Half Changed World

No long post tonight, as I’ve been watching the presidential debate. It’s more substantive than I had expected, given the way the campaign has been going.

If you’re not registered to vote, please do so. The deadline is this weekend in many states. You can download the forms for most states here. It’s less than 100 years since women got the right to vote in this country — don’t take it for granted.

I love this cartoon on women’s suffrage I found at the Library of Congress.

It shows a man in a suit and apron, holding two screaming infants, and looking with a desperate expression at a woman wearing a dress, jacket, tie, and monocle. There’s a sign in the back saying "Votes for Women" and the caption is "Election Day." I assume the implication is if you let women vote, the next thing you know, they’ll be going out to work and the men will be taking care of children.

The new issue of Working Mother hit my mailbox yesterday, containing their new list of the 100 best companies for working mothers. I’m more than a little dubious about these lists, because there’s often a big gap beween the official company policies that are captured in these formulas and practice on the ground, especially around part-time work and non-standard schedules.

My sense is that if you have a supportive boss, you can often get flexible arrangements even if they’re not company policy, and if you don’t, you’re out of luck, regardless of what the manual says. I’d love to see data on what fraction of the workforce is taking advantage of these policies, broken out by gender (are they just creating a mommy track?), and on the career outcomes for people who work part-time or take extended leaves. I work for the federal government, which is overall reasonably family-friendly (with the glaring exception of ZERO paid parental leave), but I know people’s experiences vary dramatically from department to department and even office to office.

If any of my readers work at one of these 100 best companies and want to comment on what it’s really like, I’d love to hear your point of view.

Amy pointed out that in my discussion of flexibility on Monday, I didn’t talk much about stable flexible arrangements, especially shifted schedules. She’s right, and that’s ironic, as such schedules are very common in the Federal government. People love them, especially people who drive to work and want to avoid the utter craziness of DC-area traffic during rush hour. Working Mother reports that flexible hours are among the most common family friendly benefits, with 57 percent of companies offering flextime, and 34 percent offering compressed workweeks.

Of the benefits discussed in the study, the most common offered nationwide are dependent care flexible spending accounts, offered by 73 percent of all companies and mental health insurance, offered by 72 percent. (These figures are attributed to a Society for Human Resource Management survey, which I think means that it’s mostly large companies who were asked.) The least commonly offered benefits are take-home meals (3 percent), business-travel child care reimbursement (3 percent) and emergency/backup elder care (2 percent).

I’d also like to call attention to Corporate Voices for Working Families’ efforts to increase flexible working options for low-wage and hourly workers.

Many companies — even those that have very enlighted policies for their professional workforces — offer much less flexibility to their production and support workforces. The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that only 47 percent of private sector workers have ANY paid sick leave. At a conference I attended, one woman explained how her company, a large food industry corporation, had just changed their policies so it was possible for production line workers to take less than a WEEK of leave at a time (but only if they could find someone to substitute for them on the line). I’m embarassed to admit that such a possibility had never occurred to me in my privileged professional position.

For today’s book review, I turn to Ann Crittenden’s new book If You’ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything: Leadership Begins at Home. I felt bad about having taking a bit of a cheap shot at it a few weeks back, without having actually read it. So I read it.

The good news is that Ann Crittenden has not taken leave of her senses — she’s very well aware that the business world does not currently value the skills developed through parenting. The bad news is that this book is unlikely to convince anyone of the value of parenting experience who isn’t already a believer — even if they read the book, which they won’t. I’m not quite sure who the target audience for this book is, other than weirdos like me who are obsessed with the work-family literature. Maybe stay-at-home parents who are looking for a confidence boost as they consider moving back into the paid workforce? (There’s an appendix discussing how to list skills gained through parenting on a resume.) As of today, it’s somewhere in the 4,000s on the Amazon sales list, which I think is pretty good.

To be honest, I found this book a slow read. Crittenden makes her case with exhaustive quotes and examples, but after a while it felt awfully repetitive. And, to a great degree, it felt like she was attacking a straw-man (straw-woman?) argument — that parenting rots your brain. Except for those awful sleep-deprived mornings, that’s not a claim that anyone I know takes seriously.

RebelDad shared his perspective on this book a few weeks ago, and commented that Crittenden lumps all parents together — those combining paid work and parenting, and those returning to the workforce after time spent exclusively parenting. I think I’d go further than that — while the interviews that Crittenden cites were with both "juggling" and "sequencing" parents, I think the book is really aimed at promoting sequencing.

This makes sense when you think of If you’ve raised kids… as sort of an addendum to Crittenden’s last book, The Price of Motherhood. As throughly documented by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, it’s not just the years out of the labor force that cripple women’s lifetime earnings, it’s the effect of these years on their earnings when they try to return. (The limited evidence suggests that it’s just as bad, or even worse, for men who take time out to parent.) And, as I’ve argued before, it’s crazy that in a potential lifespan of 80 or more years, we shouldn’t be able to focus on parenting for the few years when our children are very young or otherwise needy.

However, I wish that Crittenden hadn’t let her bias in favor of at-home-parents show through so much. There are several passages in the book that made me wince as a working parent, including the one in which Crittenden imagines herself telling her teenage son "I gave all that [a prestigious job at the New York Times] up so that you would have at least one parent at home who would be there for you and make sure you didn’t turn out pathetic!" Ouch! Crittenden also shares a horror story of a poor working mother whose children died in a fire when she left them unattended to go to work, a story of a union leader whose daughter was "still angry about her frequent absences and for a long time remained more deeply attached to her grandmother," a story of a media executive who had to remain on the job at September 11, not knowing whether her son was safe, and the story of a lawyer who became an at-home-mom because her job forced her into an "inauthentic persona." Not exactly the most reassuring reading.

This is particularly unfortunate, because, as Crittenden suggests, if the doors are going to be opened to recognize parenting skills any time soon, it’s probably going to be other parents who open them. And by and large, it’s going to be working parents who are going to be in the position to open them.

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1/14/05: This post is getting a zillion hits via google all of a sudden.  I’m assuming this is part of some sort of assignment.  Please read my comments about the internet and plagarism on my About page.

Flexibility is the holy grail for working parents these days. Flextime, telecommuting, conference calls, checking email from home, all of these are eagerly sought after as ways to make it a little more possible to combine a satisfying family life with a full career. But flexibility has some downsides, as well as some limitations, that aren’t often considered.

1. Flexibility doesn’t really add more hours to the day. It can save you the commute and the need to dress up, but it doesn’t magically make the time bind go away. I know someone who after the birth of her first child successfully negotiated to convert her job into a part-time, work-from-home position, with flexible hours. She didn’t have paid childcare, however, planning on working while her baby napped, or after her husband came home from work. After several months, she reluctantly resigned, having discovered that she was working every night from 10 pm to 2 am.

2. Flexibility makes it hard to set limits. Cell phones, blackberries, email at home — while these may free you from the office, they make you more a prisoner of work. We all know the people who check their messages constantly, even while on vacation.

3. Flexibility reduces your negotiating position. Until I read Kidding Ourselves, it had never occurred to me to think about the effects of workplace flexibility on household choices. Mahony points out that when a couple negotiates over child care and housework, having the less flexible job can be an advantage. Moreover, she argues that, unless there are significant social changes, increased flexibility will only reinforce the current gendered division of labor, because predominantly women will take advantage of it.

4. Flexibility forces you to make a constant stream of small decisions. If you know that there’s no way you can take off from work on a weekday morning to pass out muffins at your child’s preschool, there’s no decision that needs to be made. If you have a flexible job, you find yourself constantly weighing the alternatives: maybe you could go in two hours early the day before, but then you won’t be able to help get the kids ready for school, and is this more important than your older child’s field trip, and what about the dentist appointment next week, and how likely is it that your boss will reschedule the meeting that was cancelled last week for that morning? If you consciously or subconsciously believe that a "good mother" would always be there to hand out muffins, you wind up feeling like you’re letting your child down each time you could possibly have rearranged your schedule to be there, and didn’t.

Today my first post appears on DotMoms, a group blog of about 20 different mothers, writing in alternation. I’ll be posting there twice a month, writing less about policy and more about my family.

Their website also includes links to a hundred or more mothers who blog. Most of these are just women writing about their lives and their families. I am fascinated by the brief views they provide into different worlds — mothers who work and mothers who homeschool, single mothers and married mothers and lesbian mothers, mothers of infants and mothers of college students and mothers of children who died. And I love that all these women think their lives are interesting enough that someone might want to hear about them — and they’re right.

A few things to take care of today:

First, we’re heading out to see my parents this weekend, so I may not post until next week.

Second, a big thank you to those who have posted comments recently. Like Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne, I work harder and faster the more people who are watching. This project is eating up a ludicrous amount of my free time, and it definitely helps to know that people are finding it interesting.

Third, the Brain, Child article I discussed a couple of weeks ago is now available online.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Almost every parent I know thinks that diaper changing is vastly overrated as the worst part of parenting — it’s the lack of sleep, and the interrupted sleep, that kills you. Shortly after my older son was born I took a grim satisfaction in reading a newspaper article about how a number of accused suspects had falsely confessed to major crimes under the pressure of being kept awake for long periods of time.

A British magazine, Mother and Baby, recently released survey results that have gotten a lot of play on the internet. The statistic that’s gotten the most attention is the claim that 52 percent of fathers either sleep through their babies cries or pretend to, while mothers only get an average of 4 1/2 hours of sleep a day during the first 4 months of their children’s lives. That 4 1/2 hour figure is pretty horrifying; fortunately, it’s almost certainly bunk. I couldn’t find on their web site any explanation of how the survey was conducted, which almost always means that they had the survey in the magazine and readers sent it back. Well, that means you have a highly selected sample — those parents who are worked up enough about sleep to bother sending back a stupid survey to a magazine.

However, the Sleep Foundation has also recently released its survey results, based on a more scientific sample. This is a long, fairly technical report, but it has some interesting findings:

* 71 percent of all infants (under 12 months) wake up at least once per night, and 21 percent wake up three or more times per night. Both the number of wakenings and the length of time that they’re up decreases as kids get older, but 36 percent of preschoolers are still waking up at least once per night.

* This survey agrees that mothers are by far more likely to respond to a child who needs attention in the night, being the primary respondents for 89% of infants, 85% of toddlers, and 71% of preschoolers.

* They found that the average primary caregiver for a child under 2 months slept 6.2 hours a night, and for all children under 10, 6.8 hours a night. Granted, 6.2 hours broken into 3 2-hour chunks is an order of magnitude less restful than a solid 6 hours, but it’s better than 4 1/2. Most parents think they need about 8 hours a night.

*Almost 3 in 10 parents reported having some symptoms of insomnia at least a few nights a week, with nearly half saying they have these symptoms more often since becoming a parent, and about 20 percent saying less often. This hit home, because I’ve been having trouble sleeping this week. I fall asleep instantly, but when I get woken in the early morning — typically by the boys, but Tuesday it was by the cat puking next to our bed — I can’t get back to sleep. It’s the worst feeling, lying there exhausted, unable to get back to sleep, knowing that my alarm is going to go off in just an hour or so.

* 10 percent of parents of an infant say their child’s sleep habits have caused a moderate or significant amount of stress in their relationship with their spouse/partner — much better than the 60 percent who Mother and Baby claims say that it has created “immense stress.”

* There are some interesting statistics comparing infants/toddlers who are put to bed awake versus those put to bed asleep (eg rocked or carried until they fall asleep), suggesting that those who are put to bed awake sleep better. However, I could make the argument that the causation goes in either direction. I’m an agnostic in the sleep wars (cosleeping v. sleep hygiene v. crying it out, etc), believing in doing what works for you. My older son didn’t sleep through the night until he was about 14 months, my younger slept through the night at 4 months; we didn’t do anything differently.

I realized last night that in my discussion of Dispatches, I never talked about “Frequent Parenting Miles,” Fox’s way of tracking the extra time she spent in child care activities than her husband. She reports how she tracked them over the years (in 1/4 hour increments!) and then “cashed them in” to go to a two-week writer’s retreat.

Some of the reader reviews on Amazon seemed horrified by this concept, thinking it implies a lack of love for her children. I don’t think that, but I do think it’s a pretty lousy idea. Excuse me, ma’m, you do realize that your husband has a full-time job, and you work about 4 hours a day? Even if he spent every waking non-work moment caring for the children, you’d still win this contest. Either change the fundamentals of your life — figure out a way for him to work part-time, or hire more child care — or get over it. (This doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t have gotten to go the writer’s retreat — all of us should have a chance to do the things that make our hearts sing.)

I almost wished I could assign Fox to read Unbending Gender and Kidding Ourselves and to report back. I would have liked some acknowledgement that as long as her husband worked at a career-track academic job, it would have required significant career risk and sacrifice to cut back his hours substantially. I would have liked some recognition that the fact that her work as a writer was part-time, flexible, and unpaid almost guaranteed that she’d do more of the childcare — and not just because of her insecurities.

And I would have liked some acknowledgement that work is, well, work. Instead she writes:

“I’d never bought the argument (nor had he) that he was working as a professor ‘for us’ while my complementary part of the deal was to hold down the homefront. In our house, work was what you did for yourself while housework and childcare were what you did for the family.”

This may be true in her house, but I think it’s a dangerous argument overall. I don’t think earning money should let you off the hook for having a relationship with your children, but I also think women systematically undervalue the role of breadwinning as part of parenting. (Obviously, as a breadwinning mother, I’m a bit sensitive to the issue.) Thus, for example, it’s far more common for women to talk about their guilt at being away from their children for work than about their pride at being able to support their family. Even when men are frustrated at the conflicts they experience between the demands of work and their desire to be present for their families, I don’t hear them using the word “guilt.” (Do you? I’d be interested in other reports from the field.)

Moreover, while I’m glad that Faulkner and her husband both had work that they loved, I think that’s too high a standard for most of us. I think one of the reasons that (at least some) women are opting out of high-powered careers is that those careers were oversold as providing intellectual stimulation, respect, power, and self-actualization. As Alain de Botton wrote in the NY Times over Labor Day weekend,

“The most remarkable feature of the modern workplace has nothing to do with computers, automation or globalization. Rather, it lies in the Western world’s widely held belief that our work should make us happy.

“All societies throughout history have had work right at their center; but ours — particularly America’s — is the first to suggest that it could be something other than a punishment or penance. Ours is the first to imply that a sane human being would want to work even if he wasn’t under financial pressure to do so.”

Today’s book is Dispatches From A Not-So-Perfect Life OR How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child, by Faulkner Fox. (Side note: until I started this project, I had never noticed how all of the nonfiction books I read about parenting have long subtitles.)

This is a hard book for me to review, because it’s such a personal narrative. It’s about Fox’s struggle with Motherhood and her attempt to keep her sense of self in the midst of the fatigue, messiness, and routines of being a mom to small children. She does a good job of identifying the problems she faced, but doesn’t really try to propose solutions or broad analytical frameworks. Her main goal is to provide a lifeline to other women in the same situation, to make them feel less alone, less crazy, less guilty. I wasn’t feeling any of those things before I read the book, so I’m probably not the target audience.

That said, I enjoyed the book. I didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny, as some of the reviews I’d seen suggested, but it’s got a light touch and is well-written. Most of all, I liked the author and enjoyed spending a few hours in her company — if she lived nearby, I’d want to be her friend. She’s mastered the art of raising complaints/concerns about her life and the world without sounding either strident or whiny, which is a rare skill.

The book is divided into thematic chapters, some of which resonated more for me than others. The one that hit home the most for me was on friendship, in which Fox talks about her frustration with her inability to make friends with the mothers around her and the superficial levels of conversation she has with them, and comments that she wants to join an old fashioned consciousness-raising group to talk about motherhood, how it really felt, how it was often joyous but also frustrating. Me too. I found it interesting to see that on her website, Fox has set up discussion boards for women to talk about these issues — I’ve definitely found the internet, especially parenting email lists, my greatest source of support.

Fox thinks that it’s judgmentalism, and the fear of it, that keeps women from talking about these issues. That’s certainly part of it. I agree with her analysis that it’s hard to just put in the hours to make new friends. I also think the playground and coffee shops, those famous mother hang-outs, are terrible places to try to talk, because in neither one are small kids likely to safely self-entertain for long periods of time. My older son is now 3 1/2, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to learn if we have a playdate the kids now actually can play together for 20 minutes or more at a time and the adults can have something resembling a real conversation.

Fox would really like to be able to get together with mothers without the kids, and attributes the difficulties of this to men not doing enough child-rearing. I think she’s totally missing the perspective of the full-time working mom, who rarely feels like she gets enough time with her children. Sure, I’d miss an evening with them occasionally to spend with a good friend — but probably not for the awkward getting-to-know-you stage with someone who might someday be a friend.

Finally — at least in my experience — the biggest obstacle to friendship between full-time working moms and at-home moms is not judgmentalism but scheduling. Working moms want weekend playdates; at-home moms rarely do. For a while I was working a "compressed workweek" meaning I worked 80 hours a payperiod, but over 9 days rather than 10, giving me a weekday off every two weeks. So I’d have my day off and head out to the playground. I had fun with my son, but never really connected with the parents. They all seemed to know each other, and didn’t seem interested in meeting someone new, especially not someone who wasn’t going to be there on a regular basis.

Over on RebelDad’s blog (see September 15), G. wondered whether the American Time Use Survey would allow researchers to examine whether wives of stay-at-home dads got more sleep or did less housework than working moms in dual-earner families.

I’m not sure whether the ATUS will allow for that sort of detailed analysis, but my gut reaction is that researchers wouldn’t pick up a big difference (assuming that they were able to slice the data finely enough so that they only were comparing us to full-time working moms). Based on the not-especially random sample of moms on the MAWDAH (moms at work, dads at home) email list, most of us feel like we’re still doing a lot of the housework. Some even feel like they’d be doing less if their husbands’ worked — because then they could afford to pay someone else to do it. Our husbands do more housework than most men — but a lot less than the average stay-at-home mom.

If childrearing is only marginally valued in our society, housecleaning is definitely not valued. Because gender roles are up for negotiation in a MAWDAH family, there isn’t the fundamental assumption that housework is primariliy the at-home parent’s job.

Plus, most of us have pre-school age children, and the fact is, it’s awfully hard to get much cleaning done while caring for infants and toddlers. (The dads who have only school-age children do seem to do more housework, but there’s not a whole lot of them — if you think SAHDs get funny looks from strangers when they’re caring for preschoolers, wait until the kids are in school.) Most of our families have chosen to have an at-home parent because we value hands-on childrearing, and it’s hard to argue that the kids should be left to watch television so dad can mop the floors.

So how are things divided up in this household? Our motto is the song from Free to Be You And Me: “Your mommy hates housework, and your daddy hates housework, and someday, when you grow up, you can hate housework too.”

My husband does most of the grocery shopping, because I refuse to deal with the insanity of a supermarket on a weekend when he can do it mid week. I do a bit more than half the cooking — and tend to make more elaborate meals when I cook. (My husband doesn’t believe in side vegetables, as far as I can tell.) But I like cooking and miss it when I don’t do it. I do more than half of the laundry, which drives me crazy because it seems so much easier for him to do while he’s home during the day (we have a washer and dryer in the house). We do about equal amounts of vacuuming, sweeping, scrubbing, etc. — but neither of us does very much. He usually takes out the trash, because when it rains our back gate swells from the moisture and I can’t get it to open.

I think I’d do more housework than my husband does if I were the at-home parent — but I also think that’s part of why I wouldn’t be happy as an at-home parent. I’m afraid that I’d always be aware of the undone chores that were hanging over me, whereas he’s apparently quite capable of totally putting them out of mind.

I conclude with a quote from the New York Times Week in Review article on the ATUS study. They cite relationship researcher John Gottman:

“The more men participated in the care of children, housework and daily conversation, he found, the more the wife increased her level of satisfaction and sexual intimacy.”