I’ve never been busier or more successful than I am now with three children, writes Amil Niazi.AleksandarNakic/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
Amil Niazi is the author of Life After Ambition: A ‘Good Enough’ Memoir.
“Didn’t anyone tell you you can’t have more than two? At least not if you want to work again.”
Though he said it with a smug smile on his face, I could tell my former co-worker thought he was sharing serious career advice when he offered up those self-proclaimed words of wisdom. Never mind that I was already heavily pregnant with my third.
He wasn’t the only one with this opinion. When I was still just thinking about having another child, almost every older, professional woman I spoke with about it gave me the same advice. “Don’t,” they all said bluntly. I was told it would kill my career, that I’d never write again. My own mom, a parent of three, had told me to stop at one.
Fortunately, I’ve never been big on other people’s advice. I had that third baby in 2024. He’s now a joyful, brilliant, loving and kind toddler – and despite the words of warning, I’ve never been busier or more successful in my career. Not in spite of my big family but, I firmly believe, because of it.
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Growing up as a millennial, in the midst of 1990s third-wave feminism, I was always told a career was the ultimate pursuit. It was the girl power era and I was all in. I worshipped at the altar of the millennium romcom archetype played by actors like Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson, the sassy journalist who sacrifices relationships, family and her small town for a chance to become something – to be somebody, man! Though they usually found a way to have romance and a career by the end of the 90 minutes, the movie always ended before kids entered the picture.
As I pursued my own career in journalism, I was always advised to wait as long as possible to have children so it wouldn’t interfere with my professional aspirations.
In my early 30s, I got married and started seriously trying for a child, though it wasn’t until I was 35 that I actually got pregnant. Just in time to become a “geriatric” mom. At that point I wasn’t just worried about giving birth and figuring out how to care for a newborn, but was wildly anxious about what a year-long maternity leave would do to my career.
I scoured the internet for stories and stats about what happens to working women when they have kids, hopeful for some good news about this new chapter of my life. What I found was depressing research that showed that a woman’s peak earning years are between 35 and 54. I was immediately plunged into a panic about the notion that I was making the most I might ever make (which wasn’t a lot) and I was about to knock an entire year off of that trajectory. Then I would return to work as a mom, a label that I knew would put me into a new category in the minds of my bosses and peers, and came attached to negative preconceptions about what I was capable of and how much I could take on.
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As I was preparing to leave my job for mat leave, everyone told me my attitude toward work would change, that I’d be less interested or focused.
What I found after having my first son was the opposite. I was suddenly acutely aware of how much time was in a day, now that I had to get anything I wanted to get done during a nap window. I became adept at making the most of even a 15-minute reprieve from nursing or rocking a tiny human. I also had clarity about how I wanted to spend my free hours, my zest for writing returning in a fierce way. Knowing my time was limited, I was determined to avoid wasting even a single second of it doing something I loathed.
Rather than put me off work, becoming a mother turned me into the best version of my professional self. When my son was just over a year old, I returned to freelance writing and found greater success in that sphere than I had when I was child-free. Haters be damned.
And then a year later, I wanted to have another. The consensus I heard then was that becoming a mother of two was a death sentence for the writing career I was building. (I noticed that a lot of this advice was coming from men who had big families themselves; apparently kids are a career-killer for women, but dads are immune from the virus.)
At the beginning of 2020, while I was eight months pregnant with my second, I was offered a dream contract: building a pop-culture podcast from the ground up. I brought the show to air, from concept to production, just a few months after giving birth, during the height of pandemic lockdowns.
Obviously, there were gruelling days where I was breastfeeding a ravenous newborn, chasing a rambunctious toddler and trying to make edit notes on a rough cut of the pilot episode – all while we were trapped in a small apartment together. Many days I asked myself why on Earth I had done this to myself.
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Yet something I started to notice while having to manage all of these things at the same time was that the two worlds, parenting and career, were not necessarily separate. Knowing I had only certain windows of time to work made me a sharper, more organized editor. And being energized by work and using another part of my brain seemed to make me a happier parent. Having a newborn and toddler for whom I was now going to be modelling what work looked like also made me realize how important it was to take on meaningful work that brought joy into my life, not just jobs that paid the bills. (Yes, it’s possible!)
In this way, work and care fed into each other. And the more mothers I spoke to, the more it became clear that I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. Yet the perception in professional spaces is still the opposite. Our power as working mothers is minimized or used against us. Rather than recognize the newfound focus, clarity and organization we bring to the table, we are often sidelined because of preconceived notions about our capability, or chastised for requests for accommodations.
Pregnant with my third, I finally sold the book I’d been dreaming of writing for decades. I wrote it as that baby grew from an apple seed to a watermelon, and the first draft was written and edited as he went from newborn to baby and now toddler. Had I listened to the naysayers who told me to stop after one or two, I may not have done it at all.
So here’s some advice from a working mom of three. Go ahead, have a baby, or have another, if that’s what you want. The threat of a child ending your career is just that: an empty threat.