Tutto si risolve con FLO

Family and Career: Why Starting a Family Doesn’t Hold You Back — It Transforms You

How many times have we heard it: “Career first, we’ll figure out the rest later.” As if children and professional ambition sat on two opposite tracks, bound to collide sooner or later. The good news, backed by scientific data and dozens of real stories, is that this isn’t a law of nature. It’s a cultural fear — and like every fear, it can be faced with the right tools.

Let’s look at the question with a technical eye: what do the statistics on parenthood and career really say? And what do the people who have lived it, at the very top of success, tell us when we ask if they ever regretted it?

What science really says about parenthood

Let’s start with an honest point, because rigor comes first: research does not paint a simplistic picture where “having children automatically makes you happier.” Studies that distinguish between hedonic wellbeing (day-to-day pleasure) and eudaimonic wellbeing (sense of purpose) show something interesting: once you isolate the “quality of the couple relationship” factor, the direct effect of children on daily happiness turns out to be close to zero in many national samples. In other words, children are not an instant-happiness pill — and anyone who promises otherwise isn’t describing the science, they’re selling marketing.

But the same body of research reveals something deeper: parents report significantly higher scores on “sense of meaning in life” than people without children. This is the so-called parenthood paradox: less day-to-day euphoria, far more meaning. And it’s precisely purpose — according to the scientific literature on purpose and longevity, including work from Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program — that is associated with better health outcomes, psychological wellbeing, and even life expectancy.

There’s more on the longevity front: researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research observed a correlation between number of children and parents’ life expectancy, with a small longevity “bonus” for parents of two compared with those who have none. It’s a complex relationship, likely mediated by stronger social support networks, but it undercuts the idea that children are simply a “drain” on vital energy.

On the strictly professional side, the data tell a harder story — one none of us should pretend not to see. A Pew Research Center survey of working parents in the United States found that 70% have to handle child-related demands while working, 59% respond to work obligations while with their kids, and roughly a quarter (27%) believe being a working parent has made career advancement harder — with women reporting this difficulty far more often than men. About half of working mothers have taken significant time off or reduced their hours to care for a child.

In Italy the picture is, in some ways, tougher. The “Le Equilibriste” report from Save the Children (2025) shows that in northern Italy, 96.3% of men with minor children are employed, compared with just 74.2% of women in the same situation: a gap of over 22 percentage points that shows how disproportionately parenthood still weighs on women’s careers today. The 2024 Inapp-PLUS survey adds an interesting psychological data point: people who believe a child won’t hurt their career report a 12.8% intention to have children within three years, compared with 10.5% among those who think otherwise. The perception of being able to balance both worlds, in other words, even shapes the decision to become a parent in the first place.

The message that emerges from this body of research isn’t “it will be easy.” It’s rather: the strain is real and measurable, but so is the meaning children bring into life, and the two are not mutually exclusive — especially when the right conditions are in place (support, flexibility, a present partner or network).

The gender gap: the real technical issue

If parenthood itself isn’t the problem, where does the perception that “having children slows your career” actually come from? OECD data help pinpoint the exact spot. In 2023 the gender pay gap across OECD countries averaged 11%: a woman working full-time earns, on average, about 89 cents for every euro earned by a man in the same position. But the interesting technical detail is that this gap doesn’t start at graduation: it widens systematically after children arrive. Mothers tend to take longer leaves than fathers and work part-time more often; fathers work an average of 42 hours a week compared with 35 for mothers. The hourly pay gap is also wider specifically among parents of children under 12.

This points to something precise: it’s not children that “cost you your career” — it’s the unequal distribution of caregiving between the two parents that generates the cost, and historically that cost has fallen almost entirely on women. It’s a distinction that completely changes the strategy to adopt: the problem isn’t solved by giving up on family, it’s solved by redistributing care work and negotiating better organizational conditions. The OECD itself points to the levers that actually work: shared parental leave (not just for mothers), access to affordable childcare, well-designed flexible work practices, and pay transparency in companies. Where these levers are activated together, the gaps shrink measurably; where they remain isolated or poorly designed, the effect is modest.

Real stories: who made it work, and how they tell it

Statistics give us the frame. But it’s the concrete stories that show, in practice, how an ambitious career and a family can be held together, without having to choose.

Michelle Obama — lawyer, executive, then First Lady — has publicly rejected the narrative of total sacrifice. She has said she doesn’t recommend that young mothers step off their career track for their children: “You don’t have to get off your track. And I wouldn’t advise it.” Her most-quoted summary of the issue: being a mother made her a better professional, because coming home to her daughters every evening reminded her what she was working for; and being a professional made her a better mother, because chasing her own dreams was showing her daughters how to chase theirs.

Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, offers a more nuanced — and for that reason more credible — version. Asked about regrets, she replied: “Regret is a very complex word.” She doesn’t regret her career, but admits the pain of time not spent with her daughters as they grew up, recalling a note one of them once wrote her: “I love you, but I love you more when you come home.” Nooyi doesn’t hide the strain — if anything, she makes it explicit — but her conclusion remains that you can “reckon with” guilt without letting it erase the value of either choice, work or family.

Jacinda Ardern, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, became a mother while in office, only the second head of government in the world to do so. She rejected the “superwoman” label: “I reject the idea that I’m somehow a superwoman, because to me superwomen are the ones who do it alone. I have my partner, who is going to be a full-time dad. I will do what I can, but I will have a village around me.” Her most useful technical point: any parent who works and raises children is, in the end, managing a logistics problem — and logistics is something you design, not something you simply endure.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, tells a different kind of story: his son Zain was born with cerebral palsy and requires special care. Nadella has described how this experience rewrote his style of leadership, shifting the center of gravity from individual ambition to empathy as a strategic skill. His key line: he learned to “see the world through his eyes,” and that shaped the more inclusive culture he brought to Microsoft — a case where fatherhood didn’t slow his career down, it redirected it for the better.

Samantha Cristoforetti, Italy’s first female astronaut and mother of two, offers perhaps the most practical lesson of all: making it work requires an explicit agreement with your partner, not solo heroics. She has explained that in her family, because her job involves long absences, it’s her husband who has the stronger day-to-day bond with the children: “I never tried to build a relationship with my daughter where I would be indispensable — that would have been completely irresponsible of me.” A line that works as a guiding principle for anyone juggling a demanding career with parenthood.

Serena Williams adds a different piece to the puzzle: the comeback after a pause dedicated to family. After stepping back from her tennis career in 2022 to grow her family — calling it an “evolution” rather than a retirement — she returned to the court years later, in her forties. On regret, she’s blunt: “I don’t have any regrets. I don’t live in the past. I live in the present and learn not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.” Her reason for returning wasn’t to reclaim sporting glory, but the wish for her daughters to see with their own eyes who their mother really was, what she had built, and to be proud of it. A case that shows career and family don’t have to run in constant parallel: they can take turns across different seasons of life, without one canceling out the other.

The common thread running through these stories isn’t the absence of strain — quite the opposite, every one of them names it explicitly. It’s the absence of regret about the underlying choice: none of them, looking back, would change the decision to have a family. If anything, they’d change how they handled certain specific moments. It’s an important technical distinction: you can regret a single organizational choice without regretting the existential choice that made it necessary.

Proven strategies for staying balanced

From these stories and this data, a handful of operating principles emerge — practical, not theoretical, and consistently recurring.

  1. Design the logistics instead of improvising them. This is Ardern’s principle: for a working parent, almost any role largely comes down to an organizational problem. Anyone who approaches parenthood as a string of daily emergencies burns out; anyone who treats it as a system to design — who does what, when, with which backup plan for the unexpected (a sick child, a meeting that runs long) — holds up better over time. In practice: a shared calendar with your partner, a backup network (grandparents, a babysitter, other parents) identified before you need it, not in the middle of the emergency.
  2. Explicitly divide the load with your partner. This is Cristoforetti’s principle, and it’s also the technical issue identified by OECD data: the real career cost doesn’t come from children, it comes from the imbalance in how caregiving is divided. Couples who explicitly negotiate roles and responsibilities — who handles the morning routine, who covers unexpected absences, who manages communication with school — report less conflict and less burnout than those who leave the division of labor to convention or inertia. It holds at the policy level too: where parental leave can be shared between both parents, the OECD observes a more marked rebalancing of women’s careers.
  3. Accept the absence of “everything, all at once.” This is Nooyi’s summary: you can’t have everything at the same time, every day, at the same level. Wellbeing research suggests that trying to simultaneously maximize immediate happiness, sense of purpose, work performance, and parental presence produces an unsustainable cognitive load. Serena Williams’s case shows the alternative: phases can alternate over time. You can invest more in work during certain periods of life and more in family during others, without that undermining overall balance across a horizon of years, not single weeks.
  4. Actively negotiate work flexibility. Pew data show that most working parents consider the option to work remotely or on flexible hours extremely useful, but only a minority actually have it. The OECD confirms that well-designed flexible work practices are among the most effective levers for closing the gender gap linked to parenthood. Flexibility shouldn’t be treated as a favor to timidly ask for: it’s an organizational condition to actively negotiate, knowing the data defines it as structurally useful, not an individual indulgence.
  5. Turn the parenting experience into professional skill. This is what Nadella did with empathy, learned through the experience with his son. Patience, managing priorities under pressure, the ability to decide quickly with incomplete information, tolerance for uncertainty: these are skills that get trained daily while raising a child, and they transfer — often surprisingly well — to managing teams and complex projects. It’s worth bringing them up explicitly in career conversations, instead of hiding them as time “taken away” from work.
  6. Normalize guilt without making it the only measure of success. Nooyi calls it “reckoning with” guilt; the psychological literature on intensive parenting frames it as a physiological reaction to the contemporary context, not proof that you’re getting everything wrong. Recognizing it as a predictable emotion — rather than a sign of failure — helps you avoid being paralyzed by it, and keeps you making clear-headed decisions instead of anxiety-driven ones.

Myths worth busting

This body of data and stories surfaces three widespread beliefs worth challenging with technical honesty.

The first myth is that having children automatically damages career advancement. It’s true that a share of working parents — mostly women — perceive it that way, but OECD research shows the real mechanism is the imbalance in caregiving division, not parenthood itself. Where that imbalance is corrected (shared leave, accessible childcare, real flexibility), the gap shrinks measurably.

The second myth is that children have to make you happy every single day for it to be “worth it.” Wellbeing science distinguishes daily happiness from sense of purpose, and shows it’s the latter — not the former — that’s systematically higher among parents. Expecting constant euphoria only leads to unwarranted disappointment about an experience that simply operates on a different plane.

The third myth is that perfect balance exists and is achievable with enough organization. None of the people cited in this article — from a former global CEO to an astronaut, from a prime minister to a sports champion — describes a stable, settled balance. Every one of them describes a system in constant adjustment. That, more than perfection, is the realistic goal worth pursuing.

The technical (and human) bottom line

If we had to compress all this evidence into a single line: children are not a statistical obstacle to a career, they are a variable that needs to be managed with intention — with a present partner, a support network, negotiated flexibility, and the acceptance that daily happiness and a sense of a full life run on partially different tracks. The women and men who built extraordinary careers while remaining present parents did not find a miracle shortcut. They stopped looking for a perfect balance and started building, day by day, a system that would hold. And that, more than anything else, is exactly why none of them would go back.

Sources

Avatar Floriana Missori

Published by

Floriana Missori
Categories:

Lascia un commento

Scopri di più da Tutto si risolve con FLO

Abbonati ora per continuare a leggere e avere accesso all'archivio completo.

Continua a leggere