As women have experienced an ‘expansion of options’ in terms of marriage and family, there are a growing number of single ladies. Less than 50% of American women are married and women are increasingly opting to have children outside of marriage. Where will this increasing age of change lead us in the future?
I felt the way about changing my name the way some people feel about having kids: I didn’t feel too strongly about keeping or changing my name, and hadn’t yet decided what I wanted. To be honest, by the time I was 30 and in a partnership, changing my name felt like a lot of work, especially in a digital age with internet footprints. People already knew me. But then the question of kids came up, and we agreed we didn’t want hyphens. And we wanted to share the same last name. “I want to take your last name,” he said. I’ll admit one of my first thoughts was: “Are you sure?”
Kate Northrup always knew she wanted to be a mother, and she pursued entrepreneurship partly because of the freedom it could afford her to be there for her kids. What Kate wasn’t counting on was the way pregnancy would change her drive and refocus her energy when it came to the business. She admits that it took her a long time to “get back in the game,” and that her husband and business partner, Mike, picked up the slack. But Kate credits having her daughter, Penelope, with initiating a personal evolution that allowed her to clarify her desires and ultimately renew her interest in the business and the way she thought about showing up for work in the first place. Perhaps there was something revolutionary here: because, as she shares in this episode, she found that she was able to achieve more even while doing less. And that some of her most productive weeks happened when she was working only 20 hours a week on the business. Today Kate shares her “shocking and awesome” birth experience, explaining how parenthood impacted her business as well as her marriage.
Tamsen Webster, the Executive Producer of the oldest and one of the largest locally organized TED talk events in the world, is self-described as “pattern-driven,” and likes to have a plan. Today, we talk about her journey into parenting, and how her ideas for pregnancy (and even marriage) were very different than reality.She dove into her first pregnancy with a plan: she would have a natural birth and breastfeed her baby, as the research suggests. But nothing went according to plan. Even her work was wildly different than she expected when her boss changed while she was on leave. Tamsen shares her challenging parenting journey, admitting that having her sons “knocked her sideways,”—and that she unexpectedly became an entrepreneur as a result.