Parting is no sweet sorrow, but a painful struggle for a mom who tries to get dressed for work while her preschooler tugs at her skirt or her toddler wails and flails his arms in all his efforts to make her stay. A daily dose of guilt is a bitter pill to swallow, but something career moms are sometimes forced to contend with. Does going to work really have to be an ordeal or are there ways to make your child understand the job you need to do outside your home? Family and child experts as well as career moms give more than their two cents worth on helping your child understand what working is all about.


“Mommy, don’t leave!”
Head of Contact Center at a telecommunications company, Rachel Cachuela, says daughter Annika, now six, used to question her whenever she’d get ready for work. “When she was in nursery, she used to ask why I had to go to work and leave her,” she recalls. “Sometimes, I think about just being absent from work to be with her, but you know it’s something you have to do.” Cachuela knew her daughter was then still too young to understand why she needed to work, so she just made it a point to come home early to spend more time with Annika.

Emergency consultant Perie Adorable-Wagan, M.D., found herself in a similar predicament when her son, Prince, now three years old, would go through bouts of crying in the mornings. “When Prince was only 18 months old, it was hard for me and Allwin to leave for work. He was always crying, naglulupasay, naghahabol talaga. It broke my heart each time we’d leave him crying and chasing after us. He couldn’t understand why we had to leave him. Sometimes, we would change clothes in the other room, because if he wakes up, he’d start clinging to us and would not allow us to put him down,” she says.