Led by associate professor Dr Anna Hogan from QUT, the study challenges the enduring notion of teaching as a ‘family friendly’ profession, arguing the intensifying nature of teachers’ work – and for women in particular – has made the job largely incompatible with family life and raising young children.
Drawing on the accounts of 42 teachers and school leaders from across three Brisbane schools, some participants questioned whether they would ever become a parent.
“Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll have kids. I look at the women in my department who do, and they’re just exhausted all the time. I don’t know how they do it. I already feel like I have nothing left at the end of the day,” one early career teacher shared.
Another also concluded that she could not see how motherhood would align with the realities of teaching.
The study found the intensive caring demands of teaching undermined some women’s capacity to mother in the ways they wished to at home.
“A few of the participants spoke about, ‘If I ever have kids, I’ll have to find a new job that won’t be teaching,’” Hogan says.
“[Other] women that we talked to who were mothering at the same time, were choosing to basically work part-time to manage the expectations of the teaching profession.
“[They did this] to kind of maintain an ability to not be completely emotionally exhausted for their own children – it was about better managing that process.”
Several participants described an inability to mentally disengage from work at the end of the school day, and the sense that they had nothing left of themselves to give.
One teacher said that after spending the day responding to an ’unbelievable’ number of questions from students, she needed to sit alone in her backyard watching her dogs play before she could even face her family.
“You need the decompression time … which is awful, because I’ve done it for all these other people so when I go home they feel I don’t care about them … I’m not saying they hate me, but I’m just saying, I can’t give more of me at home. That’s why the dogs are good. They don’t ask me any questions.”
More than a few described the ‘mental load’ of teaching as a form of continuous emotional and decision fatigue, with one teacher noting she took ‘two minutes of peace in the car’ between leaving school and collecting her own child from daycare.
By that point, her ‘brain [was] dead’, and she felt there was ‘no space’ left for even simple decisions such as what to prepare for dinner, the study notes.
Women also frequently reported that their evenings and weekends were eaten up with lesson planning, marking and admin tasks, with the ongoing worry for vulnerable students ever present.
One deputy principal explained that she often spent hours catching up on work after her own children had gone to bed and had ‘less time for my family than friends in corporate jobs’.
“Although male teachers also acknowledged that teaching affected family life, women’s narratives more frequently and vividly described the cumulative pressures of combining professional care work with the unpaid labour of mothering,” the study flags.
Hogan says that women continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of domestic and caring responsibilities, despite advances in formal workplace equality.
Women school leaders felt this most acutely, she adds.
Reflecting back on the years when her children were young, one principal described a period of complete and utter exhaustion.
“I look back now and I can’t even remember a block of my life because I was just living on survival from Monday morning to Friday afternoon’.
Hogan says this account is particularly powerful.
“It was that idea that the only reason that they can now sustain being principals of schools is because their children are adults and have moved out of home.
“I don’t think you would necessarily have a male principal with that sort of same reflection.
“I thought that was a standout example – the idea that leading a school means that you simply can’t be caring for children at home.”
