"I learned that effective communication starts with the understanding that there is MY point of view, (my truth), and someone else's point of view (h… - Sheryl Sandberg

Effective communication starts with the understanding that there is my point of view (my truth) and someone else's point of view (his truth). Rarely is there one absolute truth, so people who believe that they speak the truth are very silencing of others. When we recognize that we can see things only from our own perspective, we can share our views in a nonthreatening way.

Rarely is there one absolute truth, so people who believe that they speak the truth are very silencing of others. When we recognize that we can see things only from our own perspective, we can share our views in a nonthreatening way.

effective communication starts with the understanding that there is my point of view (my truth) and someone else’s point of view (his truth). Rarely is there one absolute truth, so people who believe that they speak the truth are very silencing of others.

In fact, these “bad mother with a briefcase” images are so prevalent that writer Jessica Valenti collected them in a funny and poignant blog post called “Sad White Babies with Mean Feminist Mommies.”25

Study after study suggests that the pressure society places on women to stay home and do “what’s best for the child” is based on emotion, not evidence. In 1991, the Early Child Care Research Network, under the auspices of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, initiated the most ambitious and comprehensive study to date on the relationship between child care and child development, and in particular on the effect of exclusive maternal care versus child care. The Research Network, which comprised more than thirty child development experts from leading universities across the country, spent eighteen months designing the study. They tracked more than one thousand children over the course of fifteen years, repeatedly assessing the children’s cognitive skills, language abilities, and social behaviors. Dozens of papers have been published about what they found.23 In 2006, the researchers released a report summarizing their findings, which concluded that “children who were cared for exclusively by their mothers did not develop differently than those who were also cared for by others.”24 They found no gap in cognitive skills, language competence, social competence, ability to build and maintain relationships, or in the quality of the mother-child bond.25 Parental behavioral factors — including fathers who are responsive and positive, mothers who favor “self-directed child behavior,” and parents with emotional intimacy in their marriages — influence a child’s development two to three times more than any form of child care.26 One of the findings is worth reading slowly, maybe even twice: “Exclusive maternal care was not related to better or worse outcomes for children. There is, thus, no reason for mothers to feel as though they are harming their children if they decide to work.

Men are allowed to be focused on their own achievements, while loyalty is expected from women.