The New In Having It All

We live in a unique moment in history when women, for the first time, can decide how they wish to be in the world. Women can choose whether to have children; whether to have a life partner; whether to work inside or outside the home; and where to place their time and energies. We now have role models for nearly any life composite we wish to create. We feel less compelled to conform our lifestyle choices to societal expectations. Having it all is a reality for women today. And having it all does not mean doing it all. Rather, it is a new version of having it all, one where you carefully and consciously devise choices and strategies that reflect and enhance your own personal vision of an optimum life.

Our Mission. The mission of The New Having It All is to help women make and maximize these choices. We focus on what it means for women to be successful, with a focus on role models, systems for success, milestones, and potential mishaps. Our discussions include issues surrounding work-life and work-family balance and integration because, in our experience, they represent the primary stumbling blocks that most frequently cause women to feel unsuccessful in their lives.

What Makes Us Unique. There are three things that make The New Having It All unique among the various firms that address work-life balance issues:

1. We work with women in all walks of life, in all stages along the sequencing spectrum. This gives us a vantage point from which to understand the needs and concerns of each stage along the trajectory of women's lives.

2. We have no preconceived agenda for the women with whom we work. The New Having It All is based upon the premise that every woman must discover for herself what her all will be. Our role is to raise the right questions; develop and demonstrate the best tools; propose alternative courses of action; provide research and analysis; and offer the benefits of our own experiences and the knowledge we have garnered in working with scores of women in similar situations.

3. Our sessions offer a unique blend of motivation, inspiration and personal development on one hand, and hard data, research and analysis, and tangible tools on the other. We are experienced speakers and teachers and connect with our audiences in a way that sends each participant from our sessions with a greater sense of optimism about her ability to define her all--and a practical road map for achievement.

Somewhere along the historical work-life balance road, when having it all took a doing it all detour, many working moms crashed, hit road blocks, or took multi-year child-rearing detours. As super-achiever moms returned to work after having children, workplaces and marriages often failed to yield, or at least share, the right of way, i.e., the right of work, with them. In Getting to 50/50: Having It All by Sharing It All, authors Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober, avowed working mothers themselves, are unapologetic about their point of view—they maintain, unequivocally, that mothers, fathers and children all benefit when both parents work while raising a family. The authors’ 50/50 model requires a true partnership with respect to both work and family, i.e., a mom willing to pull her share of the financial load and a dad willing to be a genuine partner on the home front. It requires continual re-assessment and adjustment. It may be 90/10 some weeks, 60/40 others and 50/50 from time to time—the balance is achievable, but continually shifting.

Meers and Strober present multiple studies in the areas of child development, sociology and economics to support their premise that families benefit not only when fathers truly co-parent and support their wives’ careers, but also when mothers share the financial burden of their households by working outside the home. The shared obligations ultimately pay great emotional, personal, familial and financial dividends. Getting to 50/50 dissects and reconstructs the issues that plague women attempting to weigh the pros and cons of working full time after having children. Meers and Strober  present and analyze the often incompletely cited studies on the effects of non-parental child care and demonstrate that non-parental child care has no discernible negative effect on a child’s social, emotional or intellectual development. Getting to 50/50 debunks the myth that men generally prefer that their wives stay at home with children, citing studies illustrating that shared financial support roles decrease stress, improve marriage, increase sexual activity within the marriage (by diminishing frustration and resentment over perceived unequal divisions of labor at home or at work), and free men to choose the careers, job changes and work arrangements that they want, rather than those that they, as sole breadwinners, feel compelled to pursue.  When fathers engage and become present for their children, a luxury that a working wife’s contribution affords them by reliefing the pressure on their job and income performance, children experience increased in self-confidence and greater achievement.

The crux of the Meers-Strober 50/50 model is the symbiotic partnership of husbands and wives at work and at home. It requires a husband who is willing truly and fully to co-parent and co-manage the household when his wife returns to work after have a child (or two or three). The husband-father must do an equal share of parenting and must genuinely support his working wife. He must share the midnight feedings, the grocery shopping and laundry; he must be the first parent the school calls when a child is sick or in trouble or a field trip volunteer is needed 50% of the time; and he must alternate the responsibility (and the privilege) of leaving work early to for the little league game or the ballet recital. Equally critical to the success of the 50/50 model is a wife-mother who will breach the "Maternal Wall" in less-than family friendly workplaces and forge a sustainable return-to-work path (knowing she has the support of a 50/50 husband to back her up at home). She must embrace the “Let Go and Let Dad” state of mind, letting dad dress the baby in a striped shirt that clashes with plaid shorts, zipping her lip when dad serves a(nother) meal with fewer than five food groups, and taking a walk when dad teaches math by tracing numbers in pudding on the countertop. The model also depends on identifying an evolved boss or mentor who disavows the 24/7 workplace culture, enforces family friendly workplace policies on the books, and is invested in the success of his or her working parent employees.

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