With the average first-time mother in Australia,I was and still am very much the exception to the rule. At 38,I look around and see my friends at the start of their parenting journeys,while I send my son off to his final years of high school.
Odette Barry with her son.Supplied
That the average age of motherhood now so neatly overlaps with core career-building years means we’re increasingly seeing parents attempt to cram two fundamentally incompatible life chapters into one. Where I have an increasing capacity for my career,I see a trail of exhausted parents trying to navigate a seemingly endless cycle of challenges,haphazardly juggling between family and work and often feeling like they’re failing at both. At a time when they could be coming up for air,they are drowning.
Having a baby in my early 20s was not without its challenges. People would routinely stop me in the street and tell me I didn’t look old enough to have a baby,and I could feel the sting of judgment when people learned my age,and the age of my son. I didn’t spend years backpacking around Europe with no responsibilities or dance at half moon parties for half of my 20s. But on the whole,my relative youth as a parent has paid dividends over the years.
Along with more energy,I didn’t have time to get used to a disposable income before I gave it all up. It also meant that when my career was kicking into gear at 30,my son was already settled into school,and I had the mental and logistical space to start my own business.
Now,there are no nappies,gastro or childcare hurdles as I navigate Zoom meetings and last-minute travel for work.
These days when we’re asked what we want to be when we grow up,being a parent – especially for women – isn’t at the top of the list. Girls are often told that they should aim higher. There are understandable and very valid reasons for this,but an unintended by-product of hard-won feminist gains is that parenting is now presented as an afterthought – something to delay until the rest of your life goals are accomplished.
Visible examples of motherhood in public spaces,such as seeing Jacinda Ardern skilfully guide New Zealand through COVID with baby vomit on her jumper or Larissa Waters breastfeeding in the Australian senate,are important. The problem is this type-A version of parenting is unreachable to most mothers but it’s being presented as the model to follow.
It feels as if the championing of this capitalist,white-centric version of motherhood has coincided with a decrease in the value we place on the responsibility of parenthood as a whole.
As birth rates continue to dramatically fall across developed countries,we have to consider the knock-on effect our social obsession with productivity has had on family planning,health and happiness.
Instead of meeting societal KPIs that value output and achievement over the human experience,we need environments that encourage parents to actually enjoy parenting,rather than having to navigate boardrooms while breastfeeding and heralding doing both at once as a win for women.
That means policies that help families first,instead of helping organisations that drive mothers back into the workforce to prop up the capitalist fever dream. Policy that doesn’t have parents dodging childcare bugs,juggling deadlines and paying for costly IVF rounds and skyrocketing childcare fees. Policy that doesn’t force parents to give up their time,energy and the vigour of youth to their workplaces only to then outsource the parenting experience a decade later to nannies,childcare and after-school programs.
Medical advancements like IVF should be lauded for allowing people to realise their dreams of starting a family,but they come with a high financial,emotional and physical price,and with that can be devastatingly low.
We need to see becoming a parent supported at all ages,not just when it’s financially or socially viable. This means better fertility education for young womenandyoung men (who are responsible for).
As I approach my 40s,I’ve watched the struggle,heartache and expense that comes with waiting too long to have children,only to discover it’s not as easy as you believed it would be when society was fearmongering about the risks of teen pregnancy.
Becoming a parent at 22 was hard,but becoming a parent at any age is hard. What I wish people considering parenthood understood is that fertility isn’t a guarantee;it’s risky and volatile and when you choose to do it matters. If I had my time over,I wouldn’t change a thing.
Odette Barry is the founder of Odette&Co,a publicist and PR mentor based in Byron Bay.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge,champion and inform your own..