Lauren (00:00):

It builds you up to understand why economically, it’s a good decision for you to ask for what you’re asking for. You already know in terms of your feeling of being supported and wellness that it’s good, it’s good for your baby, it’s good for you. Wouldn’t be asking for it otherwise, right? But what is the case that you can make for why? Also, this is a good decision for the person across the Zoom or across the desk from you. And remember that that person is probably also going to have to go negotiate up themselves. So give them, it’s in service of them. Give them everything they need to go make the case for you. And let’s just assume from the get go that they’re on your side.

Dr. Sarah (00:45):

Going back to work after having a baby can be filled with many hurdles and unexpected challenges. And that’s something that both my guests this week and I know very well. Joining me today is Lauren Smith Brody. Lauren is the CEO and founder of The Fifth Trimester and the author of the bestselling book, The Fifth Trimester: The Working Moms Guide to Style, Sanity and Success After Baby. Lauren is also a co-founder of the Chamber of Mothers, which is a national nonpartisan nonprofit that mobilizes Americans around public policy solutions for parents bringing local chapter advocacy to Capitol Hill. In this episode, we’re diving into the critical need to shift workplace culture in a way that empowers working parents. Lauren shares how caregiving is not a career setback, but it’s an asset that adds value and strengthens the workforce. And we’re going to share some very practical strategies for advocating for yourself at the office for tips to making it easier for management to say yes to your requests. And we’re even going to talk about how small businesses with limited resources can still support working parents. Let’s dig into the conversation.

(02:00):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(02:30):

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the securely attached podcast. Today we have Lauren Smith Brody on, and I am so excited for this conversation. I have lots of questions for you, but first, can you share a little bit about your work and your amazing, you’re such a pioneer in this field of and kind of coined the term “the fifth trimester.” So welcome.

Lauren (02:58):

I did. Yes. I was going to say, you can say journey. It’s fine. So hi. So I started my career in media. I was a women’s magazine editor for a long time. Had both of my children who are now 13 and 16, which is really hard to believe. While I was working at Conde Nast, I live in New York, it was a very sort of high stakes, high stress, long hours, extremely creatively rewarding, surrounded by just a constellation of amazing people, none of whom were very open about actually how hard it was to be a mom and do that job. And so when I had my kids, so my first son, I had a really healthy pregnancy, healthy delivery, and then I had pretty bad postpartum anxiety when he was born and it was undiagnosed by anybody but me in retrospect. But it was bad. I had a lot of intrusive thoughts, was really challenging for me. I’m the oldest of four kids in my family. I babysat to save up money through high school love babies, love kids, think of myself as a baby person. Although now I think of myself as a teenager person because it turns out I just actually love people and kids.

(04:11):

And so I was really sort of gobsmacked by how hard it was and how my image of myself didn’t align with what I thought it was going to be. And I don’t mean looking in the mirror. I mean really how I felt about myself as a mom going back to work at 12 weeks, which was the leave that I had access to. Most of it was paid, not all of it, but enough that my husband and I could weather the unpaid weeks in some ways, gave me back a piece of my identity that I really knew well and I knew how to do my job well. And I went back into my job, which was at that point at an executive level. And so I was able to be perhaps a little bit more transparent about what was hard about this reentry than I had seen some of my other colleagues be.

(04:53):

And I also just, I’m not a fake it till you make it kind of person. And for the first time in my life I realized the benefits of that, which was by showing what was hard, I actually became a better manager. I had people coming to me saying, oh my gosh, I know all these people have families. You make it look like it’s actually not easy, but you’re doing it anyway and you’re doing it well and that looks like something I can do too and get through and I’m seeing you get through it. Thank you for having your breast pump on your desk. Thank you for saying you need to leave when you need to leave. And that was a real eureka moment for me because I had kind of come up in publishing in very much the girl boss era of management of really dress for the job you want, not the job you have approach. And it really undid that motherhood undid that for me. I had this notion of there being a fifth trimester, which was I knew about the fourth trimester from Dr. Harvey Karp who really helped me through those first weeks of anxiety and soothing a newborn.

(05:56):

But I remember again and again thinking he’s saying, just get to 12 weeks, get to 12 weeks, your baby’s going to be the baby you were supposed to give birth to. Every other mammal is developmentally like a whole trimester further along when they give birth than humans. And that the irony of that was really hard for me. And so I thought, well, maybe there’s, there’s a fifth trimester and maybe this one’s for me as the mom developmentally going back to my paid work. My husband is a psychiatrist actually and was in his training at that point. He went to medical school a little bit later than just right after college. So I was the primary breadwinner. I was definitely the one who as he was working overnights, had to do sort of the morning and evening shifts with the baby and transferring to our caregiver and stuff.

(06:41):

And I found it was really a time that taught me a lot about myself and who I wanted to be a real reset of values. And I ended up continuing to advance remarkably not quite as fast as I had before. And that was okay and had a second child and I just filed away this idea of maybe there is a fifth trimester. People need support around it. People need to feel like there isn’t just this individual problem to be solved because when you enter it for the first time, and I think it was having the second child that showed me this, you think everything is on you. If you feel mom guilt, it’s your fault if you’re distracted or unfocused or something must be wrong with me. Everybody says, you get your whole 12 weeks, you should be good. And I’m not, it’s me. This was sort of the awakening of maybe there’s something more systemic going on here.

Dr. Sarah (07:30):

Yeah.

Lauren (07:31):

So eventually actually it was laid off from my magazine job that was an industry that was really, really contracting at the time. And I decided to research and look at the experiences of a whole bunch of other returning to work moms. And I called it the fifth trimester. First thing I did was trademark it on a really good friend’s advice. She said, just make it real for yourself. I said, oh my God, that’s like a thousand dollars. She was like, just trust me.

Dr. Sarah (07:58):

Probably the ROI on that trademark is paid off.

Lauren (08:02):

Although I have to tell you, I get legal bills for it all the time.

Dr. Sarah (08:05):

Well, I mean, I don’t mean literally dollars, but the idea that you as, and I think this kind of speaks to a lot of your messaging is empowering women to be working mothers to own their work, to own their worth, to own their purpose, and to be able to say, no, no, no, yes, this is my idea. I own this. There’s a lot of value in that.

Lauren (08:28):

There is. And I fought to keep it actually as the title of my book once I did the research and looked at the experiences of these hundreds of other moms from a diversity of backgrounds, because I found that, and maybe I’m just a word nerd, I come out of, I’m a journalist still, I’m a writer. But to me, being able to name something means that other people can say, Hey, that sounds like something I’m a part of too. I’m going through that too. And so it really created community.

(08:55):

And the book really did foster that sense of community too, among the hundreds of moms who I interviewed and surveyed. But then also as I made it into a social media entity, there was community there. And it was simultaneously as I was helping new moms through this transition and sort of finding the benefits and the growth moments and the resets of values, I was going through a work transition myself coming out of corporate life and into working for myself, which I will tell you I am built to be. My old boss used to say, you’re a company girl. And she meant it as a compliment, but I am meant to have structure. And instead here I was in my home with my two little kids, eventually through a pandemic figuring out how do I have a business? So the answer was I realized that a lot of these moms who I was reaching were going back to their companies and saying, I feel empowered to speak up for myself now.

(09:46):

So I wanted to help from the other side, the managers, the HR leaders, the benefits directors, figure out how do I create not just benefits, but a culture. So that’s what I do too. I now go into companies and I help them do a better job of supporting and retaining. Initially it was new moms, now it is really all caregiving people because if you can create policies and culture that support especially a single mom, a single new mom, then those policies will impact everyone in such a positive way. We know that 73% of employed people are doing caregiving work in their personal lives, and more and more they’re identifying into that category too. It’s the caregiving is the fastest growing identity group in the workforce as well, which I think is really, really cool and says a lot, not that more of us are doing more care than we were, but that we’re making it more visible and seeing it a part of who we want to be and seeing unpaid caregiving work as having value alongside our paid work.

(10:46):

So over the years, it’s been a real evolution of helping people reframe and understand and doing the research myself to make the economic case for all of these supports. So that’s all private sector. And then I found that through a lot of that work, I was really only reaching, not only, but primarily reaching corporate employees who had access to something, not great policies, but something enough that wanted, that their businesses wanted to work with someone like me, which means they’re already sort of somewhat progressive on these issues. I mean, this should just be humane, not progressive, but relative to the rest of America. And it was not sitting well with me that I needed this to be a business. I needed to find identity in it. I needed to be able to say, this is what I do. At the same time, I wasn’t necessarily able to fully support everybody who doesn’t have access to any leave at all, who works hourly wages or in gig work or for themselves. And so the answer to that was linking arms with a bunch of other really amazing women who had communities of new moms with different professional backgrounds themselves. And we formed the Chamber of Mothers with a goal of unifying America’s moms to create the country we want to live in now and bestow to our children, and we fight for paid family and medical leave, affordable and accessible childcare and vastly improved maternal health outcomes.

Dr. Sarah (12:07):

That is so amazing. You’re actually the third chamber of mother interview. So we had Alexis, Brad Cutler, and we also had Rena Boston and now, so I love the work that the Chamber of Mothers is doing. Can you talk a little bit, I want to come back to the private sector stuff and what moms can do, but can you talk first a little bit about what is the Chamber of Mothers and why is that important for people to know? Especially we’re in a bit of a political moment right now. Why is it important for people to know what the Chamber of Mothers does and what they’re advocating for?

Lauren (12:43):

Absolutely. Because it is so universal, and that’s how we came together. So first of all, I have to say everybody go listen to Alexis’s episode and to Reana’s episode. I quote the two of them all the time. Reana in particular, her account on Instagram is @theworkingmomtras, and it’s exactly right. Every sentence she speaks, I’m like that. Thank you for helping me with that. Chamber of Mothers, we’ve actually, it’s funny, I’m going to be really transparent in, we’re doing a lot of fundraising pitching right now, and we’ve moved away a little bit from telling our origin story. But I think to answer your question, it makes sense to share that in the fall of 2021, I don’t know if you remember, but so Build Back Better was the Biden-Harris Administration’s sort of answer to it included a lot of care infrastructure in the bills and paid family leave was proposed as a part of it.

(13:31):

And it was based on a paid family leave legislation that had been proposed again and again and again and again by lawmakers including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. And it’s a fantastic package. The way it works, it works very similarly to the way we’ve seen it work in New York State in particular, but also there’s now 14 states across the country that have access to paid leave. It works, it pays off. We all knew this. And then we saw it on the cutting room floor. It was just getting negotiated down, down, down, down, down until it was gone. It was four weeks and then it was gone, and then it was back to four weeks and it had started at 12 weeks. And we were friends, mostly just online friends through our different Instagram accounts and communities and our backgrounds were, so Pooja Lakshmin’s a psychiatrist, Daphne Delvaux is known as the mom attorney.

(14:19):

She’s a labor and employment attorney. Erin Erenberg is also an attorney. She’s an ip. But she had this amazing community does still called Totem women that supports women through early motherhood, the entry to motherhood. We all, and a whole bunch of other people came together and wanted to show the unity in these issues and the fact that we’ve sort of come to this idea, but there’s so many divisions of early parenthood and we were sick of seeing it politicized. We were sick of seeing it left on the cutting room floor. These are basic human needs for the mom, for the kid, for the perpetual society at large, I would argue. And we sort of identified, so initially we came together around paid family leave, and then we realized that really that worked hand in hand with maternal health and maternal mental health and childcare and that you sort of needed all three to link together.

(15:16):

So it was the germ of an idea. We started out really supporting existing groups that were going very deep on each of these individual issues, other nonprofits, but who weren’t necessarily reaching a mass consumer audience that we very, very quickly did. And we now reach between four and 20 million moms or followers I should say, every month. And what we do is we form communities all over the country. We have 30 local chapters right now. We also have a military chapter that’s virtual and we give them a playbook of how to form in community, how to find local resources, how to lean on each other, how to advocate locally for the policies and changes they want to see, whether that’s in their workplace or that’s in their local government. I mean from school board all the way up to the presidency. They report back to us about, and we bring them with us sometimes to go to DC and we meet evenly, we’re nonpartisan.

(16:10):

We meet evenly with Republican and democratic lawmakers to help educate them about what’s going on among their constituents in their hometowns and to make the case, the human case, but also the economic case for why these are not partisan issues and why we really need co-signers on all of these bills, for instance, that are in the mom debus, to protect maternal health, to pass paid family leave and childcare bills. That is, we do a whole bunch of things and every single one of them is important and every single one of them makes us more informed and better at the others. We also do a bunch of, we say we do do narrative shift around motherhood with some of that divisiveness and especially with, so one of the divisions I think is around attachment parenting. You’re supposed to be an attached, attached mom or you’re supposed to be the mom who cuts the cord, cries it out, goes to work. It’s sort of a false division.

Dr. Sarah (17:11):

I couldn’t agree more.

Lauren (17:12):

Right. Breastfeeding versus formula feeding. No, versus most people do some of both. And working versus being stay at home mom, I think we all know that what’s in the middle there is much more representative of what everybody is actually doing. And so a lot of what we’re trying to do as well is rewrite some of those false narratives. And if that also shows people that this is not such a polarized, this is not such a polarized issue supporting moms, and that impacts the way people research who they’re going to vote for. Fantastic. We have a whole program called Vote Like a Mother that actually it’s voter education, it’s nonpartisan. You can go on our site, you can sign in, you put your zip code, you get your sample ballot, you find out exactly where your candidates that you’re going to be able to see and vote for in November, up and down the ballot where they stand on childcare, paid leave, and maternal health issues.

Dr. Sarah (18:09):

That is such a valuable resource. Can we link that in the show description because that, I feel like we’ll put that in the show notes. In show descriptions. She can go there. So you, I’m wearing my shirt, my vote like a mother shirt here. Yes. Vote like a mother, please go vote like a mother. And this way I also think because hi working mom here have three jobs and two kids, and I don’t have time always to research all the things. And I do know where I stand on a lot of these issues. So to be able to have a resource to get a cliff notes on the things that matter to me as a voter. So I feel informed because I know that a lot of people sometimes are ambivalent about voting, not because they don’t want to vote, but because they don’t feel informed enough and they’re like, eh, I’ll get to it later. They put it off and then election day comes and they’re like, I don’t know who to vote. I don’t know all the things.

Lauren (19:01):

Or you’re standing and landing, Googling, what are the ballot measures and there’s a child hanging on your pants and also a deadline. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (19:08):

So this is a hugely invaluable resource for anybody. So we’ll definitely link that. I think that’s really useful. It’s interesting, one of the things you were saying, you’re talking about this polarization, this false polarization that you’re kind of tackling from a policy level. We’re not working moms or stay at home moms. We’re not formula versus breast milk.

(19:32):

Most people are somewhere in the middle. It’s just interesting because what my head went is from, because I come at this from a maternal mental health place and the work that I do with an individual mom is oftentimes helping them integrate those two internal polarizing voices like the, I’m supposed to do this, but part of me wants to do this, or I really want us to help with my kid. And I’m feeling really ambivalent about going back to work. And also I miss being out of the house and having a job and feeling that sense of purpose. And I feel like so many women talk about feeling torn or pulled into seemingly impossible directions. And that actually is a big amplifier and can actually can also create that distress, that conflict that creates the mental health issue, the anxiety or the depression or the spiral stress. And so a lot of the work that I do on a very individual level is helping a human being integrate those parts to be able to say I’m both.

Lauren (20:44):

Right.

Dr. Sarah (20:44):

Can feel all these conflicting feelings. Actually, it’s counterintuitive, but it actually is totally human to have seemingly mutually exclusive experiences all at the same time. And so it’s just an interesting parallel.

Lauren (21:00):

Yes, definitely. And that’s where, so I do some private coaching and I’m very, very clear about the fact that I’m not a mental health professional trained in that way, but I do a lot of career development coaching that for many women is happening at the same time as becoming a mom. And I sort of pick up the baton where you are, and I hope I always encourage these moms to get the therapy that they need, but to take that feeling of conflict and then figure out what about this is actually a system that’s not serving me well.

(21:34):

And if I feel that way, are there other people that also feel conflicted in this way and perhaps aren’t able to show it for one reason or another? They can’t be vulnerable, they’re marginalized in some way that I’m not at work and it’s too much of a risk for them to speak up and that it sounds so, I don’t mean for it to sound like psycho babbly, but that is the thing that most galvanizes people to say to their boss, actually, I need to leave at four 50 because every minute I’m late at daycare, I get charged an extra $5 and I will, here’s how I’m going to deliver my job anyway and do my job, but this is flexibility I need is hearing that it’s not just something they need in their personal life and it feels selfish. And for many, many moms, the first time they negotiate anything at work is when they become a mom because they’ve just sailed through by working harder, trying harder, doing a better job, saying yes, right, not sailed, but work really hard to get there and this is the first time that they’ve felt that conflict and have to stick up for themselves.

(22:39):

And it can be really helpful. I think particularly in New Parenthood, we’re so lit up to nurture people and I don’t think of that as a female management trait that’s somehow lesser. I think it’s a management trait that women are really good at, but I think we’re really keyed up to nurture in this moment and it’s important to remember that we’re nurturing not just ourselves and our families, but everybody around us too. And then in addition to that, so one, you’re helping yourself. Two, you’re helping your colleagues who can’t speak up. Three, you’re actually helping the business make a really good decision and be aware of a need that if they answer and fulfill it, we’ll get them better work out of you.

Dr. Sarah (23:20):

Yeah, let’s talk about that a little bit. Okay. It’s funny you were talking at the very beginning when you were talking about that, when you were realizing the shift between the fourth trimester and the fifth trimester and you were like, oh my God, the fourth trimester, they keep saying it’ll be good once we get past the fourth trimester, but I got to go back to work at the fifth trimester, so I’m not going to get to be here for the good part. I had this memory when I was thinking about talking with you, I hadn’t thought about this, but it popped into my mind. I had this memory of sitting in a coffee shop. I was probably eight months pregnant. I was really kind of like, okay, I’m leaving on maternity leave very soon. My first, and I was reading this book about, I don’t even remember the book was called, but it was about healthy child’s sleep and it was giving me this very specific set of rules for optimizing child’s sleep.

(24:14):

And I was sitting there doing the math and I was like, my God, if I follow the rules of this book and AKA be a good mom that supports my child’s sleep in the most optimal way, I would’ve literally never been home while my child was awake. And I was like, oh, because if you need this many hours, and that means he has to go to bed at six 30 and I won’t get home till seven, or I’ll be getting home at six 30, but he will already have to be in bed and then he needs to sleep till seven, but I’ll have to leave at six 30. Oh my God, I’m never going to see my kid. And I started crying in the coffee shop by myself eight months pregnant, holding this baby sleep book being like, I’m never going to see my kid.

(24:58):

Or they’re going to have the worst sleep. And I think that there is, it’s so relatable this moment where you’re like, oh my God, being a working parent actually means I have to sacrifice things that I don’t know if I can handle what that’s asking me to do. And fortunately, I was also able to be like, well F that rule, I’m going to do it how it works for us and I’m going to see my child and I’m also going to see how I can shift my schedule. And after about a year I left that job to work for a mental health startup that allowed me to work four days for the same amount of money. And then pretty soon after I had my second, I was like, and Covid happened and I was like, you know what? I’m not doing an hour and a half commute anymore. I’m going to work where I live and we’re done.

Lauren (25:46):

I love that you default into that. It wasn’t in a moment of duress. You saw it through enough cycle, enough trimesters, right, of your development as a mom to sort of know that you were making good informed choices along the way. I call it compromise math. There’s a lot of new parents in particular who I talk to who I think in a totally well-intended effort to build up the strengths of this transition, which is really, really hard. We’ll say, I’m really just so much better at saying no now and I am all for a boundary. Love boundaries happen to not be so great at them myself, but I’m always working on it makes me a very empathetic coach, but I really like to reframe that and what you’re describing that you did is what I help people I think try to see these decisions they’re making by the time, especially in early, where the rules are not lining up with what you have access to in terms of support.

(26:50):

Oh gosh, sorry, I just lost my train of thought for two seconds, which is also like you can totally not even erase this. This is just what happens. Okay. So you have to make a decision and in your head you’re going, am I going to say yes to this or am I going to say no to this? Rather than saying I’m better at saying nos. What it is I think is you’re better at saying really informed, really meaningful yeses because you’ve decided in your head, if you’re going to meet colleagues for a drink after work and say yes to that, you’ve figured out the childcare or what’s going on with your partner. You’ve figured out what that does to baby’s bedtime when you’re going to pump. And if you get to yes on that, that’s a really meaningful yes. And you’re going to go into that networking drinks thing being like, I’m going to talk to three people. I have my goals, or maybe not, maybe you’re going to say, actually I’m just going to enjoy and settle into being part of this community again, but you have a sense of what you want to get out of it and it’s a really meaningful yes, and I think that that reframe also helps people say the nos because it gives them more permission to say really good yeses.

Dr. Sarah (27:56):

Yes. That is so helpful to think about because I do think we can sometimes have ambivalence about I was fortunate enough to be in a position, well, not always. I mean when I first went back to work, I was working at a hospital, I was a early career, newly licensed psychologist and I was faculty at the hospital and I had a lot of work to do. I had ridiculously intense hours and emotionally demanding work. I was working with people with a significant amount of trauma and training supervising and stuff. And I didn’t have a lot of flexibility, which ultimately, and I was also in that track, I was like, we are going to be in the hospital forever. This is your life. You’re just kind of getting indoctrinated into that world a bubble of normal. I didn’t think I had already drank that. I was like, this is where I will be forever. So I’ve got to figure out how to make this work, and that does mean getting a little tiny fridge and pumping in my office and cleaning up the bottles in the tiny little bathroom that the staff had. It was not easy. It was really and schlepping my pump, all that stuff to and from work and from Brooklyn to Manhattan and I even used to bring, so I didn’t want my son this weird. I also had postpartum anxiety with my first, and I had this really, really strong feeling that I needed him to be, I was living in Brooklyn, but working in Manhattan, I was like, you need to be in Manhattan while I’m at work. I didn’t want, there was something that happened and I was like, I can’t get from Manhattan to Brooklyn. For whatever reason that made me so anxious. So I found a daycare near my work, and so he would come on the train with me and I called him Baby Commuter. Every time we get daycare they’d be like, they called him Brooklyn because he would come from Brooklyn from A train into the city.

Lauren (29:56):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (29:56):

But like, I had kind of manufactured all of these things to work with the work that I had to do. And it wasn’t until I was a little bit more senior and I was like, I like I don’t want to do this anymore. And so I made changes, but my point is it is not always easy to feel empowered to say no to things, especially if you are earlier on in your career or you don’t have that confidence yet. It gets easier as you get more experienced and you realize that people don’t necessarily crumble at your needs. But I think when you think about what your point this yes versus no thinking about it in terms of not just, oh, I can’t say no to all these things, if you reframe it in terms of well, what am I saying yes to?

(30:47):

What am I doing? I was saying yes to higher quality care for my patients because I had more time to give them when I was there and I also had time away that worked for me and my family and at the new place I to, I negotiated to start at eight and end at four instead of nine to five so that I could be there for daycare pickup and not get charged $5 a minute.

Lauren (31:09):

And honestly, so when you were interviewing, and this is something I see happen a lot in the moms, I’m helping negotiate for what they need, the person across that desk or that Zoom who you were asking that of couldn’t have assumed that that’s what you need both for discriminatory reasons and just like they can’t read your mind. So you’re actually doing a good job by saying, here’s what would let me deliver my job effectively for you.

Dr. Sarah (31:36):

Yes. You talk about this all the time with parents. What are some strategies if you’re a new parent or maybe you’ve been a parent, you’re expecting another kid or you just on your parenting journey and you need to make some changes at work to be able to have a better balance that works for you and your family, what are some things that are helpful strategies to talking with your employer about working on improving this for you?

Lauren (32:07):

Sure. So first of all, this is funny, I did, do you know Alene Welter Roth? She’s the founder of Birth fund. I went on her, she does a maternity, oh, I love that. She’s about to give birth to her second and I said this to her and I think she actually snapped. I was like, oh, I got her. It’s amazing. She’s so great. But so anytime you’re negotiating anything, the very first person you need to convince is yourself.

Dr. Sarah (32:37):

Mhmm.

Lauren (32:37):

It doesn’t mean that not, oh, I want to snap to that. Right? I like, it doesn’t mean that all of the research that I’m about to suggest that you go and do that, you bring in on stacks of paper with you or email in a long, long, long list. In fact, I actually, oh, there’s a woman who stood up at a talk I gave a long time ago and she said, I don’t understand. I made the most complete and thorough case and they didn’t go for it. And I was like, well, tell me what you did. And she’s like, and I brought in, it was five pages, my memo and I was like, oh no. The memo’s in your head that needs to be this big. For people who are listening, I’m making a little square with my hands. It needs to be five bullets.

(33:19):

It can’t look hard, make it easy for them. But all of that five pages, I think if you have the time to put into it, is really worthwhile because it builds you up to understand why economically it’s a good decision for you to ask for what you’re asking for. You already know in terms of your feeling of being supported and wellness that it’s good, it’s good for you baby, it’s good for you. You wouldn’t be asking for it otherwise, but what is the case that you can make for why also this is a good decision for the person across the zoom or across the desk from you. And remember that that person is probably also going to have to go negotiate up themselves. So give them, it’s in service of them, give them everything they need to go make the case for you and let’s just assume from the get go that they’re on your side.

(34:09):

They actually want you to succeed when you’re their employee. If you do great work, they look really good. So not everybody’s built that way, but go in with that assumption at least because I think it will get you the most collaborative approach from the other person. But so what that research looks like is, first of all, internally, what policies does your employer actually offer If they do, and there may be policies that you’re just not aware of or things that have developed since you took the job. A lot of places have really improved their offerings and this may be backup care, there may be FSA you can contribute to that actually helps you choose a daycare that costs a little bit more, that’s a little bit closer that makes your life a little bit easier, easier. Just make sure exactly what’s available to you. Then do sort of a softer approach to what is everybody else around here doing?

(34:58):

And it doesn’t have to necessarily be exactly just the moms or just the new dads. It can be people who are taking time away weekly for a child with an older appointment or who have a parent sandwich generation in it and they have a parent who is in treatment for cancer, somebody who has a mental health challenge. Just as much as you can figure out what accommodations are other people getting around here because it helps you see that there might be more support available than you think of, and there might be more creative ways that people are approaching it than you even know about. And especially if you’re looking at people who are doing caregiving in a generation or two above you, they just might be much more covert about it and obviously don’t go pry, but whatever. You can sort of get a sense of what’s going on on paper, what’s going on in reality.

(35:45):

Then you also want to talk to your friends who are outside of your specific employer but also outside of your industry. And this is where that sort of bubble of normal comes in of you in the hospital thinking this is how it has to be. We’re creatures of habit and it’s our nature to think that whatever is in front of us that we see around us and our colleagues, this is how it is, this is how it has to be. As soon as you hear from another new working parent, I think of all working parents as colleagues universally on these issues as we’re making progress together. As soon as you hear from them that they have a different bubble of normal and they think that actually 16 weeks is the minimum you would need to be out, or of course they can just work a couple hours on the weekend and it makes up for the fact that they get in at 10, whatever.

(36:34):

It just opens up the possibilities for you. It also lets you come into that conversation if you need to present the economic case and say, look what our competition is doing or look, we’re doing better than others and we want to maintain that. We want to maintain that appeal to people who are going to be applying jobs here. We want to retain people. Go read if you can and we can link it in the show notes too. I did a report, it was a partnership between my company, the fifth trimester and the childcare company Vivi measuring and looking at the ROI of caregiving benefits. So this was not just things like backup childcare, which Vivi does exceptionally well in regular childcare, but also looking at culture like also looking at contributing to an FSA, also looking at paid family and medical leave, looking at mental health resources, looking at flexibility.

(37:24):

And we did a survey, but we also did case studies one by one, and they were biased purposefully toward people who raised their hands and said, interview me for this white paper because I feel supported. So it was people who felt baseline supported. There’s this narrative that parents try less hard Once you have a kid, you just don’t care about your job as much. You’re less motivated. The exact opposite is true is what we found when you’re actually someone who has support. So we asked these case studies, what did you use of the benefits of the culture of the policies in your workplace? What did you use in the last year and what was the cost of that to the company and what was your output like super capitalistic approach, but that’s what was needed was the numbers.

Dr. Sarah (38:08):

You’ve got to know your audience, right?

Lauren (38:10):

Right. Exactly. What was your output when you had that day of backup childcare or when there was one woman we interviewed who worked flexible hours. She actually worked from very early in the morning until only I think two o’clock, but she actually had a team she was communicating with in Europe, so it actually let her do better work anyway. What was your output? Because of that policy benefit culture, and the long and short of it is the math was, I love math. $1, every $1 that a business invested in caregiving benefits of any kind yielded $18 and 93 cents of return from the employees. That’s an 18 ROI 18 X return on. That’s incredible. I say all of this because don’t go spout necessarily all those statistics when you go have a conversation about can I leave at four 50? But if you know that, if you know your value, if you know that losing you would cost your employer somewhere between six months of your salary and 213% of your salary asking for the thing that costs your employer $5,000 is like actually that’s a good business decision anyway.

(39:18):

So shore yourself up, that’s the first step and it’s the most important step so that you are convinced yourself. Then when you go into the conversation, come with a plan A, hopefully also a plan B and a plan C just in case they don’t go for it. Understand your exact job description. Many of us actually over deliver on our job descriptions. So what were you actually hired to do and how is the plan that you’re proposing going to allow you to deliver that work product? Again, sorry to sound so office speaky, but work product. So when you present the plan and say, not just like this is the need that I have, but here’s the plan for how it’s going to work, and then also propose preempt this, don’t just wait until they say yes or no say. And what I’d love to do is try it for just a set period and report back to you really openly about how it’s going and I want to hear back from you about how it’s going and think of me as a Guinea pig of somebody who’s trying this for the first time here, and I want to do this really not just for me, but also for the company to show you that it can work and we can work on it together.

(40:18):

Put that date on your calendar, on their calendar so that they’re not signing away their life for forever, feeling like they’re setting precedent that now everybody has to have access to, which hopefully they will, but show them that this period of time you’re going to try it. And then the other thing that lets you do, especially if you’re a mom of a new baby or dad of a new baby, is that that baby’s needs change by the month, by the week. And so by the time you get to that check-in a month later, two months later, three months later, your needs may have shifted and then what you’re doing is you’re not saying, actually no, I don’t need this thing. I need this other thing. But you’re being able to deliver your job effectively, part of an ongoing career development conversation that frankly we all should be having anyway. It’s just that in the beginning of parenthood, many people are having it for the first time.

Dr. Sarah (41:04):

That is so valuable. I think a lot of times, first of all, just that shoring up yourself, knowing your numbers, but also knowing you don’t need to share every single thing. But also yes, knowing your audience, trying to, the collaborative approach, it’s very, from a social psychology perspective or like an IO psychology perspective, I’m like, that’s so aligning and that’s so foot in the door. You’re making it very easy for someone to say yes and not feel like they’re pressured to say yes, but because to say, I want to do an experiment. I want to try this thing to see if we can build out this cultural shift in the company that could benefit your ROI your retention and create a more help you serve that value you…

Lauren (41:55):

Help me, help you, help me.

Dr. Sarah (41:56):

Exactly. And I think that that’s very cool. And also you’re also modeling because if you’re coming in that prepared, you are just demonstrating your effectiveness and your efficiency and your preparedness and your ability to, it’s very professional. I really like that strategy.

Lauren (42:14):

The other thing that I tell people this happens comes up in coaching calls all the time when they’re trying to approach someone who they think might be hard to talk to. I’ll just say, just diffuse them by saying, I’m so glad we have the kind of relationship where I can come to you with this.

Dr. Sarah (42:28):

Yes.

Lauren (42:29):

But thank you. Thank you for having an open door even if their door’s closed, right?

Dr. Sarah (42:36):

That’s such parenting. That’s such a parenting thing too, because we said that parent kids all the time to be like, thank you for bringing this to me. This is so, I’m so glad you are telling me this. Right. It’s interesting. Okay, I have a question. I mean, I’ve been talking about myself this whole time. I am thinking about myself from the employee perspective, from this early career position, this new mom, but I’m also now, I’m a business owner. I’m a small business owner. I have a group practice in Westchester. We’ve got 12 therapists, the team of admin. I really want one of our huge values and critical pieces of who, what makes us us in our practice is that we are like women slash mother led. Emily and I, my co-founder, we identify as mothers and women entrepreneurs and we really were because we worked at the hospital together, we’ve done other work and we’ve been in private practice and felt the isolation from that. We’re like, we want to bring, but it’s super flexible and it’s really easy to be in private practice as a parent. Sometimes you don’t get the benefits, but you do get to set the schedule. But we’re like, how do we take the things that we loved about the hospital.

(43:53):

The multidisciplinary teams, the ongoing education, just the academic sort of sophistication of it and the benefits of the private practice world with the work flexibility, the work-life balance, being able to go move your patients to the next day because you have a sick kid at home and you’re just going to do that. We were like, how do we make sure that that’s how we show up at our business? We wanted to create a group that prioritizes and supports parents who work for us, and we’re a small business and we can’t afford, do, I can’t afford to pay someone at this moment. Hopefully down the road we will, but I can’t afford to pay someone for a full maternity leave. Fortunately, we’re in New York and they get paid family leave, which is why that is so important, not just for parents, but for small business owners.

Lauren (44:50):

Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (44:52):

Absolutely. But I want to make sure that I’m honoring and supporting my parents. I want anyone who, we’ve had two parents go on maternity leave and come back. We love that. And if you’re a small business owner listening, how do you support parents if you don’t have the funds to necessarily do some of the obvious big ticket items?

Lauren (45:15):

So I think you support every ask and conversation they have and tell them that you can’t possibly, even though you are also a mom, even though you’re doing similar work, you cannot read their minds and know what they need. So please, part of their job is to come and ask you, gosh, there’s so many ways to answer this. So team of 12, what I hear from a really just practical business perspective is that especially I think especially people who are starting their own businesses, they’re so driven, they’re so entrepreneurial, they just want to go do the thing they were meant to do that they were probably stuck, unable to do for so long and go do it. And sometimes we do grow a little bit too fast, and I think it’s really important to have a bench, to have the buffer, the flexibility among your team that people can, as a piece of their job, one 12th of their job is filling in for your colleague who needs coverage today.

(46:11):

And that is like a business plan, structural hard thing to do in retrospect. But I think that sometimes it, if we stop and think about, no really actually we’re going to grow at a slightly slower pace so that we can do that and have that be part one of our just core deliverables internally. So that’s a piece of it. The public policy piece of it is huge. And I think that actually when things are unfair and letting your employees and colleagues know that public policy advocacy is welcome here, wave that flag. Not necessarily that they need to be one side or the other. Super political and putting a sign out front, not necessarily, although that if you want it, but mostly helping people understand that this is a little bit broken, that you know it is too, that you have empathy for it and that you want to work with them to make it possible for the long-term.

(47:11):

And sometimes you may have to make a small investment now for their long-term growth, but help them know that when you’re doing it, that’s really the goal. It is really challenging. We feel it all the time internally at Chamber of Mothers fifth trimester is just me, and this is part of the why is because I actually want to be able to sort of staff up with contract work when I need help on a specific project. But other than that, it’s just me and it’s just more manageable for me this way, which is a shame. I wish in some ways that I could grow in that way, but it’s a choice that I’ve made. The other thing, and sorry, this is a little hokey, but I don’t know. I think it’s kind of most immediately actionable. Help people understand that part of your job managing them is to help them resentment proof their lives.

(47:59):

And what that means is that is not getting to the point where they’re furious or really just whether it’s resenting their spouse or partner if they have one, their boss, their job, their work schedule, worst of all resenting themselves for not having spoken up when they needed to. The idea is get ahead of it. If you have a need right now and you can foresee that in two months, if you don’t speak up now, this is going to be really be a problem and it’s going to make you feel resentful and burnout. Identify it for me now. Let’s talk about now about solutions that we can plan together because that runway, that time helps you, I think have more options in front of you to provide solutions to

Dr. Sarah (48:39):

That is so valuable on so many levels. Thank you. Thank you. A million more questions for you, but maybe you’ll just have to come back and talk to us. I would love to. Would love to. How do people get in touch with you, connect with, well obviously link Chamber of Mothers, but what about Fifth Trim, everything you’re doing? Where do we send ’em?

Lauren (48:57):

So website is thefifthtrimester.com. I’m on Instagram as @thefifthtrimester. I’m on LinkedIn under my real name, Lauren Smith Brody. Chamber of Mothers. Yes, please go do that Vote Like A Mother exercise that we talked about. It’s fantastic. Join a local chapter of Chamber of Mothers and if you, honestly, I’m just going to put it out there. If you know any major foundation funders who want to fund this work, it’s largely volunteer and we really need that sustainable support so that we don’t get resentful because we need support.

Dr. Sarah (49:26):

Yes, you’re asking for what you need so that you don’t have resentful.

Lauren (49:29):

Definitely. And then in terms of fifth trimester, which is the work that pays me and lets me do that volunteer public policy work. If you work at a business that could use my help, wants me to do a speaking, engagement, management, training, coaching, any of that, please reach out to me. I’m Lauren, L-A-U-R-E-N at the fifth trimester all spelled out.com. And I would love to hear from you. And thank you, Sarah. This was an awesome conversation.

Dr. Sarah (49:51):

Thank you, Lauren. This is fantastic. I’m so grateful for your wisdom.

Lauren (49:56):

You too. You too. Great to meet you.

Dr. Sarah (50:04):

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, I want to hear from you, share your thoughts and your feedback with me by scrolling down to the ratings and review section on your Apple Podcasts app or whatever app you’re listening on. And let me know what you think of this episode or the show in general. Your support means the absolute world to me, and just a simple tap of five stars can make a real impact in how this show gets reached by parents everywhere. So thank you so much for listening and don’t be a stranger.