Kids benefit by having a working mother.
That’s the word from Harvard Business School where academics conducted a recent study. They said daughters with working mothers earned 6 percent more than women whose moms never worked outside the home.
Boys benefit too, it said. As grown men they spend an average of 7.5 more hours a week caring for their children and 25 more minutes doing chores.
My first question though, what types of jobs did the moms have?
Are they professional business women who leave the house, looking the part and, while exhausted from working, still have the help they need to pull it altogether? Can they afford childcare? Do the kids have summers full of camp and new clothes and the long awaited vacation, all of which moms’ paycheck makes possible?
Or are they moms who have to work to put basic food on the table? Who run in and out, harried from one to two and even three jobs in hopes that a family member can babysit. Maybe she leaves her children with the oldest sibling even if they may not be quite of age to do so. The money keeps the lights on. It doesn’t pay for vacations or camp.
If I had to guess, I’d say these women in the study were of the second group. Their children have seen the rough life. They’ve seen their mother struggle. They’ve seen the exhaustion. And they are ready to put a stop to it.
And that is a good thing.
I don’t want to see any family struggle. It is heartbreaking. And many of my friends are single moms, with no help from their former spouse or family.
What I love to see is them rising above. They work. Harder than anyone I have ever seen. They go to school with the little money they can scrape up, searching every late night for scholarships on the internet. They volunteer and are always the first to bring food in for class parties even though they are struggling to buy groceries. Heck, they find time to run because they can’t afford to join the local gym.
Their kids see this. They see what is possible. They learn that giving up is not an option.
And even for the kids whose moms seem to pull it all off without ruffling a single hair, watching their mothers work and achieve success as an individual person, and not just as someone’s mom, is a wonderful gift.
The Pew Research Center also recently found that society is not as excited about our individual potential as we are. The group found that 41 percent of American adults say the increase in the number of mothers working outside the home is bad for society.
It is bad to expand our abilities? It is bad to strive to make our lives and that of our family better? It is bad to teach our children that you can achieve a goal and make a difference in your community?
Is it bad to make the decision that you have to take charge of your household and be the breadwinner, even if that means some sacrifice?
It is not.
Working moms, you got this. And we all benefit from having you working hard every day to make our entire world a better place.
