I recently came across a Facebook post of my young colleague, and a young mother that the hardest thing in life is to leave your child at home and go to office, and not being able to see what he/she is doing at home.

Many of us would have gone through this gut wrenching moment when one look of the baby’s sad face, makes one drop everything in the world, and stay back home. But my dear young mothers, you are not the first and not the last to experience these pangs!

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, also is not untouched by this as she says in her book “Lean In”: “I was returning to the job I loved but as I pulled the car out of the driveway to head to the office for my first full day back, I felt a tightness in my chest and tears started to flow down my cheeks. Going back to the office meant a dramatic change in the amount of time I would see him”.

This situation is specifically more serious for energy professionals, who have a full time job, with very little options for flexi timings. Being a woman who has always loved her job, and its challenges, and a mother of two daughters, who are both finding their own positions in professional fields today, I would like to offer some advice to my younger colleagues.

When we are young mothers, we all suffer from something called as “intensive mothering”, which defines a good mother as being always around, and devoted to the needs of her children. When we judge ourselves against these standards, we find ourselves failing. But it is not so. If we try to jog our memories of our childhood, and our stay at home wonderful mothers, we will recall that while our mothers were always available, they were never hovering or directing our activities. There were no organised play dates, no streams of hobby classes, no sitting with us for getting all the homework done, so in fact they had limited time spend with us. One’s own life is the best teacher to learn, and it is for all to see that even without today’s standard of intensive mothering, we turned out fairly good as energy professionals of today.

So have a heart, young mothers, you are not failing as you are spending the same number of hours with your kids as your mothers did even with your full time jobs.

Now let’s get to the hard data and research on this issue, which we all with our analytical minds, have been trained to believe in. In 1991, the early Child Care Research Network under the auspices of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, initiated the most comprehensive study to date, on the relationship between child care and development and in particular on the effect of maternal care versus child care. The Research network which comprised more than thirty children development experts from leading Universities across the country spent 18 months designing the study. They tracked more than a 1000 children over the course of 15 years, repeatedly assessing the child’s cognitive skills, language abilities and social behavior.

In 2006, the researchers released a report summarizing their findings which concluded that “children who were cared for exclusively by their mothers did not develop differently than those who are cared by others”. They found no gap in cognitive skills, language competence, and social competence, ability to build and maintain relationships or in the quality of mother child bond. Their finding that “Exclusive maternal care was not related to better or worse outcomes for children. There is thus no reason for mothers to feel as though they are harming their children if they decide to work” is therefore worth a reading many times over.

But notwithstanding the above, be also prepared to hurt like hell, when very soon your baby, while crying, looks up for help to his/her nanny instead of you………….

Do not let that dishearten you or stop you from facing the challenges the dual role offers. Children need your involvement, love, care, and attention.You are capable of giving them this loving and secured childhood, even by working outside the home, while getting your adrenaline flowing from the challenges of your job.

By Sangeeta Kaushik

Author is a currently working as General Manager in NTPC Limited. An energy professional, of nearly 31 years of experience, she is a mother of two daughters who would soon be stepping into professional world.