Does Being A Young Mom Mean Earning A Lower Salary Forever?

Postponing motherhood leads to a higher salary, according to a new study that might remind you to take your pill this morning. For every year a woman delays having children, she earns about 9% more, in part because she’s able to put in more hours. Researchers found that the effect was most pronounced among college-educated, white-collar women, whose peers with children are likeliest to be “mommy tracked” and never catch up. It’s a fascinating finding, but I wondered if it rang true to women who had children early in life. Would they tell me they had regrets — or that having children actually helped their careers?

The first thing that many moms told me that having children early served as motivation to get their careers going — they had someone depending on them, so they needed to get their acts together in a way their 20-something peers didn’t have to.

Christina Kirk had her daughter during her sophomore year of college, graduated on time, and immediately started law school. “I pushed myself more,” she explained. “I wanted to be a parent she could be proud of. … and I was determined to complete my education before she started hers!”

Fauzia Burke had two daughters before age 30, and she said it seemed to help her career. Now 44, she has two teenagers, and can focus on work in a way that her peers with young children cannot. “I still get a lot of time with them but they’re independent, which frees me up to focus on work at an age where I have gathered lots of experience and have come into my own,” she said.

Lindsay Hartman writes for Mommyish and The Grindstone as well as working as a sales coordinator and data analyst for an alcohol distributor. She had her daughter at 22, and for the first two years she was a single mom. Just eight months after her daughter’s birth, she was promoted from her previous position of office manager. “I’m not sure that I would have gotten promoted if I wasn’t a mother,” she told me. “They weren’t looking for someone who wanted to work 80 hours a week, but they wanted someone who was dependable.”

Hartman also made the point that she was able to push through the toughest early years of parenting while her responsibilities at work were relatively light. “I’m pretty happy that I had those years while I had less responsible,” she said. “I would hate to have worked my butt off and gotten further up the line, then had a child and felt a lot more pressure to come back early and keep working at the same pace.”

In one important way, Hartman was unusual among the young mothers — former or current — I spoke to, however. The majority of them had started their own businesses instead of forging a traditional corporate path.

Michelle Dunn began having children soon after she married at 21. For a while, she worked a traditional corporate job, but when she divorced, she began working from home. “I know many people struggle with working while they have young children, and I did too,” she said. Working from home was a better fit, and having her kids in the picture actually helped her be more efficient in her work; their schedules created built-in deadlines for her. Most days she found herself working during the school day, and again after the kids went to bed. “This may sound like a lot,” she said, “but when I worked in an outside office, I spend many times working late, spending time away from them traveling to and from my job, and being much more stressed.”

Are young mothers more likely to be entrepreneurs — who probably make less money — because the the typical office-based job doesn’t work for them? In the end, no one who loves their kids is likely to say they regret the life that produced them. But the anecdotal evidence I found does suggest that many women who add a responsibility to their lives early end up taking unconventional career paths. And that’s not even considering the women who stay home with their kids for many years, skipping the rat race altogether. Any of these paths have the potential for happiness, of course — unconventional doesn’t mean unhappy. But in the end, the salary study sounds plausible.

That’s not to say there are no benefits to having children young. Carolyn Brundage, who had her son at 27, pointed out one real advantage: “If you can teach a 2-year-old boy to pee in a toilet and not throw temper tantrums,” she said, “you are well equipped to manage adults.”

Photo: Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock.com