This week’s “Speak Your Mind” topic on Work It, Mom! is “Have you become less ambitious in your career and personal goals since having kids?” It’s a tough question to answer for me, since parenthood, career, and adulthood pretty much all coincided and it’s tough to tease out exactly how they affected each other. I’m inclined to say “yes,” but it’s more like my ambitions have been scaled to the framework of managing family and work.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been overly ambitious – at least not realistically, since I know there’s a limit to how driven I am and that I’m not one of those people who will do “whatever it takes.” But I can’t say at this point whether that’s an outcome of having kids…I just know that family and balance are more important to me than getting to the top of the heap at work. And since last October, I’ve been married to someone who feels the same way, which is very nice.
There’s a fuller discussion in my essay here. You have to be a member of the site to rate/vote on an article.
I think maybe I had kids as a result of becoming less ambitious in my career, rather than the other way around.