Family or Career? I choose both

In life, we can’t have it all, neither can we give 100%, but we can give enough for a balanced family and work life.

This said, I do NOT have a problem with parents, most especially mothers who give up career for full-time parenting and spousing. However, I do have a BIG problem with full-time wives/mothers who try to make working mothers feel they are not being good enough wives and mothers, just because they are career focused.

Giving up career to be a full-time wife/mother does NOT necessarily make you a better wife and mother than your working counterparts. It only gives you more time. And having more time to do a particular thing doesn’t always mean you would do it better than another who invests less time on that same thing. It only increases the probability that you will do it better. But then, probabilities remain what they are, which is probabilities. They aren’t certainties.

You have chosen to stay at home, all well and good. But stop trying to guilt or emotionally blackmail working wives and mothers. Stop trying to blackmail everyone into living life your way.

Nollywood is another propagator of this. They know how to script their movies to make highly career achieving working women appear as bad wives. I was watching one some days ago, and a CEO was made to look like a very terrible wife and mother. When you (Nollywood) do this, you pass across a message to young women that it’s a crime to aspire for career excellence as a female.

A couple can both work full-time and raised sound children, and another couple can have one stay-at-home parent and still end up raising bad children.

If I should take statistics from what I have observed in my environment since I was a child till this very moment, I would say working parents raised better children more often than stay-at-home parents did. Remember, this conclusion was drawn from my personal observations over the years.