With friends like this who needs enemies? This charming piece in the Harvard Business Review by Roasabeth Moss Kanter, “Why running a family doesn’t help you run a business”, is supposedly aimed at helping stay-at-home mothers re-enter the workforce but it reads like a giant put-down to me.
But, don’t get her wrong.
Don’t get me wrong. I encourage flexible careers that permit multiple choices over a lifetime, with employers who value skills over lockstep career advancement. If women (or men) choose to put their paid work careers on hold while raising children and nurturing a household, I want to see them succeed at reentry and use their talents to the fullest. But myths about the value of their experience as full-time stay-at-home parents are not going to help them succeed in the business world, and some family habits must be unlearned.
Family managers are accustomed to being surrounded mostly by people who are much younger than they are, know little or nothing, and are clearly dependent, unable to function fully on their own. Spending quality time with people with limited vocabularies doesn’t hone complex strategic thinking. But in business workplaces, managers generally need to hire “up,” finding people who are as good or better than they are at significant tasks. Wooing people with career aspirations, then motivating, assessing, and retaining them, is totally different than getting family work done.
Furthermore, family managers who stay home might have a protector and defender in their spouse. But family managers used to having a powerful ally intervene in family conflicts on their behalf won’t benefit from that kind of partnership in most offices. Workplace professionals must stand on their own, something that family managers can forget.
Family managers operate in a world defined by personal relationships and personal favors. Rightfully, loyalty, caring, and deep emotional bonds are important. But in the paid workplace, even the most compassionate ones, objective measurable goals are key. Sentiment can’t substitute for performance.
Really, how helpful. Moss Kanter’s piece manages to patronise stay-at-home mothers in two ways – and I guess that’s an accomplishment of sorts.
Firstly, it makes the mistake that many non-parents and fathers make in thinking that being a primary parent involves a lot of ninny brain activities and not much real world problem-solving or skill. This reminds me of when I was a teenager and I confidently told a family friend, who was a stay-at-home mother living on a shoestring budget at the time with her husband and four small children, that I could never be a stay-at-home mother because I wasn’t the sort of person who could survive doing nothing all day. How she managed to restrain herself from clobbering me at that moment I do not know.
Now that I am the mother of two small children I can say that my experience of parenting is that it is quite the friggin’ opposite of “doing nothing all day”. That’s not to say I don’t sometimes find parenting boring and repetitive (the same can be said for my more highly regarded, paid office job, too), but I also often find parenting psychologically and intellectually taxing, and to reduce all child-rearing work to a series of mindless tasks completely devoid of “complex strategic thinking” is just plain sexist. And really, it should come as no surprise that we’re so sexist about it all because care work is an essential community task predominantly performed by women. So, of course, care work, paid and unpaid, is grossly under-estimated in a capitalist economy.
Secondly, this article manages to presume that stay-at-home mothers live on Planet Out-Of-Your-Minds where mothers are putting “nappy changing” and “packing school lunches” on their resume and wondering why they don’t get an interview at the law firm. Please. I’m a work-outside-the-home mother and I’ve sat on plenty of job selection panels, plus, I am very close friends with a number of stay-at-home mothers and I have never once heard of or seen a mother imagining for a minute that their parenting tasks will be in any way respected as the skills that they are when it comes to applying for paid jobs. At-home mothers are facing enough discrimination when they attempt to re-enter the workforce without Moss Kanter’s article to help them along.
(Thanks to @STWnextness for the link).
blue milk 
I think stay-at-home moms have one of the hardest, most under-valued jobs there is. Hats off to anyone who does it.
I agree!! I couldn’t do it hats off to them!
“know little or nothing, and are clearly dependent, unable to function fully on their own. Spending quality time with people with limited vocabularies doesn’t hone complex strategic thinking”
Sad to say that I have worked, in paid work, with neurotypical able bodied adults exactly like this. Sometimes I think working with my kids has more promise because they have the capacity to learn.
I was thinking the exact same thing – many of the things my daughter says are much cleverer and more insightful and creative than many of my colleagues.
Dealing with little people helped my customer service skills TREMENDOUSLY.
I imagine that’s not the kind of work the writer’s talking about. But it’s not like we don’t also manage our managers from below as they are managing us from above, either.
Oh god, this has me enraged on so many levels, I can’t even begin!
But, children who know “little or nothing”? Insulting. A husband who is my “protector and defender”? Oh, that just makes me want to explode.
Yes, the most offensive part for me was actually the husband as the protector and defender and how stay-at-home mum skills can be unsuited to the workplace because we/they expect a similar protector. Ridiculous.
While I was a stay-at-home mum, for 11 years, I also helped run several play groups, was on the committee reviewing policy at the day care centre my oldest attended for the sake of my sanity, volunteered as enrolments officer for 2 years at the pre-school my youngest attended, was treasurer for the Uniform Shop at the primary school for 3 years and for the annual school fete for 2 years, P&C President for 2 years, and on the P&C executive for another 4 years. There was plenty of complex strategic thinking going on and you had better believe that my people managing skills were given constant and very taxing workouts over that time.
It’s not only that parenting is plenty challenging on its own, the other work that stay-at-home parents do is so often not acknowledged either.
If I ever have inserted nursery rhymes in the articles and reviews I write and took my husband on the briefings for support, her advice could be really valuable. 🙂
hah hah – so true.
Interestingly, in France, if you have 3+ children and you wish to become a teacher, you are exempt from the Master’s degree requirement to take the grand concours (qualifying examination.) Pretty impressive, valuing the effort and skill it takes to raise 3 children as much as getting post-Bac schooling.
I… just can’t. I’m a stay at home mom to two little kids, living on a shoestring budget (a lot of budgetary prioritization, quotes, dealing with businesspeople) and I think I spend 90% of the non-mortgage money we spend. I’ve definitely worked with people with smaller vocabularies than my 4-year-old, and OH HEY, they’re not the only people I interact with or the only thing I do.
As for my spouse stepping in to ‘intervene’ in family conflicts, NO NO NO. If one parent said something, then that’s the law. And in the real world people do have bosses who can and do intervene in conflicts (like the time I had an epic conflict with HR at my pre-kids job and my boss resolved it so I didn’t quit).
As for personnel skills, I can think of no skill more valuable in the business world than that of continually dealing with cranky, petulant, territorial, mildly irrational people who want everything their own way.
Exactly. I would NEVER use my husband to back me up/intervene in a dispute I was having with my child. But I regularly call on my boss to ensure my work requirements aren’t expanded beyond my contractual obligations.
Exactly! “Protector and defender” against who? The kids? Tradies?! I imagine most negotiations in the house are bw child & parents, but really, a lot of the time it’s bw the parents.
And like Jen said, it’s a myth that employees “must stand on their own”. They can, and should be able to, call on coworkers and superiors for support and guidance so they can do their job well.
This author is a complete dolt!
Ha! This exactly!
As for personnel skills, I can think of no skill more valuable in the business world than that of continually dealing with cranky, petulant, territorial, mildly irrational people who want everything their own way.
When I was pregnant with my second kid, my workplace sent all of its middle managers to management training. I was really struck by the overlap in advice between the books about raising siblings that I was reading at home and the conflict resolution advice in the management training. The idea that dealing with children doesn’t help hone your skills for dealing with other people is absolutely bunk. Being a parent has made me a better manager. Also, the prioritization and time management skills required to get kids out the door on time is excellent practice for making a project plan.
I’ve hired several mothers returning to the work force, and not one has listed their motherhood experience on their resume. From what I’ve seen, I’d say that moms returning to the work force don’t have a hard time getting hired because they don’t know how to write a resume or be interviewed. The problems are more likely to be a real or perceived staleness in skills and the preformed opinions of people on the hiring committee. Actual useful advice for someone returning to the workforce after an extended period of time at home with kids would be to network like crazy so that personal knowledge can overcome biases on the hiring committee and to find ways to refresh your relevant skills, such as taking a class (there are a lot of free ones online now).
I see Moss Kanter also likens “family work” to “managing a handful of people who are vulnerable and can’t leave”. I think this highlights one of her mistakes, which is to assume that managing a family is just a matter of using authoritarian leadership (e.g. “Do it because I say so”) over people who lack power. Of course there are families like that, just as there are managers like that. And it is good to acknowledge that it is not an effective leadership style. But she’s wrong to think it’s inherent in managing a family.
She is wrong to claim that “[w]ooing people with career aspirations, then motivating, assessing, and retaining them, is totally different than getting family work done.” Children have huge aspirations for power and autonomy, and the skills you need in order to motivate them to work for the benefit of the family, while retaining their goodwill, are not hugely dissimilar to the skills you need when you work with adults. Children are people, too.
(BTW I’m guessing that one of the “advocates” Moss Kanter disagrees with is http://www.anncrittenden.com/iyrkbook.htm )
Oh I loved this comment so much. What you write is so very, very true. It is interesting how so many people (particularly non-parents) presume parenting is about authority and wielding power. I find that so much “disciplining” of my child goes unnoticed because I am not yelling or generally being authoritarian when I do it (my non-parent brother, for example, prefers to just scream “No!” rather than gently directing our child away from an inappropriate object by encouraging them to play with something else). There are much more subtle ways that we as parents use to get a small, willful person to do something that doesn’t involve wielding our relative strength and power over theirs.
Further to some of the comments above, I too was most struck by the idea that somehow raising children does not engage higher thinking skills. Indeed, I have found that making decisions about how to be a parent and how to relate to my children have been moments of great intellectual challenge. For me, becoming a parent forced me to think about how to “walk the walk” in terms of my philosophical and political principles, in a way I had never done before. I have graduate degrees in political theory, and have never been challenged to use them as much as in spending time with children.
I think the description of being a family manager is very similar to being a human resources manager in small business!
Like every other stay-at-home parent on the planet, I’ve never attempted to put household management on my resume (although it certainly DOES teach multitasking and time management), but I’ve always been proud of my ability to problem-solve fast and creatively, and looking after a one-year old challenges that constantly. Today my daughter figured out how to remotely (ie not using her mouth) open the valve on her non-spill bottles so that she can pour water out (clever girl!). So now I need to either manage her drinking entirely by parental suggestion-and-then-removal (a step backwards since she’s been fetching her own drinking water for a while now) or have a wet area for her to drink/play. Or discipline her more, but while she understands, “No”, she doesn’t yet understand, “Do that again and I’ll take your drink away.” My sanity is greatly assisted by having a safe play area where “No” is used relatively little. So, wet area it is. And tomorrow she’ll have something new for me to think about.
Louise Curtis
Ugh. Great analysis.
I dunno, you’d think skill at wiping butts would come in handy when dealing with the inevitable office assholes… 😛
Guess when I started my own bookmeeping buisness? When my younger son started first grade. I learned bookkeeping by doing the books for my husband’s business. “Staying home” with my kids taught me how to prioritize, how to be flexible with my time, and how to do what I REALLY want to do to earn money. I learned patience, ability to mollify difficult personalities, and how to network with other women. So Mr. Mansplainer can blow it out his nose!
I’ve been in business for myself for over six years. I also hired two awesome women when the client base grew, and helped one of them find a better-paying bookkeeping position with one of my clients. Yeah, not the way men would do business. GOOD!
Oops, silly me – somehow missed the fact that Moss Kanter is a woman!
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