Walking away from a failing job is easy. Walking away from one you are winning at is something else entirely.
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Karoline Leavitt just made one of the biggest decisions of her young career, and it has almost nothing to do with politics.
On Wednesday, Leavitt, 28, announced that she will leave her job as White House press secretary at the end of August. There is no publicly reported scandal driving her departure. By her own account, she is stepping down because she wants more time with her two young children, a two-year-old son and a daughter born just three months ago.
Leavitt became the youngest press secretary in American history when she took the job at the start of Trump’s second term. She was also the first woman to serve in the job while pregnant. For eighteen months, she stood at one of the most unforgiving podiums in Washington, and she was good at it. She could have stayed. Instead, at 28, she is choosing to step back from one of the most visible jobs in the country.
There is a version of this story that treats Leavitt’s exit as a retreat. It is almost exactly the opposite.
Young Americans are told, in a hundred small ways, to build the career first and think about marriage and children later, once there is room. The assumption is that career comes with a timetable and family can somehow be fitted around it. Leavitt has discovered what generations of parents already know: sometimes there is no way to give two consuming responsibilities everything they deserve at the same time.
She has said that returning to the White House after her daughter’s birth was both the most rewarding and the hardest stretch of her life, and that she could not be the mother her two children deserve while also giving the job everything it demands. That is not failure. It is success followed by the recognition that success was exacting a price she was no longer willing to pay.
American culture tends to understand ambition in one direction: upward. Get the better job. Take the promotion. Accept the bigger title. Keep moving.
Leavitt is doing something harder to fit into that script. She is deciding that some years matter differently from others.
She is not disappearing from public life. Trump says she will remain an outside adviser heading into the midterms. The political world will still be there. Her children’s early years will not.
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A campaign can wait for her. A toddler’s second year cannot.
That may be the part of her decision worth dwelling on. Ambition is usually measured by how far someone climbs. It is rarely measured by whether someone has the judgment to stop climbing for a while.
There is nothing easy about making that choice when the next rung is still within reach. Professional advancement is one of the few sacrifices our culture applauds in advance. Turning away from it, even temporarily, requires explaining yourself.
Leavitt’s example matters precisely because she has so little to prove professionally. She reached the kind of success most people never will, at an age when many are still deciding which ladder to climb. She is not wondering whether she could make it. She already did.
That gives her decision unusual weight.
Sociologists can publish papers on falling birth rates. Commentators can urge young people to marry earlier and have children sooner. Most of that remains abstract. Leavitt’s choice is concrete. She had the career, the visibility, the access, and the momentum, and she decided that, for now, something else mattered more.
Her decision does not tell every parent what to do. Families, finances, careers, and children differ too much for that. What it does show is that stepping back need not mean giving up, and that putting family first for a season need not mean abandoning ambition.
There will be other jobs, and perhaps even bigger titles down the road. There will not be another chance to be present for these particular years of her children’s lives.
A career can have another chapter. Childhood only moves in one direction.
Walking away, on her own terms, while she was still winning may turn out to be one of the most consequential decisions Karoline Leavitt has made yet.
Image created using AI.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D., is Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive with 30 U.S. patents, he focuses on analyzing human behavior, public health, and global affairs, drawing on an interdisciplinary background. He has published in multiple RealClear platforms, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., The Humanist, AFRO American, South Asia Monitor (on the editorial board and host of a show), and others. [email protected], mpreddyinsights.com, https://lnkd.in/gn2zQJbs
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