The guest on today's show is Karla Miller. Karla writes for the Washington Post Magazine's weekly @ Work Advice Column, where she answers questions on everything from co-worker clashes to employee rights issues. Karla also works full time at a local accounting firm and volunteers as a wife and mother of two children, who are now four and six years old. Listen in, to hear Karla's story.

Karla's Parent At Work Story started before she was even technically a parent while working for the same accounting firm that she does now. Her plan was to leave work and get her house in order about a week before her baby was due to arrive. About six weeks before her due date, she woke up to find that her water had broken. That was lesson number one: Children don't give a hoot about what your plans are.  After spending a day in the hospital in labor, she was given an emergency C-Section. With that, came lesson two for Karla: You really do need excellent co-workers and a supportive work environment, in order to survive the experience of becoming a parent. Fortunately for Karla, she had all of that. Listen in now, to find out more about what Karla has learned through her experience of working and becoming a parent.

Today, Karla talks to Tom about:

• Her really supportive work environment.
• That with parenting, there are always things to juggle and to take into consideration.
• The often overlooked difficulties of being a stay at home parent.
• The work she does for the accounting firm, which, is fortunately quite flexible, and she can do a lot of it on her laptop, wherever she is, or via email.
• All the different elements that she has to balance, in her busy life.
• Her particular blend of flexibility and freedom.
• The stress that comes from having work flexibility.
• The double standards in people's attitudes towards male working parents, as compared with their attitudes towards women parents, who work.
• What she sees, as a writer, with parenting in the working world.
• That it's sometimes a relief and a welcome change of pace, to go into work.
• How she makes it work, as a working parent.
• A tip she has for parents- don't over share or over justify yourself for being unavailable work, it's not necessary to share too much detail.
• That every family is different.
• How she landed her writing job at the Washington Post.
• That turning a problem into a story helps you to get a better perspective on it.
• The kinds of concerns that Managers tend to have, about their workers with children.
• Parents will sometimes try to take advantage of their situation, to get a better deal at work.
• Moms often learn to get much more done in much less time.
• The sense of camaraderie that can develop between co-workers, when supporting and helping each other.
• The advice that she would give to her 'before she had children' self. 
• The little things that one tends to miss, as a parent, like going out for a meal and being able to eat with both your hands.

Follow Karla's Work

If you're a new parent and you're finding it much more work and a lot less fun than you thought it would be, you're really going to gain a lot from this show. Today, in the first episode, Tom explains that his idea for the show came from his own experience as a father of four children and the juxtaposition of two books, Jennifer Senior's All Joy And No Fun and Bruce Feiler's The Secrets Of Happy Families. Listen in discover how you can live a happy life, even though you have children.

Today, Tom explains that Jennifer Senior's book is about the phenomenon that parents generally score lower on happiness surveys, when compared with people without children and that this flies in the face of the common belief that having children is the crowning achievement in life. Ms. Senior profiles parents who struggle with expectations placed on them, often by themselves, to raise well-adjusted children, with increasingly fewer available resources, such as time, money, or a network of support from family. Thomas points out that the book does, however, have a silver lining, in that most parents do experience a significant amount of joy and meaning in their lives, due to having children. Bruce Feiler's book, on the other hand, points to some possible solutions to the dilemma of parenting. He looks to the lessons learned in business and in other fields, to see if these methods can be used to teach families to function better. He gives an example from the book, of a family who adopted the use of agile management, a project management tool used in the software industry, to help with family meetings and to streamline the hectic morning routine. 

Tom says that he hasn't managed to replicate agile management in his house, however, he does dream! Today, Tom tells you what you can expect to hear in his future episodes and he explains that although solutions are great, at times, it really helps just to know that the problems faced by parents are both common and survivable. Listen in today, as Thomas shares his own parenting story by reading the relevant chapter from his book, You're Pregnant, You're Fired.

Some highlights include: 

• How he was offered a position as an Assistant to the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, in 2005, when he was thirty-three years old, married and had a ten-month-old son.
• How little idea he had, prior to the birth of his son, of how much work it would involve to be a parent.
• Sharing the responsibilities of parenting with his wife, who was also an attorney.
• Their dog, Sawyer, who had health problems and added to the stress of parenting.
• His decision to spend as much time as possible with his son.
• His joining the US Attorney's Office in the fall of 2006 – a harrowing situation for all new prosecutor's, given the long hours and stress.
• The stress of coming home to a strung out kid and a stressed out wife, after a demanding day at work.
• His battle with insomnia.
• How his own routine became more extreme.
• He was learning a lot, but it was difficult.
• The birth of his second son, Jonah.
• How unprepared he was for having two children- no one ever got a break!
• Being diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder.
• That no one at work knew what he was going through.
• A survey that showed that men with families have it easier than women with families do, in the workplace, yet men tend to be more heavily penalized for taking time off work.
• His realization that he could no longer maintain the way he was working, trying to balance work and family.
• His work move to a less stressful situation and his coming down with respiratory tract infection.
• Opening his own firm and dealing with the guilt of his departure from the US Attorney's office- in the midst of an economic meltdown.
• His realization that it was having children that had made his balancing act so difficult.
• Making the choice- career or family?
• The lack of support by the government, for working families and policy matters that are worth debating in this regard.

Link:

Tom's website: www.spigglelaw.com/podcast