Teaching responsibility

Inspiration

Teaching responsibility: what your work does to your child

Jun 14, 2019Lauren Bradshaw

Employment equality is a common thing today, which means that women constitute approximately half of the workforce. In such a case, rarely does a woman compromise her motherhood in favor of a career or education, and it means that a lot of women must learn to balance their occupations and motherhood.

Apart from the challenges of managing one’s life and career, working mothers have to face the challenge of taking new approaches to raising their children, as they cannot dedicate themselves to 24/7 parenting. One of the main concerns of working mothers is the way their schedules impact the personality of their children. However, having a working mother proves to give benefits to the development of a child’s personality.

The child sees you in two important roles

Commonly, the image of a stay-at-home mother limits a woman to being a nurturer. Meanwhile, the children of working women learn early that the nurturer is only one of the roles their parent takes. The image of a professional is usually attributed to the father, yet fathers often do not tend to take the leading role in nurturing a child.

When children are informed that their mother has other duties apart from the full-time service for their emotional and physiological needs, it teaches them responsibility and autonomy long before they face it first-hand in their adulthood, which increases the chances of handling it easily.

Remarkably, the duality of the mother’s image as a professional and a nurturer does not compromise or undermine any of the woman’s duties. It means that the woman surrounds her children with the same love and support, only they see that it is not the ultimate goal in the occupation of their mother. In this regard, children learn to respect the time of other people and, later, their own time, seeing their mother as a role model in dedication and excellent time management, which is the path a working mother requires.

Apart from learning the responsibility in handling personal matters, children learn the importance of being a professional, as both their parents transmit a message about the matter of having a profession, self-development, and job satisfaction.

Photo by Paige Cody on UnsplashThey socialize with a childcare professional

One of the fundamental principles of a successful balance between work and motherly obligations for a woman is finding good childcare. It must be a person that the working mother can fully trust and, even more importantly, who shares the mother’s views on caregiving. It will be the person that the child will interact a lot with while the mother is at work. Therefore, the communication of the child with the nurse-maid will impact their psychological development as well.

One of the most important benefits of having a nurse-maid—apart from the free time—is that the child learns a new model of socialization at a very early age. Women tend to view a nanny as a factor in the child’s alienation from the parents. However, it proves to be a brand new model of interaction that the child acquires. If it is too early for a child to attend a kindergarten, a nanny serves as an image of a caregiving adult to maintain a distance with. With a nurse-maid, the child takes his or her first and guided steps in socialization and takes in a new social role apart from the one of a son or a daughter.

They learn to be a part of the family schedule