Why I quit my six-figure job to be a house husband-Father explains

A man has explained his decision behind quitting his high-powered, high-paying, technology gig to be a stay-at-home dad.
Anand Iyer, now three months in, tells Yahoo Parenting it’s the best investment he’s ever made..The 34-year-old's wife Shreya, 36, became the primary breadwinner with her job managing recruiting for Splunk, a technology company that does data analytics. “

Like all working parents who often struggle to balance career and family, the San Francisco tech guru had just endured one too many nights of rushing home only to find his 2-year-old daughter, Ava, already asleep. He was missing too much and “felt terrible,”

“I wasn’t spending any time with her in the evening,” says Iyer, noting that one conversation with a fellow father really got him thinking. “We started talking about how hard this was, being a working parent. My friend said, ‘My son is 2 months old and I haven’t bonded with him yet.’ And I felt the same way. I started to ask myself, ‘What am I working so hard for? Why are we trying to make our lives so great but aren’t investing in time with our child?’”

So on January 23, the former Microsoft product manager, then chief product officer at Threadflip, walked into his boss’ office and quit. 

Iyer announced that he’d decided to stay home and focus on spending quality time with the toddler before it was “too late.
For the sake of his little girl, that high power, six-figure gig he’d climbed the ladder 15 years to score would have be on hold for a while. And to his surprise, Iyer tells Yahoo Parenting, his boss applauded him for it.

He told me, ‘I totally get it,My boss said, ‘You have to realize who you’re working for.’ His words, not mine. He was very understanding. It actually wasn’t a tough talk at all.” Colleagues followed suit.“I’ve had occasional sleepless nights over our finances, “But the reality is that I’m fortunate that I’ve been working nonstop for a long time so it wasn’t as difficult a transition for us financially as it could have been.

 

Instead of hurrying off to get to work each morning, “I look forward to getting up every morning and feeding Ava,” he says. “And when I first read that study about fathers being more happy the more time they spend with their kids, I was like, ‘That’s totally right.’ I feel magnificent. This experience has been so rewarding and I can see that Ava is benefitting from it.”