How to Survive Practicing Law While Being a Caregiver – Part 2
Parenting is hard. I am the last parent to pick up my children from daycare.
Parenting as an attorney is hard. I miss my children’s activities to meet work obligations.
Parenting with a partner who travels for work is hard. I must scramble when school is out to make sure I have care so I can work.
And this is my life. Does this sound familiar to any of you? Even though I have an invaluable partner who shares most of the domestic responsibility (thank you, Fair Play!), it is hard for him to help when he is traveling for work. I have found it challenging, frustrating, and isolating to be a mom and an attorney. I wanted to share – and/or complain – about my personal experiences, hoping that others in a similar situation may find some solidarity. On a regular basis, I experience one or more of the following dilemmas.
Leaving Work Early to Pick up Children
I felt so seen when I saw Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sentiments after returning to work from maternity leave. She said she had to slip out of the office “at the unspeakably early hour of five p.m. each workday” on Bloomberg Law’s Instagram post promoting her book, Lovely One. Even though my workplace is flexible, so much happens after 5 p.m. that I, too, feel guilty slipping away before 6 p.m. so I can pick up my children before their childcare closes.
Coordinating Childcare and Child Activities
I am fortunate to have access to quality childcare and enrichment activities for my children (and to have the ability to pay for them!). Still, it is so much work to navigate wait lists, after-school applications, dance classes and dance driving, and everything else necessary to pay a small fortune to work until 5:30 p.m. And do not get me started on summer camps for my elementary-aged child! It is January 2025, and I have already signed my oldest up and paid for a summer camp for 2025. I will be busy coordinating the rest of her summer in a few weeks.
Knowing that My Children are the Last Ones Picked up at School
My oldest daughter tells me that she knows the days when I am picking her up from after-school care because she sees everyone else leave before I get there (luckily, my husband usually picks her up when he is home). My youngest daughter knows she is always the last one to get picked up from her childcare and has formed a special bond with the after-school teachers, calling them her “best friends.” One day, when I could pick her up at 5:21 p.m. instead of her usual 5:30 pm (or slightly later if I am stuck in traffic), she asked if she was getting picked up early to go to the doctor. I cried a little bit when she asked this question.
Planning for Unexpected School Closings
I am currently editing this post on a snow day with my kids screaming in the background! Fortunately, there were no court or client obligations, and I have been relatively productive. However, it is extra difficult when unexpected school closings happen on days when my husband is traveling and I must be in court.
Missing Events that Are Important to My Children
As an attorney, I frequently miss events at my children’s school. Sometimes, I plan on being there, and then an unplanned court deadline pops up, or a project takes longer than I allotted, and I have no choice but to miss it. Nothing breaks my heart more than hearing that I was the only parent who did not volunteer at the Fall Fest or attend the latest project presentation.
This list could go on and on. I feel a constant pull between being a good parent and a good attorney, and it seems that for me, both cannot co-exist simultaneously. I have worked in many legal environments – public sector, small law firm, and now in a larger law firm – and in no place has anyone openly shared how difficult it is to be an attorney and have children. It is surprising that we are not having these conversations in our workplaces, because when mom attorneys post about parenting and work frustrations on social media, hundreds of people comment and say they find it extremely difficult to manage both.
Studies have emphasized the many complications that attorneys who are parents experience throughout their careers. In 2023, the American Bar Association (ABA) published a report, “Legal Careers of Parents and Child Caregivers,” that surveyed over 8,000 working parents and provided information on how parenting impacts the legal careers of mothers and fathers. In particular, the authors’ data showed “a substantial percentage of mothers in the profession have been subjected to unfounded criticisms and stereotypes, implicit biases and many adverse day-to-day experiences in the workplace that impede their advancement and ability to balance their professional and family obligations, thus leading to a continuing high rate of attrition.” A full copy of the report can be found online.
Last year, the United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released a Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Parents, highlighting the urgent need to better support parents, caregivers, and families to help our communities thrive. Any working parent already knew that parenting and working was a crisis. One of the solutions outlined in the Advisory is a “cultural shift” where we recognize the critical importance of raising children to society and value and respect time spent parenting on par with time spent working at a paying job. The Surgeon General’s Advisory can be found here.
I want to share a few things that I do to help me attempt to do my job and be a parent:
- Work at a family-friendly firm. One of the many things I love about my co-workers is that they really love their families. This creates a truly family-friendly environment that makes me feel comfortable talking about my family and what I need to take care of them.
- Ask for flexibility. I work in the office almost every day, but if my children are sick (which sadly is often), I can work from home. I am glad that my job has the technology to set up a full office at home so that I can have all the screens I need to do my job.
- Rely on family and friends. My in-laws live in the same city as I do and often help with pickups, even when no one is traveling or with a good home-cooked meal. I recognize that I am fortunate to have family nearby; not everyone has family who can assist with childcare. I also rely on friends. I have a great group of friends I met through childcare who have been invaluable. The first week I started my current job, two helped with school pickups because my husband was out of town for work.
- Be intentional with your time. After missing many important events with my children, I have tried to attend the ones I know will mean a lot to them. Focusing on one or two major events, as opposed to every classroom party, has allowed me to adjust my schedule to attend. Recently, my daughter took African drumming lessons through her school and talked about it nonstop. At the end of the lessons, there was a presentation in front of the whole school. I planned my schedule around attending the presentation and am so glad I did because I saw her and her classmates have the best time showing off their new skills, and every other parent was there.
The 2024 ABA Profile of the Legal Profession indicated that women continue to make a substantial mark in the legal profession because, for the first time, most law firm associates and more than four in 10 of the nation’s lawyers are women. In the 2023 ABA Profile of the Legal Profession, however, caretaking commitments were cited as the main reason experienced female lawyers left their law firms. As we have these honest conversations about caretaking commitments and how to be both an attorney and a caretaker, we can hopefully reduce women lawyer attrition and grow our mark on the legal profession.
In Part 3 of this series, we will interview Carolyn (“Kerry”) E. Waldrep, a former attorney and now Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, who is focusing her dissertation research on women attorneys and has spent the last year interviewing women attorneys. Stay tuned!