ThirdPath Institute

Reaching the end of my maternity leave, I'd developed this recurring feeling in my stomach. It was not quite dread; rather unease.

 

I was looking forward to hanging out with peers again on a daily basis and putting my mind to some different intellectual tasks. But I was uncertain that I wanted to be gone all day from my son. I knew of several women in my unit who had come back to work part-time after giving birth, but I didn't know much beyond that. How did they negotiate it? What is common practice out there these days? Were there specific things I should be considering? The HR guidance from my employer was pretty thin back in 2016 (though it has been updated since).

 

In researching on the internet, I came across a small non-profit group in Philadelphia called ThirdPath Institute. Its tagline: “Creating Time for Life.” In perusing their website, it struck me at how comprehensive the Institute's thinking was on the challenge of work-life balance.

In retrospect, anyone who has had children can appreciate that parenting is not static. Children's needs evolve and change drastically over the first five years. I would bet they will continue to do so through adolescence. It would make sense then that the impact on our time and ability to balance child rearing with other responsibilities—such as work—would need, by consequence, to evolve as well. But as a new parent, you are literally sailing in unchartered waters, taking each day as it comes.

 

ThirdPath Institute refers to the evolving range of personal challenges that we will have to tend to over the course of our lives professional careers as the Life Cycle; and the Institute takes a very practical approach to helping individuals, couples and families tackle them while ensuring that we excel at maintaining careers, raising children, nurturing relationships, and caring for our aging parents. For those of you who followed my Breaking the Mold series, you'll recall Lotte Bailyn, who was a major inspiration to ThirdPath's founder, Jessica DeGroot.

 

 

The great thing about ThirdPath is their diversity of resources, ranging from worksheets to person-to-person coaching. On their website you will find little checklists and surveys on how to get going in rebalancing your life to small courses to logged webinars they host every third Thursday of the month to a roster of life advocates that can work with you one-on-one or as a couple. In that sense, you can involve others in problem-solving your situation as little (or as much) as you like.

 

I started by reading a number of their online resources and checklists to help me define what going back to work would look like for me. I listened to a number of the webinars to learn about how men and women were re-negotiating what work looked like to them as they raised children. Then as the first months of being back at work materialized, my husband and I made use of their professional life advocates to help us problem-solve some pinch points we were experiencing. I then also used a life advocate on my own to help me define my own career goals after I'd been back at work for roughly one year. Most recently, while preparing to go on vacation, I stumbled across their vacation checklist (brilliant by the way) and it gave me some new ideas on how to handle re-entry back to work post-vacation bliss.

 

Lastly, I really appreciate that the founder, DeGroot, leans just as heavily on male role models as female ones. She features a number of male-run organizations who are seeking to re-define what fatherhood and careers looks like.

 

 

No matter where you are at in your life cycle—pregnant, coming back from maternity, early years of child rearing, or empty nester—there are millions of people out facing the same challenges as you. ThirdPath Institute has been pioneering a new way—a third way—to balancing public and private responsibilities for decades now. You will always hear DeGroot remark at the uphill struggles of changing public policy on these matters in the US. It is an uphill struggle for parents too. But the rewards—creating time for life—are well worth it.

I can attest to the benefits myself. My husband and I often recall those early afternoons when I would come home from work at 1pm and have the entire afternoon with our son. We built so many fond memories of park time, outdoor trail walking, reading, you name it. Indeed it requires sacrifices—financial and professional—but ThirdPath has resources out there to help you navigate that decision-making. I wouldn't trade those memories for more hours in the office.