YOUR CHILD’S HEALTH: THE WORKING MOTHER
In Australia only a minority of married couples are of the traditional model, in which father goes to work, while mother stays home with the kids. Women are now an important part of the workforce. Dual incomes have become necessary for many families to maintain their standard of living. Many couples work full-time, and this can create pressures for the family, with many parents facing the difficulties of juggling childcare and full-time work. Inadequate provision of day-care facilities compounds the problem.
For a working mother in particular, the burden can be immense, especially if her partner is unwilling to share responsibility for looking after the children and the house. Some mothers feel guilty that they have chosen, often out of necessity, not to follow the traditional role of staying home and looking after the children. Many will have grown up in households where the mother was always there with milk and cookies when the children came home from school. Breaking away from this tradition can be difficult, and many working mothers have genuine concerns about how it will affect their children.
Working full-time when you have a family requires excellent organisation. The time you do spend with your children needs to be ‘quality time’, that is, time when you are available for them. Part of this organisation process may include spending one evening a week cooking meals in preparation for the coming week. These can be wrapped separately and stored in the freezer till required. Delegating is a useful way of distributing the labour. Don’t be ashamed to ask people for support, and accept any offers of help, be it with preparing meals or picking the children up from school.
Flexibility at work makes things much easier for the working mother. Some employers, however, are still unwilling to see their employees as having lives outside work. Hopefully this is changing, with more and more opportunities for flexitime, job-sharing, and part-time work becoming available. There has been a gradual increase in the number of workplaces which have on-site daycare facilities. This can be reassuring, as well as convenient for parents.
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