We have to stop acting like having kids does not change people. When you wake up the morning after your child is born you are forever changed. Sorry folks, you can’t just go back to being old lunchbox Jane or Joe and head to the office or plant like nothing has happened. And Corporate America has to stop pretending like you can. In the work world we look at parenthood like we look at death in society at large. If we ignore it it will go away. Remember the uproar during the health care reform debate over death panels. Here’s Sarah Palin’s famous Facebook line from last summer: The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” That was about a proposal to have patients and doctors sit down and actually talk about what everyone’s expectations are if a major illness hits. Would you want to be kept alive on machines, or allowed to die? I see nothing wrong with this type of preplanning. If you talk about these things at a less emotional time they may go a bit more smoothly. I’m proposing a similar death-panel idea for working parents and their employers. In the last month, I’ve been interviewing dozens of working moms asking them about how motherhood has impacted their careers, and the one theme that’s emerging is the lack of motherhood pre or post planning.

Original Source of Death-style panels for working parents