Emilie Silverwood-Cope: From here to ‘teen-ternity’
Move over debates about maternity leave, we have a new parenting/work conundrum in town and its name is ‘teen-ternity leave’.
This tongue-twister is what we are calling the career break a parent (usually a mum) takes when older children need looking after. Just when us mums thought we could increase our working hours it seems many of us are pressing pause, or dropping back down the career ladder, to be there for our children.
Last week TV and radio presenter Claudia Winkleman announced that she was leaving her BBC Radio 2 show to spend more time with her three children who are 20, 17 and 12 years old. She said: “Time is going too fast. My daughter is getting ready to leave home and she was three [years old] about five minutes ago. I have a little one who still wants to be with me - I don’t know how long that will last - and I just need to be at home more.”
Claudia is not alone. Other high profile teen-ternity leavers include Jo Whitfield, the chief executive of Co-op Food. She stepped away from her role to be more hands-on and to support her children through their GCSE and A-level years. Ellie Harrison also left TV presenting to get a better work-life balance and spend more time with her children, aged 13, 11 and seven.
I was very stressed trying to ‘have it all’ so opted to freelance and have worked from home for more than a decade. I thought I’d be back in my power suit by now, walking the office corridors with my double espresso. Instead, I am hearing of more and more women who are leaving the workplace for their teen children and wondering if I should stay put? Women with teens are finding they are in bigger jobs with more responsibility and still trying to juggle work with their children. “They need me more than ever,” one friend told me.
Bigger children, bigger problems, as the saying goes and this seems to be the rub. The wheels on the family bus are no longer going round and round. Women are giving up work because they have to. As another friend said: “When you have toddlers you think that’s the crunch time because they have to be near you. But actually the key years are when they are teenagers and that’s when things can really go wrong.”
And things do seem to be going wrong for our teens. Last week figures about eating disorders painted a very upsetting picture. Sixty per cent of 17 to 19-year-olds have ‘possible problems with eating’, according to research undertaken by NHS Digital, the health service’s statistical body. The Mental Health Foundation report shows that 50 per cent of mental health problems are established by the age 14 and 75 per cent by the age of 24.
There’s no escaping the fact that whilst your teen child may now tower over you they still very much need you. One couple I know have adapted their working lives so someone is always able to work from home to be there when teens come home from school.
Secondary school is so much more demanding for parents and children. There’s less wriggle room when things go wrong and older children having a friendship crisis aren’t as easily consoled. If your child has SEN you will know how much time is needed for meetings and interventions and to assist with homework. There are only so many times you can discuss emergency leave with a line manager before it feels like you are damaging your career anyway.
We have to pretend to ‘parent like we don’t work and work like we aren’t parents’ in a system that feels rigged against us. The stress of pretending everything is fine at work while your child slowly implodes means many women would simply rather give up the day job.
I know mums who feel guilty because they can’t get their school refuser into class because they have to be at their desk. There aren’t childcare options for the older child to fall back on. On top of this, women are disillusioned with working life, feeling burnt out and wish they could afford to cut hours or give up entirely. Even Allison Pearson, author of I don’t know how she does it said she’d now write ‘I don’t know why I bothered’.
For those parents who are able to take a break, it can be just the short-term solution needed to mitigate a crisis. As this mum wrote: “It was the best thing I could have done for my SEN daughter. I walked to the bus stop with her every morning for the first two terms. I helped her with organisation and homework. I really believe it made all the difference to her. She entered Year 8 really confident and happy. I returned to work. We were a bit broke but it was so worth it.”
Read more Parenting Truths from Emilie Silverwood-Cope every month in the Cambridge Independent.
