Do our teens pay the price when we’re there for our babies?

I

was the proud mother of one delicious baby boy when I remember being jolted by the news. Three different women whom I considered major mentor material — successful, full-time mechanchos in major seminaries — had quit working or significantly reduced their hours so they could spend more time with their children.

Huh? None of them had babies or toddlers. They all had teenagers — children old enough to manage a few hours a day without Mommy, and to help with the younger ones. It seemed absurd to me that they were quitting work just when they seemed to finally have the most time for it.

Years later, I understood. So did the group of friends I was sitting with at a wedding. Leora and Dina were in their thirties, just starting to raise teenagers, while Chaya and I were well into our teen parenting journey. But we all shared one thing in common, and I summed it up with a line stolen from Rav Uri Zohar a”h.

“My friends,” I said, “we were robbed.”

Keep Them Close

When we’d been young adults, we’d heard — and fervently bought into — the hype about staying home with little babies and toddlers. We knew the science: attachment theory, the brain development that occurs before the age of three. We were ready to jump through any hoops it would take to keep our babies and toddlers home with us.

Most of us didn’t have the luxury of not working at all, but we managed to work part-time, from home, or at night, so that we wouldn’t have to leave our babies with babysitters. No one can care for your baby the way you can, we knew. We looked down on friends who did not share our philosophy.

“My oldest was a kvetchy baby who couldn’t fall asleep without nursing,” Leora related. “I didn’t think any babysitter would have the patience to soothe her to sleep over and over again at forty-five-minute intervals, so I decided not to go back to school as I’d planned. I wanted to be the Mommy I was supposed to be to her and the babies that came after her.”

The rest of us nodded in commiseration. Instead of considering what they really wanted to do, Dina and Chaya had accepted minimum-wage jobs that worked with their short-term parenting plans. Dina did mind-numbing data entry from home, and Chaya worked as a night secretary for a small sheitel salon.

But if being a mommy meant lower-paying jobs with less possibility of advancement, it was worth it. If we felt a bit understimulated, or that our talents were untapped, we had a whole life waiting for us as soon as our youngest started school. For now, our children were our priority.