Opinion: This is a significant moment for employers to take time to understand what moms need today - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Pre-pandemic, I had the good fortune of working from home when needed. But when I approached my company about restructuring my time to participate in parenting more fully, the company (which had been very accommodating to that point) was not ready to set that precedent for a working mom in a senior-level position.

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Working moms balance family and employment, often without recognition or reward. This Labor Day, let’s thank all of them and spotlight some of their successes, some of their struggles and some of the support they need.

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I decided to use my events and communications experience to start my own small consulting business. Right before the COVID-19 pandemic.
As many of us may recall, this is when events were put on hold, communication tactics drastically changed, and work/personal life boundaries disappeared. It became doubly hard to get a new business off the ground. Thankfully, my spouse’s job as a public school teacher provided stability. Yet the pandemic brought him (and all teachers) new challenges and pressures — like establishing a virtual classroom overnight.
Our three young children’s day-to-day elementary school education and struggles with distance learning became mom’s responsibility — mine. I soon learned I was hardly alone.
To try to connect with others in my shoes and exchange tips, I launched a simple Facebook group, Learning In the Time of Corona. It quickly evolved into a substantial online community of nearly 16,000 people worldwide, 90 percent of whom identified as women.
The group’s members share resources and ideas to help navigate the ongoing changes (and choices) in the way we learn, teach and care for our families, friends and communities.

If our first shift is family, and work is our second shift, the pandemic added a third shift requiring overwhelming involvement in our children’s education, social interactions, and health and safety.
And yet many of the struggles and complaints predated the COVID-19 pandemic and continue today.
Some of the issues I and other group members shared include:
I was “burned-out” being a working mom way before the pandemic. I’m just even more “burned-out” now.
And when you are a single working mom with no reprieve with the pandemic, it can be relentless.
Moms may do more work/work longer and harder because we feel the need to prove we are adding value/prove we are committed. (Then there’s the guilt at the end of a long day for not having anything left to give to the kids. Sigh.)
I can’t do it all. I am either a good mother or a good employee. I am never both on the same day!
This is why I only allow myself to work part time. Being a wife and mother has rightly been described as having a “second shift.”
There are so many articles, podcasts and conversations around how we can support working moms and working women. We hear about the 2 million women who left the workforce in 2020 and we see how seemingly nothing has changed.
It’s no secret that when household and childcare duties increase (as they have since and during the pandemic), it’s often the woman in an opposite-sex couple who takes on the additional logistics along with today’s added pressure of “making up for lost time.”
One of my favorite conversations over the last two years was started by working mom Sydney Williams on LinkedIn where she rewrote her resume to list only the skills she had learned as a new mother.
“Perhaps if we shift the way we evaluate, prioritize, develop and protect the skills we learn outside of the office, Moms would have a fighting chance,” she wrote.
So how can we make work work for moms? It’s simple.
Ask us what we need. Care about us. Invest in us. Advocate for us. Don’t give up on us. Believe in us. Be patient with us. Don’t overwork us and don’t limit us. Value the many, many hats we wear.
This is a significant moment for leaders and employers to stress their unconditional commitment to working moms — to take time to understand what moms need today and to pledge increased support for moms moving forward.
Harris-Turk is a married mother to three young children and an events/communications professional. She lives in Del Cerro.

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