May the Fours Be With You
9/1/26
Executive summary: With young kids, being a full-time parent is as much work as being employed full-time outside of the home. While the pay is not commensurate, the benefits are priceless.
My daughter turns four this month, marking the amount of time I’ve been gone from McKinsey and the corporate world in general. (My reflections from the past three years can be found here, here, and here.) My MIT Sloan MBA class also had its 10 year reunion (what!!) over the summer, which I didn’t attend (traveling with little kids is not something I like to do often). But I did get to see some updates on what my former classmates are up to, many of whom now hold fancy titles like “founder” and “director” and “chief something or other.” There were a few who labeled themselves as “semi-retired” or “on sabbatical,” and I myself like to quip that I’m on “indefinite maternity leave.” It’s not what I had thought would ever be my life path, but here we are, four years into this experiment of both privilege and sacrifice. So far, the results are net positive. I love that I can focus on my family, take care of their wants and needs, and also free up my husband’s time and mental bandwidth to use his big professor brains to perform groundbreaking research. I’m still not practiced at telling people that I’ve chosen to stay home (for now? for ever?) after I spent so many years pursuing my education and career, but how I frame my choice helps me clarify my current goals. Sometimes, I think of it this way: I spent decades working hard to build my life, and now that I have reached a certain level of educational, professional, personal, and financial success, I can invest my full efforts in my family. All that time and energy that previously would have been expended on my professional pursuits are now directed toward my children, and also, my husband’s (superstar research) career. I might not currently be our family’s breadwinner, but I am nonetheless working all day, every day. Pulling 70-hour weeks with the people I love is infinitely more rewarding than the same on the client site at McKinsey. (I do miss weekends and PTO though. Childcare is brutally relentless.)
Pouring my time and effort into the most important humans in my life is not something I’ll ever regret.
I will say that a crucial prerequisite before anyone can make the decision to give up their outside income is to ensure that they have a solid financial base. Cuz, you know, a man is not a plan. XD In my case, my husband and I have been partners for literally our entire adult lives (20 years since our first days as college freshman, yo!) and there is no question that everything is 50/50 between us. (We’re so egalitarian that when we got married, we changed our last name into a portmanteau of our “maiden” names, to be fair.) So while my husband is full-time professoring right now, I am full-time on … basically everything else. I am our resident janitor, administrative assistant, cook, chauffeur, personal shopper, nanny, event planner, private tutor, stylist, photographer, historian, COO, CHRO, CFO, CEO. I do everything from getting my hands dirty (the butt wiping stage is not over yet) to making all the executive decisions in our household (nothing happens without my say-so). It is definitely a full-time job, and my husband could not afford my services on his academic salary if he had to pay full fare, hahaha. These are the general buckets that fall under my purview (and cannot be outsourced to AI anytime soon — what job security!):
Eating: groceries, meal planning, cooking, snacks, dishes
Childcare: chauffeuring, nap/bedtime routine, activities, education/homework, school “fun” and volunteering
Scheduling & coordinating: medical appointments, daily activities, school and extracurricular calendars, family visits, friend gatherings, kids playdates, special/fun events (e.g., celebrations)
Social & communications: special occasions (e.g., birthdays, holidays), gifts, liaising with schools/activities/friends/family/helpers (e.g., cleaner, gardener)
Personal: clothing, hair, daily hygiene and grooming
Organizing & cleaning: laundry, trash, tidying, stocking household goods, packing for trips and everyday activities
Home & maintenance: decor, car, yard, ad hoc fixes
Administrative & miscellaneous: vacation planning, finances, taxes, bills, insurance, registrations/forms, pictures, records
I will give my husband credit where it’s due: he spends lots of time with the kids and is a generous, supportive helper at home. He takes it upon himself to own some tasks, like nurturing our plants (I couldn’t care less about keeping them alive), taking care of the car, eradicating pests, and managing our electronics (so he’s the resident CTO). He schedules his on-campus classes and meetings in the morning and works from home in the afternoon so he can be around for our daughter during her nap while I pick up big bro from school (or vise versa). He’s the one who gets up early with the kids every day and chases them around the playground on the weekends. But when it comes to the “invisible mental load,” 95% of it falls on my plate (stereotypical for women), which means that my mind never stops planning, anticipating, calculating, whirring. Could we live with a much more bare bones level of survival that my husband would be satisfied with? Sure, but I seek a higher standard of care for my family than mere survival, which is why I’ve quit corporate America and taken these responsibilities upon myself — trying to “have it all” with little kids while working full-time was simply impossible. I do not wish to embrace eating the same meal for a week straight, becoming social recluses, living in a blank box, wearing mismatched or outgrown clothing, skipping out on all school events, ignoring birthdays and holidays, finding things are used up/missing when I need them … you get the gist. I aim higher up in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. So to achieve it all, I work full-time at home (of which parenting my not-yet-in-school 3yo takes up two-thirds of the time), and I’ll be damned if that means I haven’t earned half of our family’s total comp. (Not to mention that when I left the workforce, half of our total assets/nest egg came from my decade of working in well-paid roles.) I would not have felt comfortable hitting pause on my career if I didn’t have this financial foundation to count on (or other protections in place like life insurance). So if, god forbid, anything happens to my husband or our relationship, I will not be left in economic hardship. This is crucial for a stay-at-home parent and cannot be glossed over.
I forget which class I first learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy in (maybe Psych?) but it comes in handy every now and then. (Image source: Wikipedia)
People always ask me if I’ll return to paid work in the future, to which I reply “we’ll see.” Maybe this is just a break from my career, or maybe it’s actually early retirement. Either way, I’m still a couple years out from making any decisions, as my daughter won’t be in kindergarten for 2 more years and my husband won’t have tenure for 3 more years. My focus will remain on them for at least that long, as I have come to realize that I am replaceable everywhere but at home. My first long-term employer conducted mass downsizing during the four years I was there between undergrad and grad school (although it was primarily for the retail bank operations, not corporate). McKinsey also initiated layoffs toward the end of my seven years there post-MBA, and although I survived both cuts, it reminds me that we are all expendable to corporate America. (I should know — I worked in organizational design/merger management/corporate rightsizing for a time.) So my best efforts go to my family, and even though the kids will act ungrateful for many years to come, I find the role of being a full-time parent more meaningful than any fancy job title. Besides, saying “I’m retired” in my 30s sounds pretty awesome, like the ultimate Millennial dream, right?