A tour of Kylie Jenner’s offices reveals features you would expect a Gen Z billionaire to outfit her lair with: vats of pink candy, YouTube studios, and a champagne vending machine. But perhaps more unexpectedly, the headquarters of the Kylie Cosmetics brand is also the Platonic ideal of offices for career-minded moms.
In a new YouTube video, the 22-year-old Jenner takes viewers on an “official” tour of the Kylie Cosmetics offices, showing off her signature pink walls, photo studios, and glam rooms. But even as she describes how and she and her team use each space, Jenner continually returns to the unique elements that allow her to simultaneously work and care for her young daughter, Stormi.
“It’s hard to manage mom life and work life sometimes, so that’s why I made her a bedroom here so she could be with me and still have fun,” Jenner said in her “Day in the life” video.
Attached to Jenner’s private office is a playroom for Stormi, complete with a crib where she naps while at the office with mom. A video documenting Stormi’s birth plays across screens in the lobby, and in the staff’s kitchen area, Jenner stops to point out Stormi’s pink high chair, where Jenner says she often eats lunch and dinner.
“She does spend a lot of time here. She really never leaves my side, so we’re here all the time,” the young mom says, before moving on to show off a wall of lip kits.
Jenner’s model of work-life balance may only be available to CEOs and billionaires, but it still reveals a truth about the current child-care debate that many feminists ignore: women want to raise their babies themselves. Forty-nine percent of employed women in the United States, including 42 percent of working mothers, say they are their family’s main breadwinner.
At a time when women are more educated and more employed than ever before, the need for child care, and consequently the price of child care, has skyrocketed. Politicians have made various nationalized paid leave and child-care proposals, but often overlook what women actually want for raising their children.
As The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann has written, letting people other than their mothers care for small children has rather shocking and relatively little-known negative effects on average. A study done on children enrolled in universal child care programs in Quebec in the 1990s found the children to be more anxious, aggressive, and hyperactive as they grew older. “Moreover, children in Quebec with increased child care access later had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates than other children,” a summary of the study reads.
Jenner gives a rare look into how working mothers might choose to raise their children if they had a billion dollars. They wouldn’t choose to send their kids to the world’s best day care. They wouldn’t choose to send the kid off with the nanny all day. The dream is to build your work around your child’s life is one that is healthier for both parents and kids, and something that employers and politicians should look to emulate in whatever small ways they can.
“Over here, I have a picture of Stormi and I because it’s one of my favorite photos of us,” Jenner said while standing in her office. “I have it in here just because she is really my biggest motivator without even knowing it. She motivates me everyday to work harder and be a better person.”
