Rebecca Minkoff shares the parenting advice she had to learn the hard way

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.

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 alone,” she said. “I have an amazing team, an amazing husband, an amazing babysitter, and amazing parents. There’s a machine, and I greatly rely on my team, my cofounder, Ali, for this all to happen.”

But, she said, it’s important for all working parents to set their own boundaries.

“I think you have to put the guardrails up for yourself and not what some other mom is doing,” she said. “Try your best to hold true.”