Originally titled "Best Time of Our Lives," from the September 2007 issue of Canadian Living Magazine, on newsstands or click here to purchase online.
At a recent Sunday brunch, when my friend Anthony handed me a glass of white wine, I must have sighed rather too appreciatively.
“Tough week?” he wondered.
“Parenting challenges,” I said, watching as his wife chased their naked three-year-old back into the bedroom to retrieve her recently shucked clothing.
“You have parenting challenges?” he asked, incredulous. He wiped his one-year-old's face, which was covered with yogurt. “I don't believe it. Your kids are grown up. You have great kids.”
Well, yes, I thought, I do have great kids. They are intelligent and generally responsible teenagers, a girl and boy of character and charm. And unlike my friend's toddlers, they demand nothing from me in a physical sense. It is true that I am no longer tested by a lack of sleep, or day-care woes, or reluctant eating. But I wrestle instead with other issues requiring even greater depths of maternal creativity, flexibility and resolve: broken hearts, broken promises and broken cellphones, to name just a few dramas from the week in question.
Different challenges
When your children are small, you spend a lot of time dealing with the mess in their diapers; when they are adolescents, the focus shifts to the mess in their heads, which, according to new brain research, is substantial (more on that later).
It's a task that takes time, patience and infinite psychological resources -- all of which, if you are also one of the 81 per cent of mothers and 91 per cent of fathers currently in the Canadian paid labour force, are in pretty short supply at the end of a long workday.
But as Barbara Mitchell, a sociologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., and author of the forthcoming book Family Matters: An Introduction to Sociology of Families in Canada (Toronto Canadian Scholar's Press, 2008), notes, recent evidence suggests some working parents -- particularly mothers -- have found a simple way to resolve the dilemma: they are trading their paycheques for parental peace of mind, putting their careers on pause (or paring them down dramatically) to go back home and take care of their tweens and teens.
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