Does a Demanding Job Hurt Our Relationships with Our Kids?

My daughter's teacher was legendary for her understanding of both children and parents. At our first conference, she told me that my daughter was unusual in being so well-adjusted despite both her parents holding demanding jobs that entailed travel. How did we do it? We had a wonderful au pair, I explained; I always took her and my daughter when I traveled, and my children were my first priority. But I uneasily admitted that my daughter seemed to be getting more rebellious with me, and I wished I had a bit more internal equilibrium to manage her.

A few months later my company was sold and I became a stay at home mom. After three weeks, I noticed a qualitative change in my daughter's behavior. Her rebelliousness had vanished. She was more affectionate with me. Our relationship felt profoundly more intimate. Would I have said before that we could have been closer? No. But I could feel the difference now, and so could she. Was it the extra time together? Was I just more relaxed? Did I parent differently than our 21 year old au pair? I still don't know the answer, but I've structured my work life since then so that I'm almost always home when she is.

Babies and toddlers are shaped every minute by their environments. Maybe even more importantly, our relationship with them, like any other relationship, blossoms from the time we spend together. I've noticed from observing many families that children whose parents both worked fulltime when they were small are simply not as close to their parents over time.

As any parent of a preschooler knows, young children initially protest insufficient parental interaction, often in demanding and obnoxious ways. But as we shunt them off to TV, computer, daycare and other babysitters, they increasingly turn elsewhere to get their attachment needs met. We may lament the influence of the peer group, but it flourishes in the vacuum of our own absence. By middle school, many parents find themselves shut out of their child's internal world, a poor foundation as kids enter the teen years.

Some caveats: Certainly not all stay-at-home parents have wonderful relationships with their children. Many parents don't have the option of working part-time (or not at all) while their kids are small -- which is a tragic result of our government policies and family-unfriendly workplaces -- and in the end most of their kids do ok, if not as well as they could -- as long as other risk factors don't enter the picture. I believe strongly that all childcare should be equally shared between moms and dads, and that our work world will become more family-friendly when that happens. And I don't believe that kids need a parent at home once they're in school six hours a day, particularly in light of the finding that women lose 37 percent of their earning power when they spend more than three years out of the workforce.

But does having a demanding fulltime job mean you have less to offer your baby or toddler, whether you're a dad or a mom? How could it not?