I have no shame in admitting this: Google’s Super Bowl ad made me cry. The ad features a dad practicing for a job interview. When asked about the job that taught him the most, he begins reflecting on his role as a parent.
“It was a role where I learned to take constructive criticism … I got pretty used to, you know, working long hours with a small team. I got very comfortable, uh, multitasking … and I had to become really organized,” he says.
When juxtaposed against footage of the dad managing parenting situations, the video really drives home a point: Parenting is the ultimate transferable skill — or rather, it builds a set of skills that can be applied to any job.
That message, along with the physical representation of just how quickly children grow, and how efficiently parents must adapt to each new phase and challenge, really struck an emotional chord with me. If social media reactions are any indication, I’m not the only one.
The ad took me right back in time — not just to my earliest days of parenthood, but back even further. In my pre-child life (and America’s pre-pandemic era), messages about professionalism seemed to say “leave yourself at home when you come to work if you want to be taken seriously on the job. Take your parent hat off before you step into the office.” See: This Reddit thread from a mom who was asked to remove kids’ pictures and drawings from the office because it looked “unprofessional.”
The pressure to draw a firm line between home life and work life, to operate under two distinct identities, was part of the reason I chose to leave my full-time job to be a stay-at-home mom. While everyone warned me I’d be mentally bored or restless, I felt challenged and stretched every single day … and I wondered why I felt overworked even when I “wasn’t working,” according to the outside world.
When I stepped into my freelance journalism career, I tried to hide the work of parenting I was doing — because I was operating in a world that didn’t view parenting as work. Once, my kids refused to go down for their nap on time, and I’d scheduled a work call when they were meant to be asleep. At the time, I hadn’t quite figured out tandem nursing, but in that moment, as I jumped on my call, it all came together. I nursed two babies as I interviewed, praying that they’d be silent until I hung up.
And while I shouldn’t have had to hide my motherhood in that way, that moment was a real exercise in flexibility and adaptability and multitasking … even teamwork — which are just a few examples of all the skills parents flex on the job.
The idea that these moments can feed our professional skills still feels somewhat revolutionary. But this Super Bowl ad goes there: It allows us to frame the challenges and the triumphs and the ever-changing demands of parenting as things that make us sharper and stronger in every aspect of our lives. It’s more than just permission to bring your whole self to work, it’s encouragement to highlight your work as a parent in professional settings.
When the pandemic came, many of us had no choice but to let parenthood spill outside the lines. Thanks to that, and the collective shift it inspired, now we can recognize the interplay between our roles in and out of the home. Last weekend, as I cobbled together my kids’ summer camp schedules (taking into account price points, distance from our home, hours of operation, my kids’ interests, our vacation dates, the balance of unstructured time at home vs. the stimulation of group activities, and so much more), I was able to identify it immediately: “This is just as challenging as any professional task I’ve ever taken on.” This ad gets right to the heart of that.
But the ad is getting some flack too (rightfully, in my opinion). The biggest issue for viewers? The fact that it features a dad navigating, presumably, the return to paid work after a stint as a stay-at-home dad. Is it powerful to see a dad doing the work of parenthood? Yes, absolutely. And it’s imperative to shift expectations of fathers in a world that often praises dads for doing the bare minimum, while shaming moms at every turn.
But that’s also the crux of the issue here. Do we really need another romanticized take on a dad being involved in the raising of his child? Do we really need to keep looking at dads through rose-colored glasses while continuing to dismiss the work moms do?
It’s worth noting, too, that so much of why the work of parenting is undervalued because it is disproportionately taken on by women. That’s why our world has had such a tough time viewing it as worthwhile labor. By casting a man in this ad, it suggests that in order to legitimize the work of parenting, we need to see a man perform it.
Clearly, featuring a dad was an intentional choice meant to normalize fathers taking on active roles in parenting. But was it the right choice? For me, it’s a no. My take is that it would have been even more powerful to highlight a mother looking back and recognizing all the work she’s put in as just that — work.
Valid criticism aside, this ad is beautifully produced and truly moving. And when I sent it to my own stay-at-home mom, she co-signed the idea that parenting is very much a job. “It truly is the most rewarding, the most fulfilling job,” she replied. “And you, Zara, do such a good job of it — makes me want to cry.”
It was the most meaningful performance review I’ve ever received.