What I Learned Being a Stay-at-Home Mom

Some of the greatest experiences of my life took place in the years I spent raising my two daughters. As my husband and I drove home from dropping daughter number two off at college, I didn’t have the thoughts I thought I would: “Oh wow, I am free now, I can do what I want!” Or, “I don’t have to worry about them, I can worry about myself and my husband!” Or, “I can get a real job now!”

None of those thoughts resonated with my heart. You see, I never felt limited by my role as a full-time mom when they were small. When my first was born, I had already had a brief but great career in advertising at one of the world’s largest advertising agencies; I knew what swimming with the sharks in business was like in the commercial world.  And it didn’t make me happy.

After years of reflection, I have come to understand that what I learned from being with my children was of far greater value to me than I would have learned if I had stayed full time in the workforce. Being engaged in their growth and development was about the mystery and magic of sharing with every other parent on earth the exact same patterns of growth that every human goes through. 

I felt connected to everyone on the planet.

We didn’t have much money as a family and my husband and I weren’t perfect parents, but we did our best. The primary difference in the way we parented, so far as I could tell at the time, was the way my husband and I chose experiences for them, learned to engage with them in conversation, shared our family values, and taught them to love their environment. We had no regrets.

Being with our children as their lives unfolded was the best life training I could have had.

Raising Families is the result of more than 30 years of experiences and life events that gradually led to the development of our class, Leading Your Child to Success. This exciting, rich, and all-encompassing learning tool is for anyone who is engaged with children, in any capacity. Its intent is to help people get a peek at the sequences of the life unfolding right in front of them and think about what they can do to make every step even better.

In these detailed and joyous modules of the course, viewers get a peek at the world of growing up with children at every phase—before kids, with kids of all ages, and then as a grandparent.

The building blocks of how to shape and support a human life from birth to work, are shared through the eyes of diverse individuals who each sat with us at our table to tell their stories and help lead other viewers to enrich their own.

Come to our table and join our conversation.