Childcare and going back to work after maternity leave can be a bit of a chicken and egg situation can’t it; you need to go back to work in order to earn money, so that you can pay for childcare so that you can go to work and earn money.
Blows my mind a lil’ bit.
Something that I’ve heard a lot from new mums returning to work is the guilt that they feel around putting their children in childcare. As if mum-guilt wasn’t bad enough already, this is like a lovely side-dish of guilt that gets added on to the main course.
The internal monologue goes something like:
“I feel guilty putting my child in childcare because:
I can’t afford not to go back to work, meanwhile other people can afford to stay at home and look after their kids
I will miss my child’s key milestones while I’m at work
This is my child, it should be my responsibility to look after them, not someone else’s
I should be enjoying every minute of my tiny child because they don’t stay tiny forever
I must be a bad mum because sometimes I can’t wait to drop my child off at nursery for the day”
and so on…
Recently I listened to an excellent podcast episode by Master Life Coach Maisie Hill about Guilt. Instead of allowing yourself to get swallowed up by guilty feelings, she advises working through the emotion by asking yourself if it’s appropriate to feel guilt in this situation.
Should you feel guilty? Are you holding yourself accountable to your own moral standards and coming up a bit short? Will the guilt help you to review and change your attitudes or behaviours for the better? Or are you just using it to beat yourself up?
I’ve found that looking at guilt through this lens can totally flip it, and it’s helped me turn down the volume on my internal guilt monologue to almost nothing.
Let’s apply the tactic to the above examples:
“I can’t afford not to go back to work, meanwhile other people can afford to stay at home and look after their kids.”
I’d say the guilt in this sentence is not appropriate. I’ve not done anything wrong. I’m not learning to adjust my behaviour and beliefs in a way that makes me a better person here, I’m just beating myself up about a situation that isn’t going to change in the next 5 minutes unless I win the lottery (which I don’t even play so there goes that idea). I’m also comparing myself to others which is very common but hardly ever helpful. You can only deal with your own life. I’m putting this one in the thought bin.
“I will miss my child’s key milestones while I’m at work.”
This is likely to be true. It’s also a little bit unfair, as it’s compounded by the fact that small children have LOADS of milestones in a relatively short space of time. If you’re working, you might miss some, (even if you’re not working, they happen so fast you still might miss some!) but that doesn’t make you any less of a great mum. It’s impossible to be there all the time. Kicking this one into the thought bin too.
“This is my child, it should be my responsibility to look after them, not someone else’s.”
You’ve probably seen that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ quote somewhere, (cue lots of mums asking ‘when the hell is this village turning up to help me?!’) – you can consider your childcare provider as part of your village. The expectation that parents can devote 100% of their lives to their kids doesn’t really work in the world we live in now, does it? If you can get some help, why wouldn’t you? No moral improvements to make here either, so this guilty thought is going in the bin too.
“I should be enjoying every minute of my tiny child because they don’t stay tiny forever.”
I think this comes from a weird narrative that all of parenting is rosy and you’ll miss the early years when they’re gone so you should drink in every minute of your young children. The parts this narrative leaves out is that sometimes parenting young children can be ruddy hard work and actually sometimes not enjoyable, and we should be allowed to have those feelings too. Constant gratitude mode is unrealistic, we’re not robots. I’m actually drop-kicking this one into the thought bin.
“I must be a bad mum because sometimes I can’t wait to drop my child off at nursery for the day.”
This guilty thought definitely falls into the beating-yourself-up category. It’s full of judgement ‘bad mum’ about something that is now part of every-day life – dropping your kid off at nursery so you can go to work, OR just so that you can have some time to yourself (even better!). There’s nothing to learn here, apart from how much of a hard time we give ourselves. Bye bye thought.
If you are feeling guilty about putting your child into childcare, can you take a closer look at those thoughts and see if they are helping you or just making you feel like sh*t?
Let me know how you get on in the comments.
Juggle Struggle blog 