Neha Ruch and the Gray Area Between Work and Care

Neha Ruch deeply understands language.

In her book, THE POWER PAUSE, Neha opens with a chapter of her own tongue-tied moment of being asked “what do you do?” and not having a comfortable answer. “I offered a mouthful of business jargon without ever actually owning my decision to be home with my kid,” she writes. In retrospect, she realizes, this was less about justifying her own choice to this well-intentioned mom who asked a simple question, but to herself.

Why do so many of us shirk away from the idea of being a stay-at-home parent? Have the years of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In done such a number on us that we think any career downshifting or pause means that our contribution as a member of society is less than that of a person making an income? Some of this, I firmly believe, comes from our own de-prioritization of care work and the low wages we offer the early educators who care for our young children, particularly as compared to teachers in the K-12 system who often have tiered salaries, degree and license requirements, health insurance and retirement options. Other aspects come from our go-go-go-go mentality: be productive, make money, collect accolades.

Neha posits that some of the reluctance to admit a high-achiever might stay home to care for kids instead of opting for paid work comes from this outdated notion of what a stay-at-home parent does. When we close our eyes to ask who a stay-at-home parent is, we are quick to respond “June Cleaver.” (But really, how many of us have ever even watched that show? I never have.) But we also vastly underestimate the value that we can gain as individuals and future income-earners from leaning into caregiving roles.

• We can expand our network.
• Discover new hobbies and interests.
• Think creatively about ways to work and in doing so, come up with more fulfilling options or look into entrepreneurial roles that give us more autonomy.

Neha founded the website, community and movement Mother Untitled. She has found an audience of 250,000 parents who want to find like-minded people to posit what the gray state of life between paid work and care work may look like. Stay at home parents, as she and others have found, are not a monolith group - some have the privilege to make the choice, others do not have access to quality child care and cannot work without it.

Neha was kind enough to do a Q+A with me ahead of The Power Pause release.

Q. Neha, I also had a baby the same month you did - January 2016 - and I remember so much of the Sheryl Sandberg Lean In commentary that any leaning out would be the end of our careers and ambitions. Sandberg no longer advocates such things, but how much do you think that played a role in shaping our own ideas of what career downshifting (or “career sabbatical” as one mom calls it in your book) might look like?

Neha: Our generation was raised on second-wave feminism, and Lean In came at a moment of tech unicorns, women were finally at equal labor participation rates as men, in the Girl Boss era. So, Lean In was a crescendo of a long-brewing ethos that women had to strive for, and anything less than that was defending tradition and antithetical to ambition. And it bolstered several women’s careers but cast undue shame on women who needed or wanted to take career pauses or downshifts for a chapter.

Q. I love that your book addresses the idea of what expanding oneself during a power pause could look like - and you provide so many examples from your life and others. Why do you think it’s taken us so long to really value caregiving as a value-add for people in their life and work experience?

Neha: Caregiving was deemed easy to outsource and diminished to simple work like diapers and laundry. In truth, it was always complicated, awe-inspiring work, but only more so now in the age of intensive parenting, parental burnout, and lack of childcare options. Post-pandemic, when care wasn’t as easy to outsource, our culture was forced to see it for it was – a lot of work. The next step is recognizing it for work of value, but work that is dynamic and complicated and demands organization, empathy, community-building and communication, patience, and a tremendous amount of personal growth to keep up with rapidly changing little people in a rapidly changing world.

Q. There’s a saying that people value what we can measure, and we can measure things like income earned and gross domestic product; yet we can’t really measure things like caregiving, emotional labor and authentic connection. Do you think we should be in a position of trying to measure something like caregiving, or find ways to rely less on such metrics in evaluating the health of a country?

Neha: I think that’s true, and put simply, we’ve inherited the belief that work for pay deserves support and unpaid work does not. While I see us doing the work on a cultural level to start to rewire our narratives about caregiving, to create system changes like stipends for at-home parents or a work day that’s aligned to the school day, more data helps. The survey that is now already dated assigned an at-home parent $184,000 in salary. While no at-home parent will see a payout like that from the government anytime soon, having data like that helps build a case for more financial dignity when one parent is on a career break by creating a universal understanding of their value and contribution to the home.

PULL QUOTE -- > “Put simply, we’ve inherited the belief that work for pay deserves support and unpaid work does not.” — Neha Ruch, Mother Untitled

Q. You’re going around the country for these Power Pause pop-ups and I love following your travels on Instagram (@motheruntitled for people). What are you hearing from parents? What has the reaction been to people having a platform and space to have such conversations about some of the complicated topics surrounding parenting?

Neha: Meeting women around the country has been validating that women are ever-shifting and there is a vast gray area between stay-at-home and working mothers. Half the women in the room are working out of the home in a part-time, freelance, or entrepreneurial capacity. I met a radiologist in Charlottesville, VA, who works at 50% “effort” as the hospital dubs it. Meanwhile, the other half of ambitious women on career breaks have robust stories about their current experiences. One woman in St. Louis used to work in admissions and is doing a little work seasonally in reviewing applications to keep her hand in the game while also being focused on her daughter’s new diagnosis of diabetes. She sits on the phone with insurance, writes a guide for her school in dealing with the care, and volunteers for a community for parents with children with diabetes. While they have an inner knowing of their sense of worth and possibility, all contend with a certain feeling of not being enough in certain rooms, and what I find in these [ Mother Untitled events and in our community is when we create space for women to feel like enough, they can speak up about what they need, what they want and how they can help each other.

Q. You open your book with a few pages on the importance of the language you use, and you acknowledge that one in five stay at home parents is a dad. Are you hearing from dads as well about these sort of shifts? Do you anticipate that dads who take a career break for caregiving will be able to employ some of these same tactics in re-entering the paid workforce, or does society judge them differently?

Neha: We see a generation of dads spending three times as much time with their children than any previous generation. This is also important for women working in or out of the home because they have more equitable partners. Men taking career breaks for family life helps the dialogue of dignifying chapters of at-home parenthood less gendered. Men have to navigate a different set of societal stigmas; however, they can draw from the same guidance around identity, financial dignity, resigning, goal setting, and using the stage of life to network, explore, and craft a return story encompassing all their non-traditional experiences. When men take a career break, their expectations are lower, so anecdotally, I observe male at-home parents enjoy it more because they don’t feel the need to do all the extra stuff — the volunteering, the bake sales, etc.

Q. Finally, your kids are older now but traveling away from home is still an event. How do they understand The Power Pause, and how has it shifted your own life at home to be front and center of this movement?

Neha: This fall, I got a little office around the corner from them and took them by to see. It was a way of saying that I was, in a sense, going back to work in a more official sense and created a more traditional boundary around my work day where it used to be a hodge podge in between school hours or off the playroom once they got home. Over the last few years, my husband, parents, and a babysitter have slowly ramped up their time helping after school, so I had the privilege of a loving village with which the kids are already familiar. With the set boundary around work, I’ve applied the same to home. I try to wrap up my day at 4:30 so I’m back with them, and phones are away until they are in bed by 8. Then, I’ll turn back on while my husband and I “watch” a show.

My older one, who is nine, was very invested in writing. Bodie remembers when I wrote the conclusion of the book, sitting across from him while he did his reading homework. At age nine, he is developmentally seeking more independence from me, so the travel and the ramp-up of my work have felt less of “a thing” to him. My daughter, I’ve had to reinforce that I was so lucky to get the years at home with her, and now we’re all ready for new experiences, her with friends and school and gymnastics, and me with putting this book out. I explained how much I care about the work and helping other mommies and that this is temporary. And, like everything, we’ll reevaluate our rhythms in the Spring. They get that they’re part of my team. But, I, like them, am looking forward to Spring Break as a shared family milestone to pause and reset.