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Rebecca Minkoff Shares Parenting Advice She Had to Learn the Hard Way ...
By Joshua Nelken-Zitser You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. Rebecca Minkoff has four children. Courtesy of Rebecca Minkoff 2026-04-16T11:38:17.225Z Rebecca Minkoff believes work-life balance is a myth for working parents. Minkoff, who has four children, restructured her working life to make more time for family. She wishes she had received one piece of parenting advice earlier in her career: "only your babies matter." Work-life balance is a myth that working parents should stop chasing, Rebecca Minkoff told Business Insider. "I don't believe in balance," the fashion designer and cofounder of the Female Founder Collective, 45, said, adding: "It does not exist. It's never existed for men who want to be parents, or women. Period."Minkoff, who has four children between the ages of four and 14, said she struggled with trying to do it all while raising her first three kids. "You're giving a bath to your baby, and I just remember thinking for the first three kids, 'Hurry up, go to bed, I need to get back to work, oh my god.' Just having that feeling in me," she said.It was especially hard when she was in "build mode" earlier in her career, trying to scale the fashion brand she owned until 2022. "When I scroll through the photos on my phone, I'm like, 'Wow, I only see smiles.' But that felt miserable a lot of the time," she said. After the birth of her fourth child in February 2022, Minkoff said her mindset shifted."I was like, 'Guess what happened when I didn't reply to that email?' Nothing," she said. "Guess what happened on the weekend when I didn't check it? Nothing."She wishes she realized sooner that 'only your babies matter'After returning from maternity leave, she began restructuring her work and delegating more, which Minkoff said involved reducing her direct reports from 18 to one. "We took a lot of the detail work out of my job and relied on a creative director to do that, which freed me up a lot," she said. Rebecca Minkoff tries to finish work at 5 p.m. to spend time with her family. Courtesy of Rebecca Minkoff Now, Minkoff said she aims to finish work at 5 p.m. to spend time with her family and tries to minimize the amount she travels for work.Looking back, she said she wishes she'd been given one piece of advice: "I wish someone had sat me down and shaken me and been like, 'Only your babies matter, focus on them.'"Minkoff said her advice won't apply to everyone."I don't do this...
Too Much Advice Is Making Us Worse at Parenting
“Can you see the ways that external advice can exacerbate parental anxiety by creating unrealistic standards and fueling a sense of inadequacy? It isn’t that it causes parental anxiety, per se, as parenting is naturally full of protective urges, but it certainly has played a significant part in amplifying parental overwhelm.” This is a theme I explore in my upcoming book, The Parenting Paradox, in which I reflect on the correlation between expert parenting advice and uncertain parenting. I recently participated in a podcast interview about over-professionalizing parenting. It’s a topic that resonates with me so it’s been good to have opportunities to name what so many parents are quietly experiencing as a norm—that raising children has shifted from a lived relationship into something that feels more like a complex, high-stakes profession. Much of how I think about this has been shaped by Murray Bowen’s family systems theory, which highlights the impact parents have on emotional dynamics—not through techniques but through their own functioning. For over a century, external advice and marketing have entered the parenting space, amplifying fears around children’s safety, education, and emotional well-being. This sits alongside many broader social changes, and not all of it has been negative. But what’s become increasingly clear is the correlation between expert advice and uncertain parenting, as historian Peter Stearns has noted. As I reflect in my book, “external advice can exacerbate parental anxiety by creating unrealistic standards and fuelling a sense of inadequacy.” What strikes me in my work with parents and their helpers is how universal this experience is. Parents aren’t lacking care or commitment; they’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of voices telling them how to care. Parenting, which once grew largely from lived experience in community and intuition, has increasingly become outsourced to external advisors. We go looking for reassurance, but often come away with more doubt. In fact, we go to an expert for advice to solve anxiety, but end up feeding it. At some point, without fully noticing, we begin to treat parenting less like a relationship and more like a project. We track, measure, assess, and intervene with a focus on our kids. When parenting becomes something to get right, rather than something to live into over time, it can lose its sense of direction and leave parents feeling overwhelmed. I propose that the way forward is not throu...
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Dear Abby and other advice columns from the San Jose Mercury News
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