Viji Nataraj, at her home in Edmonton, put her career on hold when she had kids. Now, she's giving back by co-running a mentorship program at their elementary school.Megan Albu/The Globe and Mail
When Viji Nataraj, 48, got her masters in educational psychology at the University of British Columbia, she assumed she would have a long, rewarding career and become a typical working mom when she eventually had children. But when her son Avan was born 13 years ago, Ms. Nataraj and her husband Andrew, a neurosurgeon, decided that she would put her career on hold to stay home with him. Two years later, Ella came along, and Ms. Nataraj decided to continue being a stay-at-home mom.
Now, she says she’s found more fulfillment in that role than she ever could have imagined. She’s also using her skills to co-run a mentorship program at her children’s school.
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Here’s Viji Nataraj on the pros and cons of being a stay-at-home mom:
What was your career like before you stepped away from it?
Even though my degree was in school psychology, I really liked working with older kids, so I mainly worked in universities and colleges. When I moved here to Edmonton, I worked at MacEwan University as a learning specialist where I helped connect kids with disabilities with the tools they needed to succeed [in school].
How did you come to the decision to be a stay-at-home mom?
The driving force was that as a neurosurgeon, [my husband] Andrew didn’t have a nine to five job. He’s on call a lot and can be gone nights, early mornings and weekends. It just wasn’t practical for us both to have all-consuming careers. When Avan came along, I realized how much I wanted us to have the most direct influence on our kids, rather than having a caregiver [in the home].
What have the pros and cons been for you and your family?
I can really see the pros now that my kids are entering adolescence in that they’ve got good heads on their shoulders. My parents were immigrants, so getting food on the table and having a job were the priorities. We have different resources now, so I think ‘doing better than our parents’ [means] doing better with the emotional intelligence side of things, the feelings part of it. I feel like because I’ve been home with them every day, I really know my kids and they know if anything happens, I’m there in five minutes. That’s way more important than I thought it would be.
The cons of it – and there are cons – are that you’re making a sacrifice. You’ve stepped away from a career that you’ve put time, energy and money into, and within a few years, you become irrelevant. Especially with psychology, things are constantly changing. There are times when you feel like, ‘Oh, what’s it like going to a meeting? You went to a conference? Wow.’ So you are kind of out of the loop.
The other pro is [that] in staying at home, it’s given me time to work on my psychological health, my spiritual health, all these things that I never did when I was really, really busy.
Tell me about getting involved at your children’s school.
Before the pandemic, I was doing some [stock] trading, but it didn’t satisfy me because I wasn’t using my best skills and I wasn’t giving back to the community. So, I felt very empty doing that.
I started volunteering to co-run a mentorship program at my kids’ elementary school. I find it really fulfilling because I can still help people and use my skills, even without getting paid.
Before [I started co-running it], the program was pairing up kids who have different needs with a parent volunteer, and they would meet once a week and just talk or do whatever. I decided to change it because some of the parents and kids were having a hard time connecting with it being so unstructured. Now, [we host] an activity once a week that has some fine motor element in it. There’s usually a lesson and they’re themed and hands-on. Usually [the kids] do something that they can present to their class.
So, for example, when it was rainy out, we did a rain cloud in a jar. I gave a little lesson on density and then we put shaving cream in a jar and dropped blue food colouring in and they watched this little rain drop and learned about how rain clouds and density work.
You can just see the kids bonding with their mentors, and we’ve gotten really good feedback from the principal and parents who say the kids really love it, so it’s been really cool.
Did you worry at all about the financial implications? Either for your family as a whole or for your own financial independence?
Yes, but I grew up with a mother who’s a hustler. I have hustler genes in me too, so if something happened, I know that we would figure it out as a family.
I know I’m lucky that I had this opportunity because I have a partner that I trust who also thinks this was the right decision for our family. He’s super supportive and always telling me, ‘Thank you for doing this. I appreciate you doing this valuable work for our family.’
Now that your children are a little older, do you think about going back to work?
I have thought about it, but they’ve made it clear that they still really need me. If they come home and they have tears in their eyes, I want to be the person they come to.
For my kids, I think me being a stay-at-home Mom does not equal me being a lazy person. They don’t see me doing nothing, they see me being a partner in this family with their dad. We’re all partners in this family, so it’s not that I serve anybody, we all serve the unit.