Raising children might just be the best experience someone can put on his/her resume. Any parent of a toddler or teenager is adept in multitasking or negotiation, according to an award-winning author.

For her book, award-winning journalist and author of, If You’ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything: Leadership Begins at Home, Ann Crittenden interviewed nearly 100 prominent parents who work in government, business, entertainment and academia to find their unique assets they bring to the office. She described four of those highly marketable skills at a speech in January:

1. Multitasking: Any executive needs to be focused amid constant distraction and react to crisis evenly. The same is true of parents.

2. Interpersonal Skills: Crittenden pointed specifically to listening and negotiation skills as the most important and necessary in business and at home. “Never let anyone leave the table without feeling they had been listened to,” she said.

3. Growing Human Capabilities/Mentoring: The “good parent” model of leadership emphasizes bringing out the best in those around you and encouraging their drive to excel through motivation and positive reinforcement.

4. Perspective: “Parenting is a lesson in humility,” Crittenden asserted.

Crittenden found that the job description of a CEO was similar to that of a good parent: hard-working, determined and committed to the whole. The mother of an adult son said for years, parents have been considered a liability as employees, but their skills can be strengths for an organization.

“A high-level Defense Department official during the Reagan administration once confided to me … that negotiating with his teenaged daughter taught him more about how to deal with the Soviets than any other training he had ever had.