Modern Parenting With Marti Post

Parenting in 2020 has been hard.

Although, hard seems to be an understatement. In truth, parenting in the modern age has been hard before the pandemic and it’s only now that we’re getting to see all the cracks in the foundation.

Today’s guest is Marti Bledsoe Post, author of Retrofit: The Playbook For Modern Moms. She’s a parental inclusion consultant, keynote speaker and strategy leader on the subject. Not only does she support the working parent, but she also guides corporations in methods that will help employees attain a better balance.

Marty started A-Parently a couple of years ago after she realized that the issues with being a mother in the modern age had to be talked about. “I was asked to do a talk at a conference, a marketing conference. So among all my industry peers stand up and talk about how I was juggling a VP role with a nine-person team and two little kids under the age of six at home,” recalls Marti.

Although she hadn’t heard of a conference session aimed at the balance of motherhood and career, she felt thrilled that it was an opportunity to stand up and talk about the subject. Marti says, “I was also really nervous, I thought that for sure it would ruin my career. And in fact, I went back and turned it down.”

She felt that it was too risky. Marti didn’t want people to know that she was sometimes distracted, stressed and feeling like she wasn’t giving her all to either the career or parent role. Thankfully, the conference organizers didn’t take no for an answer when Mart tried to back down.

When she started chatting with other women in order to add to her presentation, Marti realized that all the feelings she’d experienced were too common. From the burnout to “...the emotional tug of dropping your child off day after day after day to a place where their development is happening. Or the emotional tug of gleefully dropping them off and happily going to work and loving your business trips and never feeling that thing that you're like, should I feel bad about this? You know, either way, there was just a lot of concern and guilt on the minds of all the women I talked to.” 

After the conference, Marti said she felt free because she had said what, at times, felt too dangerous to say. “And it made me realize that every mom deserves that opportunity. Every single working mom needs the chance to sit back for a hot minute and think about how did I get here with these two, sometimes conflicting jobs? And what does it mean to me and what are my choices.” 

A-Parently was started. First with a few workshops for working moms, then with programs for employers wanting to provide support to their teams to dads wanting to be included in the conversation. It all came together in her book.

So what’s going wrong with modern parenting?

Marti says that the biggest surprise came when she realized that the motherhood idea we have today is actually a modern one. She says, “After World War Two, we began to see this notion of the mother as the primary parent until the child goes to school was born out of a variety of factors. It's born from socio-economic changes that happened after the war. It's more from gender and societal changes that happened when the GI is returned from their jobs. And the women were in the workforce. And many British and US officials felt like maybe they should just encourage the women to go home and have babies and that would free up the jobs backup for the for the returning soldiers.”

“[It] really surprised me, because I feel like in US culture, we have latched on to this idea of being good mothers, as some sort of goal for women, regardless of what their other goals are. And we've not latched on in the same way to the goal of being good fathers or having that complicate a man's career. And at the same time, we've expected women to join the workforce and, you know, basically buck up and do a great job, do a better job, then men get paid less than men get less recognition than men get promoted more slowly than men.”

While doing the same work in their careers plus the job of being the ideal mother, women still don’t get the support they need. Marti goes on, “...frankly, we do not support workers. There's no paid leave in the US. There's no, you know, policy that supports universal preschool.” 

“[After reading the stats], I thought, well, no wonder it's so hard. And that validated all of my concerns in such a nice way.” Marti got the affirmation showing her that it wasn’t that she was doing something wrong, that her kids were high maintenance, that her commute was too long or that she had chosen the wrong industry. Women are feeling burned out because they don’t have a framework that’s built to support while the expectations remain high. 

“And yet, the way we judge mothers and shame women for their choices around their children, we really do make it impossible to be successful. So that's heartbreaking because what happens when a woman is put in a position where she can't succeed, it doesn't serve her career, it doesn't serve her company, or if she owns her own business, her business. It doesn't serve the next generation of kids who are growing up in households where mom is suffering under this ridiculous heavy weighted blanket of expectation. So it will serve everyone better to empower moms and women and families and parents.”

How can we move forward with parenting in 2020 and beyond?

WE GET TO START BY FIGURING THINGS OUT AT HOME. 

Marti stresses the importance of teaching kids to do chores and to take it beyond the typical “chore chart” as they get older. It goes from doing what’s on the list to having your older child look through the house for things that need to get done. Transferring the ownership to kids gets them to share in the unpaid labor of running a home. 

Speaking of unpaid labor, it also gets to be shared with your partner. Marti suggests a few books to help navigate the tricky road of parenting and co-parenting. Fair Play by Eve Rodsky where she outlines a system in her book for splitting up duties across the unpaid labor of running a house - all in a card game. 

Although I, personally, adhere to a ‘lazy parenting’ sort of lifestyle, Marti explained that the new norm for western parenting is now “Intensive Parenting.” It means you’re investing more time, money and resources in your children than any other generation prior. 

HELPING MANAGEMENT SUPPORT THE WORKING PARENT.

Prior to the pandemic, most white collar workers were on a 40 hour work week. They’d get to the office at 8 or 9 and leave around 5 pm. “... in some ways it was almost like we could be a little lazy because we could count on most people coming together during those hours of those days to be available. And so we did not as workers have to focus on how do I asynchronously get this task done. I could synchronously count on everybody being in the same space at the same time, for a certain amount of time. And so it's a huge, huge cognitive shift, I think we have to acknowledge that that's really important,” says Marti.

The one thing that management can do right now is focus on an outcome, not the process. If the project took only 28 hours this time and it’s 52 hours the next, let it be. Although it’s hard to let go of that scheduled mindset, the company gets to think about the work, deliverables and the toll it takes on the team. “[If] I'm managing a team of six people who are all at home with kids doing online learning, I can set the stage with my leadership to say, this team is not going to have an output like six people come into the office would have had. And we all have to be okay with that. Let's recalibrate what we're expecting of them. And I think that would go a long way toward parents feeling like, okay, somebody gets it,” says Marti.

RETHINK THE MEETINGS YOU’RE HAVING IN THE COMPANY.

There are still parents telling Marti that they have five hours of meetings while their kids have three or four hours of zoom calls and it’s not working. She suggests implementing policies where meetings can’t all be scheduled the same day or that the first 90 minutes of the day are free of virtual gatherings so that the parents can get their kids set up for their virtual class. Even having a meeting free Monday would support parents in getting their kids set up for the week.  

Managers can also encourage employees to take their PTO while rethinking how it could be utilized. Could it be used in one-hour increments or two-hour increments versus eight hours? Leaders in the company should take their own PTO and make a statement about not answering calls or emails.

THE FUTURE OF PARENTING: CHANGES AND MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.

“...We have to keep moving forward toward more and more and more flexibility, not less,” says Marti. Re-imagining the location-based idea of work and how we’re using commercial real estate will be essential to continue in a positive course. Asking what we can use those buildings and spaces for. From training facilities, educational spaces or even outreach centers, these empty buildings are offering a great opportunity.

Management also gets to advocate for employees as whole people and employees for themselves. “So prior to this, who I was at home, and who I was, when I crossed through that door and became my work self could be two totally different people. And that was in many ways, probably a good thing, you know, honestly. But now I think employers need to think about themselves as essentially employing that person and their family…” Whether that means that businesses provide different benefits that include care stipends, strategizing around flexibility and remote work or rethinking the way leadership roles are honored and people promoted? Marti says, “...there's a whole bunch of new ways we can rethink things when we acknowledge that our workers are whole people.”

And that sounds like an amazing place to work and live in..

You can find Marti’s book, Retrofit: The Playbook For Modern Moms on her website. Follow her on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.