode called The Upside of Working Motherhood. Such a good episode. I left that conversation—my daughter was 12 at the time, she’s now 17—thinking that parenting an adolescent was going to open up all of this opportunity and freedom in my career and that I was just going to feel released from the burdens of early childhood parenting. I want to play a clip from that 2019 episode because this is what I latched onto.
DANNA GREENBERG: All of a sudden, for me, there’s this energy to engage in my research, in my writing, in leadership in the college in a way that I just didn’t have before. And so, it’s a really exciting phase. There’s also a lot of positive feedback that starts to come from your young adult children that you don’t get from a toddler or an elementary schooler. When you’re dealing with little children, there often can be more angst intention and things that they say that make you realize or think, Oh, my gosh, they’re upset I work. Or, “Why do you work mommy?” Or those kinds of questions that cause you angst. When they’re older, they’re excited about your working.
AMY GALLO: So why did I feel so blindsided by how hard parenting a teenager is while working?
DANNA GREENBERG: And you’re blaming me.
AMY GALLO: I am blaming you. Yeah, no, I’m not blaming you. But it’s funny, I’ve been going back and listening to that previous episode because I’m like, “Where did Danna promise me it would get better? And that hasn’t happened.” So, I have a slight bone to pick with you about that.
DANNA GREENBERG: Okay. So we’ll get into that bone and we’ll see if it really is my fault or if it’s just the realities of working motherhood.
AMY GALLO: That’s right.
DANNA GREENBERG: Working motherhood doesn’t end, God willing. Our children continue to age and grow and our work and career shifts and change, but they are still very much in your life.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. When I thought about being a working mom of a younger kid, pre-elementary school, navigating daycare and all that, one of the things that I was so frustrated by that I missed from my pre-child life was the ability to focus. And I did feel that return because at 12 she was more independent. We could leave her alone in the house for short periods of time. There were things that just felt a little more spacious. And I kept envisioning that being a clear trajectory toward freedom, and I think it’s been bumpier than I expected. And I don’t think I quite understood the emotional effort and labor that parenting a teenager was going to be.
DANNA GREENBERG: And I’m so glad you pointed out that issue of emotion. If we think about parenting, we have to think about the stage the child’s at. And you said it right away, right? In middle school, they’re starting to have a little bit more freedom. You can start to leave them alone. They start to feel like big kids because they’ve got some of that freedom. And they hit those late teens, that adolescent period in high school, and I’d consider even into college, and there is so much emotional turmoil of what they are doing as adolescents. As adolescents, they are at that stage of trying to figure out, Who am I going to be? How do I start to become independent? I don’t want to be with you, but I need to be with you and I want you.
And so that’s a struggle for them emotionally. And when we talk about family labor and family work, we’re actually getting much more nuanced in our understandings of what family work is. We used to just talk about the idea of family and caregiving and now we’re dividing it up a little bit and talking about the difference between emotional labor at home and cognitive labor at home and managerial labor at home. And we actually know emotional labor is the part that’s most stressful for us when we come into our work. So, this idea that you’ve got more emotional labor with this adolescent young woman has real implications for your experiences at work—whereas when your kids were little, maybe there was more managerial work. And actually, we know managerial labor at home positively affects our well-being and our thriving at work. So you’re seeing this rise in emotional labor, which then has real direct implications for how you’re feeling about work.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, the emotional labor is just so real. And that makes me think about, why have we invited you back? I have spent all week so excited to talk to you. And I think for me personally, I want to unpack this period of my parenting and working and understand it a little bit better, understand why I felt blindsided, but I also want our listeners, if they’re in the same phase of life, to have that same validation, but also for those who aren’t yet there to understand what’s coming. And any parenting stage, it’s a little bit like you can verbally tell someone it’s going to be hard, there are going to be new challenges, but they don’t actually feel it until they’re in it. But I’m hoping we can help people.
The last thing I really want to do with this show is I want to help people who work with parents of teenagers to understand that we’re not done. I think there’s this sense, and you write about this in the book, we talked about this in our last conversation, that when you’re the parent of a young child, you have so many duties, so many things to take care of. And I think there’s this impression that as your child gets older, those evaporate. I wouldn’t even say they lessen. I think there’s the sense that people forget that you’re a working parent. Is that what you’re seeing in your research and your work in your own experience?
DANNA GREENBERG: Absolutely. One of the things that we have been so focused on—and maybe it was a first step that we needed—was to make leaders and organizations aware that working parents exist at all, and aware, particularly, of issues of pregnancy and parental leave and return to work and how to support parents in that early career working phase and helping them understand how critical it is that parents’ reentry after having a child, after being on maternity leave, sets the stage for their career trajectory and for their organizational commitment. So we’ve made a lot of progress there, but we haven’t made a lot of progress on those next stages. And when I look at the research that’s out there, most of the research actually looks at the implications of working parents on the child, not of having an adolescent on the working parent. So we actually have some great research that Kathleen McGinn’s done that looks at working parents and adult children and what are the implications for adult children in their careers? And I know we talked about that in our last episode.
There’s also more recent research that looked at how people’s experience of work family adult parents affects their adolescent children. And so we see something we call transference. When parents feel enriched about work, it brings home positive feelings to their children and affects an adolescent’s well-being. We have not done any research that looks at the reverse, that says, how does the adolescent’s behavior, how does parenting the adolescent, how does parenting that a young adult affect that parent at work? And that’s the research we need to do, and I think the research then enables us to bring that conversation into the popular press, into organizations to say, “These challenges are real and here’s the better ways we can be supporting these parents.”
AMY GALLO: Yeah, I want to end this episode right now and tell you to go and do that research immediately. We desperately need it.
DANNA GREENBERG: Well, the good news …. And I’m on sabbatical next year and it’s on my agenda. And actually this conversation is definitely helping me think more what are the key issues and questions we need to be looking at in that research?
AMY GALLO: And I could come up with a laundry list of complaints about being the working parent of a teenager, but you’ve already alluded to, and I want to make sure we don’t miss the positive pieces of it. And that transference, to see my daughter relish in my professional successes is amazing. It literally brings tears to my eyes even thinking about the moments where she’s been most proud of me. She came to Australia with me last year, got to see me speak in front of a large audience for the first time. And just knowing she was in the room was the best talk I’ve ever given. So, there are so many upsides, and yet I do want to dig a little into the downsides.
We asked some of our listeners to weigh in if they had similar concerns, and we heard from this woman who actually worked in the military. She actually had been deployed when her child was young and was not happy about missing parts of her childhood, but she kept thinking it was going to get easier. And now her work life is so disrupted by her teenage daughter. And this woman, actually her teenager, is 20. So, I have the sense it continues on. And I know all three of your kids are now in their twenties, so I imagine you have a perspective on that, but let me share a little bit of what she says. She says, “While her physical needs have diminished over time, her emotional needs have increased dramatically. I don’t have to drop everything for an emergency, but I still find myself having to drop everything for the emotional meltdowns, over grades, over friends, over boys, over her part-time jobs, over whether she will graduate on time, over taking the wrong train, over getting a traffic ticket. The list goes on. She has called me in the middle of presentations, in meetings, frequently with tears and high pitch squeaking to the point I have difficulty understanding her. While my company was very understanding and flexible, this did not make for ideal working conditions.”
How do you think about that need to be present for your kid emotionally while trying to balance work? And how do we normalize that part of working parenthood is actually being available to your child?
DANNA GREENBERG: And that availability we know is really hard with adolescents and young adults, because they have these moments where they want to talk. And you can’t say, “Oh, let me finish this presentation. I’ll call you back in a half hour.” Because the moment has left.
AMY GALLO: And I’ve actually done that where I’ve said, “Let me call you back.” And she’ll say, “Never mind. I don’t want to talk about it.”
DANNA GREENBERG: “Never mind. I don’t want to talk.” And then they hang up very quickly, and then you feel really guilty about the whole situation.
AMY GALLO: Exactly.
DANNA GREENBERG: I think the other thing to be aware of what they are doing is they’re emotionally dumping in a really safe space. And so they may call you… if it’s a student who’s in college, for example, they’re walking across campus going to the class and they want to talk to you about a mean thing a teacher said or a bad grade or a problem they had with a partner the night before, and they spew at you this emotional rhetoric and then they hang up and you’re left with this very heavy emotional state. Be aware they’ve gone on. That’s what they needed to do. They needed to get that emotion out there. They needed to get it out on a safe space, and then they’re off with their friends are off doing their lives. And so, I think attending to the fact that that emotional roller coaster is part of where they’re at, and it’s not as devastating as it may feel in that phone call. And so that may enable you to hold less of that emotion as you go through your workday.
AMY GALLO: Well, and even thinking of it as a normal … You’ve already normalized for me the fact that we have this cognitive emotional load with teenagers that wasn’t the same when our kids were younger, and that negatively impacts work. I think that’s the part that I found really tough is that, Why am I letting this bother me while I’m sitting here? Or why can’t I return my focus that was disrupted by this phone call or by this series of texts? I actually had this experience this summer. She went to an overnight program, a pre-college program, where her first night she was in a single dorm. It was her first time ever sleeping alone. And she was great. She was happy to be there. And then at 2:00 AM … I left and told her my phone will be on in case something comes up. At 2:00 AM, I get a text that she doesn’t feel well.
And then I spend the next three hours helping her figure out is she actually sick? Is this just anxiety? Is there a mental health issue that needed to be addressed in that moment? There were periods of time where I got to go back to sleep, but then the text would come again. And the interesting part about it was the next day, of course, I was exhausted. And when I told friends and coworkers, “Oh, I’m so tired. This happened.” The range of responses from fellow working moms went from, “Why didn’t you go pick her up immediately?” To, “Why didn’t you just turn off your phone and tell her good night?” So, I think there’s also embedded in this … Especially for me, and I’ll tell you, I’m nervous about this episode because I’m nervous people who listen, go, “What is her problem? Just turn off your phone when you’re at work. Don’t answer the call from your teenager. Tell her to solve it on her own, direct her to her other parent.” All of which things I choose in the moment not to do. I’m not sure what my question is in there. I’m doing the emotional unloading on you the way my teenager does on me. But I guess my question is how do you guard against what feels like very harsh judgments from others about how we choose to balance our parenting and working?
DANNA GREENBERG: Yeah, and that harsh judgment you’ve probably been feeling for a really long time.
AMY GALLO: Yes.
DANNA GREENBERG: And this is the hardest part of being a working parent is how do I figure out what is the right model for me? There are so many different ways to parent, and I can tell you with older children, I see it now that I have friends who manage work and parent in so many different ways and parent in so many different ways, and their young adults are all equally interesting and successful, whatever that means. But we live in a society where we feel judged and we do get judged. And there’s an idea out there we call identity asymmetry, that idea of who I want to be as a working mother may be different than what my colleagues are saying.
This idea of, well, why didn’t you just turn off your phone? Or a friend who says, “Well, why didn’t you just pick her up?” We have those judgments coming at us all the time from all directions, and it’s really important to remember they’re not just coming from our work colleagues, they’re coming from people in our home systems or in our family systems. And turning that off is the perpetual challenge, particularly for the working mother. How do I say the path I’m choosing to take is the right path for me? So, if you have a relationship with Harper and you’ve chosen to parent in a way that she knows you’re available, you have to stay true to that way of parenting.
And that may mean that you’re going to interface with your work and your colleagues differently then if you said, “I’m always going to turn my phone off at certain points.” We have to stop judging and telling people what’s the best way to integrate work and family. We need to recognize different children have radically different needs. To your last point about this issue of emotional and mental health, I think of families who have gone through traumas. Their need to be available to their child is very, very different. And we don’t know what their story is. And so, I think the more we can stop judging other people who do it differently, the easier we’re going to make it for a working parent of an adolescent.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. As you’re saying that, I’m thinking in my head the phrase, “that wouldn’t work for us.” Someone who’s like, “Just pick her up.” Well, that wouldn’t work for us. “Just turn off your phone.” That wouldn’t work for us. Because this is the relationship my child and I have developed, my partner too. The way we’ve decided to parent is the way we’ve decided parent based on a lot of thought, I’ll be honest. A lot of thought and a lot of discussion. And this is what works for us.
DANNA GREENBERG: So, this way you’ve constructed being a working mother feels good to you, and it’s really hard to feel good about your path when you feel like you’re being judged.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about boundaries. That letter I read from our listener about the constant interruptions. I’m in the middle of a presentation, I’m getting this call, I don’t know if it’s genuinely an emergency, because let’s be honest, teenagers have really big feelings, and I think in the moment they don’t know if it’s an emergency or not. So how do you respond in those moments? How do you set boundaries both with the kid, in your own mind, and with colleagues who may have to be interrupted in the middle of the meeting if you have to take a call? What are your recommendations around those boundaries?
DANNA GREENBERG: Well, I want to start out talking about that boundary issue can be harder for some of us than others. So, I know, again, you’ve talked a lot about the idea of integration. Am I someone who puts work, family, and community and can do them all at once and interactively, or am I someone who needs to create boundaries? And I’ll tell you, I was someone who needed, desperately, boundaries. I loved that I went to work in the morning, my children were at school, they were in childcare, whatever that was, they didn’t have access to their phone when they were in those younger periods. And then when I came home, I could focus on them.
And in today’s world, starting with a post-COVID world where there is much less physical separation of work and family for so many people. And then add on, as you said, you’ve got an adolescent or a young adult, they’ve got a phone and they need you when they need you. So, for me personally, as someone who really likes to segment life, that integration has just been personally hard to understand and to make sense of and to figure out, how do I parent and work in this new sequence and time? So, for some people, this is going to be maybe really easy because it just fits with who they are, and for some of us who like to segment, it’s much harder.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, I’ve been an integrator. I work at home a lot of the time when I’m not traveling. I have brought my daughter to HBR’s offices for days. I just like it to be a mix, and I like to have that flexibility. But it does mean I lose that ability to focus sometimes because I’ll pick up my phone to send a WhatsApp message to a colleague, and I’m seeing 10 texts from my daughter asking me, “Can you get back to me right now? Can you call me?” And I think one of the sacrifices of that approach is the focus for me.
DANNA GREENBERG: Absolutely, because we know there’s real switching costs. We know that cognitive switching cost of moving from one activity to the next, whether they’re work activities or work-family activities are really high. And so, each of us has to figure out our own path of what that looks like. You may need to say to your colleagues, “Look, I may need to step out, but don’t worry, I will come back to this.”
So, part of what you want to do is validate, for your colleagues, your bosses, I’m getting my work done, I’m focused on my work and career, and I’m setting for you, expectations of where I am. So, I’ll give you an example. I never step out of the classroom. When I am teaching, I am all in. I’m in the classroom and I turn my phone off. My daughter a number of years ago when she was applying to med school, was going to be getting her MCAT score, which is the absolute critical thing to find where they can apply. And I told my students, “I may step out of class today.” Because for me to be able to pick up the phone at the moment when she found out whatever the outcome was going to be, I knew I had to be there for her. I knew for me, that was really critical as a parent. So, knowing those defining moments for you as a parent are really important. When do I know I need to be available? And then how do I try to proactively manage my colleagues and bosses if I can?
AMY GALLO: Did you worry your students would think differently of you for setting that expectation that you might step out?
DANNA GREENBERG: I absolutely thought my students would think differently. And again, back to that idea of I’m a segmenter, that means I don’t bring a lot into the classroom about my family, my children. I bring a lot about my identity because I teach organizational psychology. I want them to understand identity at work, but I don’t bring my family in. And so this was going to be a very transparent moment for them of understanding this was a family situation and I needed to be a parent in the moment. And so I did think a lot about it in advance, and I think that’s that idea of proactively managing when you know you’re at those points.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, I can imagine doing that even with an understanding boss. I think there was something soothing to me about the proactivity of it as opposed to like, oh gosh, I get this text. I’m looking around in the meeting. Can I leave? Can I not? Am I trying to do both things now? Is everyone worried I’m distracted because I’m frowning at my phone and texting furiously? Am I not giving my child my full attention because I’m also trying to participate in the meeting? But proactively setting the expectation this interruption might happen. And for someone who works individually, which I often do, even setting that expectation with myself. I’m sitting down to do this thing, am I going to turn off my phone and not be available at all? Set the expectation with my kid that I’m not here for this time, or am I going to say, “You know what? It’s okay if I get interrupted. I just have to accept that as part of the course of this particular moment or this particular stage of parenting”?
DANNA GREENBERG: And we’ve been talking a lot about proactive with your boss, but you also need to be proactive with your family. And so really thinking for yourself, are there those moments at your work where you really just need to be present? Something’s really important going on. You mentioned before the idea of an understanding boss. Well, maybe you don’t have an understanding boss, or maybe you don’t have an understanding colleague, or maybe you have a new boss you’re building a relationship with. And so also being proactive in terms of at home. Is there somebody else Harper can call or reach out to if she needs somebody in that moment. Thinking about the fact that in that moment she really needs emotional support and who are the best emotional supports that you have in your network?
And so, one of the things, again, that’s really important to do is to keep building those relationships, not become so hyper focused on your child, on your nuclear family, on your work, that you don’t have that broader system of support to help you and figure it out. One of the things that I think is fascinating that we know from research is the adolescents, when they have those emotional needs, if it is a heterosexual couple, they do tend to go to the mother. And so how do you switch those dynamics around emotional labor and how do you help your partner engage in some of that more emotional caretaking that they may not be as comfortable doing? But you’re now empowering your partner to say, “I trust you to do this and to do this kind of caretaking in your unique way.” And so can it really help build and continue to build that co-parenting relationship.
AMY GALLO: Well, and to build that relationship with the child in the other parent. I’m incredibly lucky and the partner I chose who’s just incredibly smart emotionally and can be really present—partly because he’s a therapist—can be really present with our daughter. And there are times she wants to come to me about stuff, but there’s times she goes to him and I have said, “I can’t talk right now. Can you call Dada?” And she does or she doesn’t, and then she realizes she didn’t actually need help or whatever. I can be able to redirect her, which really, really helps.
DANNA GREENBERG: That’s right. And if we go back to what’s the job of the adolescent, it’s to become independent. You were saying that’s been a core to your family. And so, in a lot of ways you’re also teaching them they can be independent in these moments. I think the other thing that we forget about is that we’re teaching ourselves we don’t need to micromanage. And that has implications for us at work. That idea of saying, before, “A partner or a friend or someone else is going to handle this situation, they’re going to do it differently than me, and it’s going to turn out okay.” That has implications for how we are at work. We have to let people who work for us, who work with us also do things in ways that are going to be different than how we do it and knowing it’s still going to be successful.
And I think that’s something that’s probably different for you and I at this point in our career as I’m a division chair and an associate dean. I’m working in my division with 30 faculty, and I work with 100 faculty across campus. How they teach and what they do is very different than what I do, but it’s positive. And so, giving up control at home is really helpful for me of giving up control at work also.
AMY GALLO: Right. I’m sure people that you work with have made mistakes, have not done the thing that was best for the students or best for the university, and then they learned from it. And the mistakes are valuable. We have to let… not just adolescents—it’s a huge part of adolescence to take risks and fail and learn from them. That’s part of the work too. But it’s also part of adulthood. It’s part of living life. Part of working is to make those mistakes and learn from them, and I think we really demonize mistakes in the workplace in a way that’s really unhealthy.
DANNA GREENBERG: Absolutely. And I’ve done a lot of research actually on management education and the importance of mistakes and what we call critical incidents and those failures in the classroom that are so critical to our growth and our resilience and our developing that entrepreneurial mindset. And I think we’ve been talking a lot about adolescence, but when we think about that idea of young adults, when you’re a working mother, you’ve got a long career, you have a lot of knowledge, you know a lot of things. You’ve worked with a lot of young people who have made a lot of career mistakes, and you watch your young adults starting to embark on their own career journey, and there is a part of you that wants it to go well… that doesn’t want them to make the mistakes you made or the mistakes you see other people make or the fears you have about their long-term happiness and success,—however you define success. And a reminder that those mistakes are absolutely critical to that journey and can be really helpful.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, yeah. Oh, that will be a lifelong lesson for me, I can tell. I want to go back to the relationship with your boss and your colleagues around this. And we talked about being proactive around a meeting that might get interrupted. Do you recommend having a larger conversation about this phase of parenting and what it means? Is there some education we might do of our colleagues or bosses, or is that not appropriate?
DANNA GREENBERG: I think it’s like everything else that we ever talk about, it depends. There’s not a one-size-fits-all. We’ve talked about the idea of if you have a boss or a colleague where you feel confident about who you are and where you’re at and you feel good about your work and you’re being recognized to your work, those are places where I really do encourage people to have those more explicit conversations, because back to our initial conversation, it’s invisible in the workplace. And the only way we start to make working parents of adolescents visible is by having those conversations.
But you can do that when you’re in a place of power, and unfortunately, many people are not in that place. They’re in a place where either they have a boss who has a more difficult relationship with them, or they have colleagues who they may not entirely trust. And if those are the situations you’re in, being that transparent may not be what’s most successful for you to do in those moments. And so, figuring out ways to create boundaries for yourself that you’re not being inauthentic to who you are, but perhaps you’re not entirely revealing. This goes back to the same old choices we have about identity that we’ve talked about. Do you pass, do you reveal, or do you conceal? And a lot of that has to do with how much power do I feel like I have in the system? How much confidence do I have that people trust me and know I’m doing a good job? And when you feel that way, I do encourage you to be more authentic about those conversations because they’re going to help the next working parent.
AMY GALLO: And I imagine you can test the waters a little, of like, “Oh, I’m tired. I was up with my kid who’s struggling a little bit.” And just see what happens. Not having this big conversation, “Let me tell you how hard it is to parent a teenager right now.” And, actually, I want to catch myself there too, because in the way that you really try to focus on both the positives and negatives of being a working mother, I think we often demonize teenagers and we talk about how terrible they are. I actually find my teenager pretty darn delightful and fun to be around. And are there moments that … yes, of course there are moments, and I could list lots of them, but I’m trying to embrace the challenge it’s presenting me as a professional, as a working mom, as a person, instead of focusing on just how terrible it is.
DANNA GREENBERG: I think one of the things that’s most fun about parenting a teenager is you get to practice some different skills. I actually teach first-year students and I love them. A lot of people look at me and go, “Oh my God, how do you spend a year with 18-year-olds.” And 18-year-olds, not unlike 15-year-olds or 21-year-olds are trying to figure out who do they want to be in this world? And so as a parent, even as educator, a lot of what I’m doing is no longer telling them who they’re going to be. You don’t know Harper, but coaching her through it, and coaching them through those processes of who do they want to become and giving up the idea that I can control who they’re going to become. They are going to be different than me, and that has to be okay. And that’s really hard in so many pieces to the puzzle that I don’t even want to go into. But it does enable you to think a little bit more of, I’m not managing them, I’m not telling them, but I have to come at them from a different angle, a more creative angle. And that can be a lot of fun to play with, right?
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, and this is something I take away from every conversation I have with you and certainly from your writing and research, is that the best thing I can do for her is to be a satisfied, fulfilled person. I have a friend who always says, “Parenting is a relationship, it’s not a task.” And I love to turn things into checklists and to-do lists, so I really would love to treat it like a task that I could achieve at, but it’s a relationship. And so, by being my best self in that relationship as often as I can… I’m not always, but that is nurturing and inspiring and supportive to her. You see these moments like a bad grade, a friendship rupture, a heartbroken where you’re like, “What can I do to fix it? And what can I do to shape her in this moment and to give her the life lesson?”
And sometimes it’s just about showing up and just being emotionally present because that’s what she needs to learn. And anyone who knows me knows that my family lives and dies by our calendar. We have a shared family calendar where everything goes in. And this has been one of the big lessons, is that I no longer have control over what my daughter does. She has a driver’s license, she has preferences, she has opinions. And so it used to be like I could say, “Here’s what you do after school every day. You’re going to art class or here, you’re doing six weeks of art camp.” And now she has a lot of opinions about what she does and a lot of it she’s creating and organizing … actually most of it she’s creating, organizing herself. And that is in some ways a big freedom, but it also introduces a lot of uncertainty into our family schedule.
And so, I don’t always know if she’s coming home right after school or going to band practice. I can ask her to inform me, but also, this may be the product of being in a chaotic public school system, but things change so fast. So sometimes band practice is canceled, sometimes the after school art program is closed and we just don’t know right away that’s going to happen. Any advice about managing that uncertainty? Because I know in that elementary school, middle school years, this is a lot of stress for parents of, How is my child getting this care? I’m less concerned about her safety, but I’m more concerned now about how do we organize ourselves and flow?
DANNA GREENBERG: And I love your comment about a calendar. Is it color-coded too? I’ve seen that with working parents also. For sure, it’s all color-coded, right?
AMY GALLO: Yep.
DANNA GREENBERG: One of the advice we often give to early-stage working parents is the importance of creating that structure and routine. It’s one of the things that takes stress off of a working parent. It’s one of the ways that we can ease work-family conflict, and enable parents to more successfully navigate work and family. And what you’re pointing out is, at this point in time you don’t have a lot of control over that. So, you’ve lost structure, which eases conflict intention, and you can’t bring the structure back. That’s not going to change. I can’t tell you, “Oh, create some structure into your life. What are you doing wrong?” I think the thing you have to think about is how do I best manage chaos, not controlling chaos? You’re not going to change the chaos of Harper’s life. You’re not going to be able to start to dictate to Harper, but what kind of management of that do you need so that you can do your work? I think that’s the question to really ask. Not so that you can control the calendar or not so that you can control her.
AMY GALLO: Why can’t I control everything, Danna?
DANNA GREENBERG: But bring it back to work. What kind of control do I need to know in order to manage my work schedule? So that could be everything from looking at your work schedule out and knowing, Okay, this week I have some flexibility, and so I can let Harper be a little bit more independent that week and know that if band practice is canceled and she needs a last minute pick up, I’ve got some flexibility in my schedule. And having some conversations with her in advance about where you don’t have flexibility, and with your partner. So I don’t know if you and your partner, when your kids were little, did monthly meetings perhaps. That can be really helpful if you did weekly meetings, but doing similar kinds of things. But now bringing Harper into that conversation, or hearing from Harper, what are the days where there’s something really important? Maybe it’s band tryouts. That’s a high emotional intensity. Maybe that’s a day you want to align. So trying to start to do some calendar planning with your adolescent and bringing them in as part of that conversation can be really helpful.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, I have to say, I was so excited about when she got to the age she could participate. We call it calendaring. “Should we calendar?” It’s a verb. And she, totally developmentally appropriate, was like, “I don’t want to do that. That’s your thing. I’m not into that.” And the more we enjoyed it, the less she enjoyed it because teenagers are also agenda detectors. If they detect you have an agenda, they’re like, “I’m out.” So there was a good, I would say, six months where it was this real struggle and we’d be like, “We’re calendaring.” And she’d just roll her eyes. And then what turned the page on it was that it became about the car, because we have two cars for three drivers. And so, we said, “Okay, we have to figure out who’s getting the car and it means whether you not you can drive to school.”
And she was like, “Okay.” And as long as she set the parameters. She said, “Sunday afternoons we can have a calendaring session.” And then she now is like, “I have to admit, I enjoy it.” And so we’ll start with the car, but then it’s also like, “What do you know about your after-school schedule? What do you know? Can you add that thing? You have that meeting with your college counselor? Can you put that on?” It’s not perfect, and I love your distinction between managing chaos versus controlling chaos because it is chaotic. Did you have any tools that you used when your kids were teenagers that worked for you?
DANNA GREENBERG: I think I tried to give myself grace. So “grace” meant talking to them about whatever season you’re in. Cross-country—I am not going to be at every cross-country meet. And I know I’m going to feel judged by the parents, working or not working, who are at every cross-country meet, but I’m not. And so, which ones might be important to you? Trying to understand that from them, or knowing for myself what were things that were priorities. My middle one did cross-country, ski raced, and played some lacrosse. Ski race was the priority for him. That was the important sport. And so, I really tried to manage my calendar in a way that it was like, I’m going to be present for those activities and not these other ones.
And that’s okay because in our parent-child, as you say, relationship, I know the priority for him is for me to see a ski race. It’s not to show up at a cross-country meet. And so that was really important to understand what is important to them as an adolescent and then important to my relationship. That was one piece of it. Similar to thinking about backup care, thinking about what will they do if they’re not a driver and you can’t pick them up?
Is the school a place where they can stay for a little while? Are they walking distance to a library, for example? Are they walking distance to a coffee shop? What does it look like if there are days where that chaos is going to emerge and you are not going to get there? And so thinking through those dynamics, even in your own head. You’re not going to tell them because they’re just going to roll their eyes and be like, “Well, why can’t you pick me up any time at any point? You’re my mother, you should be able to do that. Or, “You’re my parent, you should be able to do that.” But knowing in your head, what does backup look like in those chaotic moments that look very different? And so, some planning can be helpful.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, and I think about what we were talking about earlier about integrators. I have been the flexible parent partly because of the way my job works versus the way my partners does. So, I think there is some expectation that I should just be able to drop everything and show up if need be. And so that’s definitely taken some conversations around, “I just can’t. This is an important meeting,” or, “I need the time to focus today. I’m on a deadline for an article.” Or whatever it is. I actually think of those as really good conversations because, one, it level-sets our relationship and the expectations, but it also is modeling of negotiating with people in your life, teachers, friends about what you can and can’t do. I think those are really important lessons that we don’t actively teach adolescents that just come in so handy, especially as they start to enter the work world.
DANNA GREENBERG: Right. And one of the things to remember is they’re always watching you. And so, we always talk about that idea of the moment you and your partner go to whisper, Harper all of a sudden can hear everything-
AMY GALLO: “What are you whispering about?”
DANNA GREENBERG: “What are you whispering about in the back room?” And vicarious learning is just as real for adolescents as it is in the workplace. And so, Harper observing how do you make those choices in this moment will influence the choices that they’re going to make down the road. And so that clip you played about me saying, My kids are older and I’m feeling more excited and energized at work, was definitively true. I was not lying in that moment. But that does create some tensions and it’s important for adolescents to see you enjoy work and you get satisfaction out of that and that you’re having an impact through the work you’re doing. And so that does mean that you might be making different kinds of choices than if you didn’t have work in your life. And that has really important modeling implications down the road.
AMY GALLO: So can we talk, your kids are now older, you’ve made it through adolescence, but I’m sure there are other issues that come up. Tell me what’s ahead and paint me the most realistic picture.
DANNA GREENBERG: The realistic picture, right? Maybe you won’t want to go to the next stage. I don’t know. I think one of the things we have to start with is what’s going on. Just like we started with what’s going on for an adolescent, I think we have to start with what’s going on for 20-somethings, and 20-somethings in our current modern world. Certainly when I was a 20-something, my parents paid absolutely no attention to me. I went off, got a job, had no idea what my career was going to look like, I could pay my rent. And they were kind of like, “Oh, you’re launched.”
AMY GALLO: Yes, same.
DANNA GREENBERG: That launch process is much delayed for our emerging adults today, the 20s, because of economic situations, political uncertainty, constant changes in the workforce in the work world, is still very much a place where there is a need for active parenting. And again, we know that, from psychology research, that active parenting extends far into the late twenties in a way that decades ago it just didn’t. We also know that because of housing costs, which we’re talking a lot about these days, one of the repercussions is some of that emerging adulthood is spent in your home. And so, active parenting isn’t just active parenting on the phone, active parenting is done in your house. And so, parenting really does very much continue into those 20s period. And the challenge is they’re asking hard, big questions and there’s no more certainty of what the next stage of life looks like. So you mentioned before that Harper’s now starting to think about next phase plans and, like many of our young adults and adolescents, Harper sounds like next place plans are college. You finish college and now it’s completely unstructured.
And that sense of who do I want to be? What do I want my career to be like? Career is much more uncertain today with many more changes to it. And how do we start to parent them through these really significant choices around work, around relationships, around lifestyle, and when they’re making choices that are really different? And so, I always say there’s a part of me that worries about them far more now than I think I ever worried about them when they were zero to 15 or 18. And I also want to go back to that, similar to you, I am a fortunate person in the sense that we have economic stability in our house. Our children are fairly mainstream in terms of their educational needs, their interests, and we have our ups and downs, but we haven’t dealt with very significant mental health issues. And so, perhaps the worries that many other parents have, I didn’t have. But they’re creating lives for them and I want them to create independent lives where they are thriving, whatever those choices are, and it takes a long time to make those choices.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, I feel appropriately warned that there will still be involvement. And I actually had a little bit of preview with this with a friend and colleague who reached out who said, “My daughter’s doing her first internship and it’s a remote internship because of the way the work world works now, and I’ve become her de facto boss because she’s in the house. We’re both working. If something goes wrong, she comes to me. And so, I keep trying to get her to go back to her boss.” How do we not become their de facto boss when they start off in the work world?
DANNA GREENBERG: So the first thing I want to say to your friend is congratulations, because in a certain … It doesn’t feel that way. So you’re like, “What?”
AMY GALLO: I’m like, “That sounds terrible.”
DANNA GREENBERG: That sounds terrible, but congratulations because you’ve established a relationship with this emerging adult that they do want to come to you for advice. They have a choice of whether they’re going to come to you or not, and for whatever reasons, you’ve created the kind of trusting relationship that they want to come to you for advice. Not for everything because they want to go to other people for different things, but that’s pretty impressive and important to recognize and feel good about. Okay, so then the problem, which is you don’t want to be the boss, you want to be maybe a voice of advice, a mentoring, a support. And remote work has its really unique challenges around this particular question. You mentioned remote work with an early stage career person. And they’re in your home while you’re working. So, you’re kind of in this shared co-worker space.
AMY GALLO: That’s right. Your own WeWork.
DANNA GREENBERG: Your own WeWork. Your own little home WeWork environment. And we know actually from research that co-working space builds relationships, and at boards of advisors and developmental networks. And so, there is this natural tendency because you are in this shared workspace for anybody to go to another person. It just so happens this anybody is your kid, and you don’t want to be the only person in their network. The other challenge of remote work for early career workers is they don’t yet have a strong relationship with their boss and they want to do a good job, and maybe they’re worried about getting that return offer, and so they’re afraid to ask their boss or to tell their boss, “I don’t know something.”
So as a parent, if you can redirect them, that can be really helpful, even if you know the answer. To say, “Hey, look, I really don’t know the answer to that.” Or, “I don’t work in your organization, so I don’t know how your organization does it. Have you asked your boss?” Because asking for help is one of the things that we want to see people doing. And I love Wendy Murphy’s work on the idea of a network of developmental relationships. We can’t, any of us, have one person in our life and our work life that we go to for everything. No one is going to be our mentor, our sponsor, our ally. We need that network of developmental relationships. And so helping your child understand, “It’s great you come to me for some advice, but who’s in your network?” And starting to help them understand, I need to create that developmental network. Because down the road continuing to build developmental networks is going to be helpful for them in their careers.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, so helping them build their own personal board of directors, as some people call it.
DANNA GREENBERG: Exactly.
AMY GALLO: Who is in that cabinet? I feel like I need to have that conversation with Harper now. I think even starting early of not just for work questions, but life questions. Who do you go to? Because you come to me, I’m going to give you one perspective, and maybe it’s helpful, maybe it’s not, but you need to have other perspectives, and there’ll be things I won’t understand and things I don’t know. So, I love that.
I do want to ask a different line of question, because I think you and I both have been people who have taken this adolescent moment of parenting and doubled down on career. But I know of people, and I’m sure many of our listeners are thinking, I got two years left with my kid in my house, or, I want to take this as an opportunity to scale back so I can be more present for my kid. Any advice for women who are in that position?
DANNA GREENBERG: Absolutely, and I’m glad you asked the question because I actually have a family member who’s just made that choice. So one of the things that I think for us to remember and maybe learn from our young adults is the career is not linear. We are still of that generation where we think, Oh, I have invested all of this time in my career, and if I step away even for six months or a year, what does that mean about what I have done, about the career I’ve built? Am I letting down women? Am I letting down the next generation? Am I not modeling what it means to be invested in one’s careers? All of those questions come up for you, right?
AMY GALLO: Yep.
DANNA GREENBERG: And I think the generation behind us, we know, is doing career radically differently. They don’t have this sense of linearity to career. There are way more ebbs and flows and changes and taking time out of work to do other things. Maybe it has nothing to do with caretaking, traveling and seeing the world and experimenting and doing different things and coming back into paid work. And so, I think freeing yourself up from that idea—If I didn’t take any time off when they were little, why am I doing it now? Well, my needs are different now. I think one of the things that you need to proactively do is think about, when I return to work, how am I going to prepare myself for going back into paid work? So we actually, unfortunately, know that women who have gaps in their resumes due to caretaking are less likely to be employed than individuals who have gaps for other reasons.
So, thinking a little bit about if your real decision is around caretaking, maybe you don’t articulate that when you return to work if you have to go into the interview process, if it’s not your own company. How do I think about meaningful things I could be engaged in during this point? If your child is a young adult in high school, well, there is still a period of time they don’t need you. So, is there interesting different kinds of board work you could do during that time? Is there a community engagement passion you could explore? Are there other things that you can do that will build up and continue to use that work set that you have, but give you more space?
AMY GALLO: Yeah. You’re making me think of a friend who took a, she called it a reverse maternity leave, which is she had an only child in his senior year in high school. She didn’t take work off completely because she said, “I had time. I wasn’t going to not work.” But she was able to work very part-time and she said, “I never took the long maternity leave I wish I had when he was born, so I’m doing it now.”
DANNA GREENBERG: Good for her.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
DANNA GREENBERG: And that’s the other thing to think about: can you negotiate something with your employer? Back to that idea… sometimes we think it still has to be all or nothing, even if we’re doing remote work, even if we’re flexible work, we always think everything has to be full-time work. If this is a brief period in time, a year, maybe two years, trying to negotiate with your employer is a good start. They may say no for sure. Or taking advantage of the gig work. Are there ways that you could continue working during that time on a project basis? So, it is becoming more open and flexible about what you’re thinking about with regards to work at this moment in time and not being stuck in our old traditional linear career models.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Danna, I have found this conversation so comforting and validating and inspiring. It’s just been so helpful. So, thank you.
DANNA GREENBERG: My pleasure. I always love having conversations with you, and you’ve set an agenda for me as well as I think about going on sabbatical in another year—some things that, really, we need to better understand from an evidence-based perspective. So, thank you for the insight and conversation.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, thank you.
Again, Danna’s book is called Maternal Optimism: Forging Positive Paths Through Work and Motherhood. She wrote it with her colleague, Jamie Ladge. You can hear both of them in our 2019 episode, The Upside of Working Motherhood, where they give advice about managing expectations, transitions, and difficult times. Along with listening to that episode, I recommend reading the series of books that HBR created for working parents. There’s a book on managing your career, another one on doing it all as a solo parent and one on succeeding as a first-time parent. I contributed to the one titled Communicate Better with Everyone. Lots of sample language and practical solutions throughout all of these books.
Women at Work‘s editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoch, Tina Tobey Mack, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Robin Moore composed this theme music. I’m Amy Gallo, and you can get in touch with me, as well as Amy B, by emailing Womenatwork@HBR.org. And thank you Dolly Chugg, NYU professor and author for suggesting we do this episode and realizing how much I needed it.
