Shannon Proudfoot says while viral photos of politicians and CEOs working with their babies on their laps are meant to inspire, in reality, they’re unhelpful for real working parents.
By Shannon Proudfoot*
A couple of months ago, a friend asked if I would speak to a journalism class she was teaching.
I was on maternity leave at the time and her request was last-minute, so I told her I would have to bring my seven-month-old with me.
She replied, “Squeals of delight when I told the class he will be coming!”
And so I ended up standing in front of her class with a baby and a heap of toys parked on a blanket at my feet while I attempted to arrange my thoughts into adult sentences.
It wasn’t easy.
My son had only recently mastered sitting up, so I kept glancing down to make sure he wasn’t about to topple over.
About halfway through my hour-long session, he got restless, so I picked him up and perched him on my hip.
Soon, he decided he was bored and began to keen like a dog that wants in the house.
So, without pausing in my yammering, I unwrapped a package of biscuits and offered them to him.
My son was as well-behaved as a baby could be for a boring, quiet hour.
But even immediately after I finished, I had zero recollection of what I said to that class.
I’m sure I didn’t answer their questions particularly well, because half my brain was preoccupied.
It’s like talking to one person while surreptitiously listening to another conversation behind you: you might be able to fake your way through, but chances are the person you’re talking to is getting a lot of vacant “Uh huh, uh huh, interesting!” from you.
Afterward, I felt proud of myself, like some come-to-life working-parenthood meme, but the accomplishment was doing many things at once, not doing any of them especially well.
That’s why when one of those viral photos makes the rounds periodically, showing a politician or executive cradling their baby in a house of parliament or at the head of a boardroom table, I always cringe.
As a working parent and someone who cares a lot about seeing women treated with more equality, I think I’m supposed to cheer, re-tweet and offer a virtual fist-bump to my fellow avatars of Having It All.
But that’s not my reaction.
All I can think when I see one of those photos is, “There is no way that woman can really concentrate with that baby parked on her lap, and I bet this is a crappy day at work for her.”
Babies are fantastic.
But babies are incompatible with pretty much everything you need to work well and with minimal stress.
Those babies-in-boardrooms images and their inevitable “Woo hoo, lean in!” commentary are totally counterproductive to advocating in any real way on behalf of working parents.
(I’m pretending for the moment that we apply these wonky assumptions and expectations equally to men and women who are parents, which is frankly hilarious and insane, but let’s just go with it for now.)
I would argue strenuously that working parents can be just as productive, valuable and engaged as their counterparts without kids — but we can’t do any of that while we’re parenting.
Pretending that we can or should is absurd and unhelpful.
Super-parent memes imply that’s the standard against which we should all measure ourselves.
There are weird circumstances that arise, of course, and you’re proud when you pull it off somehow, like I did in that class.
This is why “BBC dad” remains one of the most delightful and relatable things the Internet has coughed up in the last five years.
There’s even a suggestion that female politicians now see value in deliberately highlighting their motherhood and other life experience.
But these moments of furiously spinning all our plates in the air at once need to be the rare exception rather than the rule.
That’s the problem with the badass-working-parent image: the implication is, “See? She can do it all, and she’s not whining about parental leave or daycare space or missing work because her kid has pink eye. Everything is fine!”
There’s also the screamingly obvious fact that you’re never going to see a viral photo of a parent working a drive-thru window or mopping a floor with their infant strapped into a carrier, surrounded by co-workers and a shift manager smiling indulgently.
This insistently cheery, can-do version of working parenthood is something that is only available to some, while the issues that underly it are problems for all.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that I have willfully ignored to this point: these memes always, always — always — feature mums.
It’s yet another way we still insist that women belong to the domestic, only now we expect them to perform at the office too, and take their kids along with them to pose for a cute photo while they’re at it.
Here’s the meme I would actually cheer for.
In one frame you see a woman at work — she’s unencumbered, talking with her colleagues, firing on all cylinders, fully engaged.
In the next frame, we see why she and her partner can be so absorbed and productive at work: after staying at home for a humane amount of paid parental leave, there’s their kid, in an affordable, reliable, happy daycare spot that they did not have to languish on a waiting list for an anxious eternity to land.
And in the last frame, they all reunite at home, where the parents can put away their work-selves at once, flipping the switch to become that other version of themselves for the evening, all about their family.
They happily let the rest of their spinning plates come crashing to the ground, knowing none of it is breakable and they can pick it all up again the next morning.
That is the kind of having it all I aspire to and will retweet the hell out of.
In the meantime, if you see one of those super-parent memes out in the real world, please: offer to hold their baby for a bit while they do what they need to do.
* Shannon Proudfoot is an Ottawa-based writer covering politics and public policy for Maclean’s.
This article first appeared at www.macleans.ca.
