Note: At the bottom of this post, I’ll be linking to other mums who’ve written on this topic. So if this post pops up incessantly in your Reader, that’s why.
Indimommy surveyed readers on going back to work after having a baby and did a nice article summing up the responses. Since I responded to their initial questions, I got emailed in a few more and while answering those I realised I had a fair bit to say on the subject. So I decided to do a post here.
Why did I decide to go back to work?
Before my baby was born, I don’t think it really occurred to me that not going to work was something that I might do. Because although I wasn’t passionate about my job, I liked working and I liked drawing a paycheck and I was fairly sure I wouldn’t like being around a baby 24/7 and all the allied chores that get thrown your way when you’re ‘not working’.
At some point, V made his preference clear which was that I continue to work. He has never cherished being the only breadwinner, and all the women he knows well worked outside the home after giving birth. I did once sharply tell him that had I wanted to stay home, he should support that (since he could financially, though it would mean saving less) but since I myself didn’t really want to stay home, I didn’t pursue that.
In Hong Kong, most middle-class women go back to work. There is a large number of highly educated women and if the choice was between their jobs or having a baby, they’d choose the former. Hell, many couples forgo having kids anyway because they believe a baby is a cost they cannot afford, even if they can drum up the interest. To push along the declining birth rate and keep women in the workforce, the Government instituted the foreign domestic helper policy, allowing Hongkongers to employ women from other countries at a set minimum wage. This did enable large numbers of middle-class women to go to work, though the birth rate is still on the low side. Basically, it’s the norm for women in Hong Kong to go back to work after having a baby, because few can afford not to.
This makes it easier to decide to go back to work. In the office, I had three other women on my floor who had just given birth and we traded stories. All of us felt we were better off back at work.
Doubts
If I had any twinges of doubt, they were when interviewing a helper. This was when I was in my second trimester so the baby was a reality and the 10 weeks maternity leave seemed to be incredibly paltry once I met the strangers I was supposed to be leaving my infant with. I just could not figure out how to pick one for the task. If I had to pick a helper for just the husband and me, easy peasy. But a not-quite-three-month-old baby is a bit different.
Thankfully, our part-time helper who we loved and trusted offered to come on board if we could pay her for the gap period when she was between employers waiting for her visa. We decided the extra expense was worth it, and in the end, immigration came through with the visa quicker than expected so we didn’t pay as much as we had thought. Several people who I’ve told we paid this amount are surprised, but for us it was money well spent.
Then Benji had reflux and I began to worry about going to work again. When I voiced these doubts to my mother, she said she would look after him but I must go back to work. When my sister had doubts after her baby, my mom told her the same. My mother is a stay-at-home mom who has completely changed her views on being one. She believes in the security of a paycheck now.
When I went back to work, it turned out to be the best decision I ever made. Immediately, the haze of anxiety that had enveloped me after Benji’s birth dissipated as I was forced to think about other things than whether his milk was coming up and burning his throat or how he was napping. My helper seemed perfectly capable of managing him and the household chores (though we told her she could skip the latter if it was getting too much) and she did so without the excessive worry that characterised me as a caregiver.
Did having a good domestic help sway your decision in continuing working after the baby?
Yes and no. It was never that much of a decision to make. I just assumed I’d go back to work. But having a good helper gave me immense peace of mind.
There’s a small chance that the helper wouldn’t have worked out. Most people I know in Hong Kong do find satisfactory help to look after their children. But if I really couldn’t find someone I was comfortable with, then I would have had to stay at home at least initially. Although my husband would have naturally been a better caretaker, I have the smaller paycheck coupled with the fact that I was trying to breastfeed. This is the sad truth for most households and a reason why its mostly the woman that gives up her job (though also, most people just don’t consider dad staying home as an option, even though bottle feeding exists). Honestly, I don’t see how I could have continued that indefinitely because I would have struggled mentally and emotionally.
The availability of help swayed my decision to have another child. I would not have done it without because after the first child I knew what a child would demand of me.
My second helper also showed me what it would be like to have a helper you don’t trust implicitly. While she loves my child, she can’t be trusted to make decisions. I would have had to micromanage a lot more and I can imagine a lot of stress.
Right now, I have two helpers who work well together in looking after our children and our when we’re at work and I feel super blessed.
Flexible hours
I don’t have flexible hours but I have reasonable and fixed hours. I also have understanding bosses who would understand if I needed to take a bit time off for something family-related. But it’s not the norm, so I’ve only done this once so far.
My husband also makes it a point to leave on time. We’re fortunate that we have jobs that allow this, but I think we’re also the kind of people who seek out these jobs even at the expense of money/career advancement. Thankfully, we do have enough money/reasonable career advancement anyway.
In cases of crisis, both of us are willing to work overtime (hell, I’ve edited stuff for my office a week after my baby was born, typing with one hand and holding my baby and breastfeeding on the other, because they called me in a crisis). I used to have to work the odd Saturday and the husband would back me up, I backed him up when he’s on business travel.
I think the reasonable working hours do help in keeping me from feeling overwhelmed and fatigued. I can switch off from work when at home and just spend time with my kids. Even so, as they grew older, I’ve felt the need to be there for them more, and hence the choice to do a PhD now (it was always on the cards, just a question of timing) which I think will give me more flexibility.
Policies
In Hong Kong, because of the helper situation, workplaces generally assume that parents don’t need to take time off for most kids’ stuff. Helpers serve the function that stay-at-home moms do in other places. Hence people are usually expected to work long hours, which kind of sucks.
Maternity leave in Hong Kong is 10 weeks which is far from ideal because babies are very vulnerable and need a lot of care in the first three to six months and it’s logical that parents would want to be involved at this delicate stage. Not to mention that it’s hard to sustain breastfeeding remotely, especially breastfeeding rooms are pretty much non-existent and one is reduced to pumping in the toilet or what you hope are deserted areas. I have a colleague whose child has severe allergies and she found with her second one that breastfeeding helped, but she couldn’t sustain it when she returned to work and her child is suffering but she has just accepted it. It pisses me off that such an affluent society that claims to want to tackle the birth rate cannot invest in the wellbeing of newborns by giving mums at least four months off. Paternity leave was instituted only last year and is all of FIVE days and that’s supposed to be some great thing. While I have a stellar helper, not everyone does or feels up to trusting someone else with such a small child. So at the policy level, much needs to be done.
Also read
Anna’s Mom’s take on her experience.
I loved your answers, and loved what you wrote here as well 🙂 Its nice to know that you got back to work, because you wanted to….and its nice to read about HK having such policies that support women to get back to work…guess India has a long way to go!
Thanks, but nooo, HK’s main policy is import of women from lower economy countries which is not an ideal solution and should definitely not be the only one. it’s a solution that works for me, but a developed place like HK should offer parents more choices such as longer maternity and paternity leave, breastfeeding rooms at work, flexible hours, creches, etc. HK has a long way to go as well.
Oh okay…its the immigration part eh?
Hmm… this was insightful. I personally feel there should be more maternity leave. It is similar in S and there is different maternity leave for locals vs. non locals.
“It pisses me off that such an affluent society that claims to want to tackle the birth rate cannot invest in the wellbeing of newborns by giving mums at least four months off.”
– same here. I personally think they care more about the money but just harp on about low birth rates at face value while making it difficult for people to have children in terms of structural and policy changes.
Ok at least we don’t have different maternity leave for locals and non-locals. How weird is it to have different maternity leave. We even have the same maternity leave if your helper gets pregnant which is party why locals are creepily paranoid about that wrt to helpers partying on their days off.
Hahn the whole thing is to keep the capitalist system running. So they found stay-at-home women to replace the stay-at-home-moms so that workers bees could be there for corporate needs, but that’s hardly something thaat commendable. And now people are agitating for better conditions for the helpers, just as happened with SAHMs and they’re flummoxed.
Really. It is so sad to know how many of these maids have their own children back home. How is it fair then?
Worse is the pay system.
Suppose my cost for a maid is X. I give the maid room to stay + food + be nice and give clothes whatever. The maid gets paid only 40-50% of X. The rest goes to Maid agency (10% of X ) and 50% goes as tax every single month.
It’s sad. The issue is the lack of the opportunities back home that make this kind of emigration necessary.
I didn’t really understand your pay calculation. Maids pay taxes? I do think agencies are very problematic. I was fortunate to be able to employ both my helpers without going through an agency. We used the agency only for processing and paid those fees ourselves.
Ah, okay maybe I made it too complicated because I do not want to write it directly. As far as I know, most people have to go through an agency because of all the paperwork.
Then the employee has to pay
1. the maid, pay every month
2. the agency fees (I do not know if this is one off fees or monthly), and
3 the taxes (which is almost the same amount as the maid’s salary) for getting a maid every month.
Again, foreigners have to pay more taxes.
So, basically, we are depriving the maid of getting more money and setting their salary levels low because we are paying the same amount of money (as her salary) as taxes. Why do maid employers need to be taxed that much if one wants to make birth rate friendly policies?
Coz, talk is cheap. At the end of the day, east Asia though economically and infrastructure wise is developed, they are not in terms of gender equality – policy wise or people wise. Women are expected to do it all – marry on time, give birth on time, keep working and do all household work.
Ah ok. Agency fees should be one off at least for employers. The problem is that agencies actually charge the maids a fee as well, often illegally. In Hong Kong, the fee that agencies can take from helpers is legally limited to a very small amount, but in reality they take huge lumpsums, and then hold the helpers to ransom by threatening their families back home. And the government does not monitor this enough, partly because it is impossible to monitor what goes on in another country, but still there is more they could do.
Hence, I was happy to avoid the agency. I know my maid did not get charged anything extra because we asked her and we’re close enough that she would tell us. We paid a one-time service fee for processing her papers, which we needed to because she was breaking her contract. For a renewal, they can process their papers directly with immigration/consulate which they are now doing.
The HK government has some new levy. It’s a small amount but I’ve heard of some cheapo employers passing it on to the helpers and cutting it from their salary. This sucks, and is also illegal.
Actually, this nonsense happens more with Indonesian helpers than Filipinos, because the latter have become more savvy about their rights, which some employers don’t like.
And the governments back home also add some weird costs, like making them undergo some useless training (which has to be paid for), and buy insurance back home when we already buy good insurance here.
So yeah, you’re right all of this could go to the helper instead of all these useless service providers.
I agree with you on finding someone trustworthy to leave your baby with on returning to work.
I had to return to work, even though I would have loved to stay at home with the Cutlet because we have an insane home loan schedule! I honest to God thought, I’d probably never have kids because of all these child abuse stories that I used to read every. single. day.
But then, my mom volunteered to keep the Cutlet through the day and get a full time help at home to do the cooking, cleaning etc. I pay for 50% of the help’s salary. Its still so much cheaper than day care and I honestly go in to work so content and confident that he is with the best people ever – my parents 🙂
But personally, if I could, I would quit in an instant. I would love to spend all my time with him. I did not think I’d like my own kid so much, and after my post partum depression, I figured it was best for me to return to work, but I was wrong. I miss him cute lil face and sometimes I’m bummed that he learns some cute things at my parents and I’ve missed a lot of firsts 😦
Hahn, I think different women will have different experiences on returning to work, all of them valid.
Returning to work was the best thing mentally for me when my kids were infants (ironically) but I feel much more need to be with them now that they’re toddlers and I feel I could add real value to their education and experience. But I can totally imagine it being the other way or something totally different for other women.
Actually, parents being willing and able to do the child-rearing bit fulltime is a very good thing and should be encouraged, just as other options are provided for those who want a middle path or whatever. Okay,
A bit off-topic but your mom encouraging you to go to work really struck me. I’m currently on a break from full-time work and my mom (a housewife) is more apprehensive than I am about me getting back into the workforce! My MIL who has gone out to work, on the other hand, tells me frequently to chill and enjoy this time by myself/with my daughter. Such different perspectives!
Yeah, maybe their experience made them veer towards the other direction. I remember one of V’s aunts who actually had a very bad marriage but did very well in her job telling me I should quit mine after having a baby. I was surprised because didn’t she of all people see the value of her own independent paycheck? But maybe she felt she missed out as a working mother.
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Had too much to say. So wrote a post 🙂
Read! I think it’s useful to hear about other women’s experiences. Do you mind if I link yours in my post?
Sure, go ahead 🙂
Very timely for me. We live in the US and just had a baby and am going to back to work next week after 4.5 months. I never thought I would not work either and it has surprised me as to how much of a struggle it has been. The main thing really is help with child care. Here in the SF bay area it’s easy to find good help but it’s very expensive. Also my thoughts on help changed dramatically after actually having a child. All sorts of anxieties surfaced which I had never thought I’d have before. I agree that maternity leave policies are horrible, here the norm is 12 weeks but I managed to stretch mine out with a lot of negotiation based on tenure. And yeah I agree that 4 months has to be the minimum particularly if you are breastfeeding. So many things are still up in the air at the 10-12 week mark both with the baby and the mother. Thankfully at least California has laws that force work places to have separate rooms to pump in which is the only thing that makes such a chore bearable. It’s unthinkable to be able to do it without a lot of support.
Oh really, didn’t realise California has those laws. My sis who lives there luckily had a cabin, but she said a friend in another company used to book conference rooms.
Also in California, I think the government makes some contribution to maternity leave, which I think is also odd. Like can’t companies just suck it up…
The pumping room and maternity laws are pretty recent I think. The government contribution is basically just payback for what people put in while they were working. Essentially while you are working a small percentage of your salary goes towards what is known as disability payments and then when you take maternity leave, the first part is actually known as disability leave you get it back. So it works somewhat like insurance, I don’t think the government actually pays for it, they just administer the funds and companies can choose to administer it themselves too and larger ones sometimes do, the place I work at for e.g. does.
Also breastfeeding really should count under preventative care. I think things are moving in that direction with Obamacare doing things like covering pumps under insurance but it’s still a long way to go.
I think the government matches the employee’s compensation. But I could be wrong.
I just think company’s should pay for it…but maybe that’s unfair to people who don’t have kids. That’s something that’s been raised now that everyone having kids is not taken for granted.
So interesting for me….I had a generous mat leave policy from work and then the govt also chips in as well. And since giving birth I’ve made decisions that I never thought I would. Hmm…actually might do a post about this myself haha. Get back into the blogging saddle 😀
Yes do…and I’ll link up all the related posts to this post. I never thought of writing on this subject before because I thought it had already been covered, but I think there is a lot to say, and different experiences to be shared.