I came across this article about ‘teen mums’ quite a while ago and while I didn’t agree with the premise of it I wasn’t sure about how to approach it. I saved the article for future consideration but didn’t do anything else.

Then I  came across this article about how

“…female workers feel pressure to furiously climb the career ladder before taking time off to start a family.”

The approach of this article was almost the antithesis of the article about teen mums but the heart of both articles deals with the challenge of balancing having a family and having a career.

The article about teen mums postulates the idea of having children before having a career.  Physically it’s the best time for it but there is more to having a child than just getting pregnant. Leaving aside issues like postpartum depression, having a child is extremely demanding no matter how you measure it - physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, or even sociologically. While many teens may be fully capable of ‘running a home’, how many teens can afford a home in the first place?

The article states, presumably tongue in cheek,

“…show me a fortysomething working mother who doesn’t feel exhausted and overwhelmed and I will show you a woman on very effective mood stabilizers.”

To me it seems fairly clear that the added mental and emotional maturity, not to mention the financial resources, afforded by the additional twenty-six plus years would make a world of difference in how the fortysomething working mother deals with issues as opposed to how the teen mom, with limited resources, education, and perspective, deals with the same issues.

On the other side of the coin, the article about the ‘pre-mommy mentality’ advocates the opposite approach. Work harder.

Pamela Jeffery, founder of the Toronto-based Women’s Executive Network, which offers career mentoring programs, says she encounters women on a daily basis who are racing for career advancement while they’re in their late 20s and early 30s.

“The No. 1 question I find in our mentoring programs is ‘How do I do it all? How do I have a great career and be a
mom?’ ”

Her advice: Put in the extra work early on.

Wow. Talking about being caught in the middle.

This is something that has always fascinated me as a science fiction writer and was one of the ideas running in the back of my mind while I was writing The Gender Divide. With an extended life span, it would be possible for both parents to take a hiatus from work and take the time to raise a child. As it stands now, too many people have children then leave the raising of them to strangers. As one of the women in the ‘pre-mummy mentality” article states…

“So I kept working harder … so that one day I could at least pay for someone else to raise them…”

I honestly don’t know the answer is or what the best time to have children is but I’m hopeful that one day society and perhaps even technology will help us find the solution.

Sleepy surgical students do make more mistakes. That’s the headline of another article in the Globe and Mail. It’s a short article and it basically regurgitates a new study published in the Archives of Surgery. The study looked at the results from routine surgery and concluded that reducing on-call hours for surgical students to 80 hours per week (down from as much as 120 hours per week in some cases) improved patient outcomes. I don’t have access to the study but the results quoted in the paper are hardly earth shattering. (more…)

I recently came across an article in the Globe & Mail. It discussed issues facing night-shift workers and included some interesting comments on Work Life Balance.

Ms. Williams wrote that work-life balance “is a self-defined, self-determined state reached by a person able to effectively manage multiple responsibilities at work, at home and in the community.”

‘A self-defined, self-determined state.’ Hmm, an interesting way of saying that it is different for everyone.

This state is difficult for full-time workers to reach at the best of times, she wrote.

Really? (more…)

Work / Life Balance. It’s a common theme in both life and writing, something that affects everyone. I recently participated in a Webinar that added some extra dimensions to this concept. The definition of balance implies that these are the only two things that you are trying to juggle. The reality is that both of these deceptively simple words encompass significantly more. (more…)