Working Mother

Archive for July, 2009

This guest blog was written by Amy Vachon, who is co-author of the Equally Shared Parenting blog with her husband, Marc. (Both are pictured here.) Their book, Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents, will be published in January.

In these tough economic times, the news headlines are filled with stories of laid-off men returning home to care for the children as their wives take on new breadwinner roles or are suddenly their families’ sole breadwinners (often with a job previously considered the less “important” of the two). Some men tell of difficulty making this transition – of losing their identities and scrambling to learn skills they had not honed – and others write of new-found joy in their Daddy focus. Some women enjoy their new work status and others speak of resenting the shift in responsibility and loss of time with their kids.

It’s a brave new gender-bending world!

But yet, it isn’t. Even with these role switches becoming more common, the questions our culture asks women are still built on old assumptions. Will she work or stay home? Does she work because she wants to or because she has to? Can she find a job that gives her enough flexibility now that she’s a mother? We don’t ask these questions of men – still. Even as men are being laid off at rates far exceeding women’s lay-offs, our culture still considers the work/life puzzle to be mainly one that a woman must try to solve – either by finding a way to stay in the workforce full-time, downsizing her career, or staying home. All while society expects a man to march on in his usual breadwinning mission…until some outside force (maybe a lay-off, or perhaps the overwhelming logic of a wife with a far bigger paycheck) stops him.

And it’s not only the burden of ‘balancing it all’ that is still given primarily to women. The privilege of opting out of paid work – for those of us who aren’t forced out and can afford this option – also goes to women in our culture. We’ve all heard stories of new mothers who had planned to go back to work after their maternity leaves but then decided to stay home because they couldn’t bear to be away from their babies. While this may sound sweet, can you imagine a new father announcing to his wife that he will be quitting work to stay home, especially if his proclamation goes against their plans? Society gives this option to women, but not to men.

On either side of the issue, the work decision (with all its possible and imperfect results) is still very gendered. While we are beginning to play in earnest with the surface roles that men and women can take on at home – a wonderful step toward full gender equality – the underlying gender assignments are still forceful.

I hope someday that the decision to work or not work, to work part-time or full-time, or to find a flexible career or not, are automatically taken up by both partners as equals. Whether any family’s ultimate decision is traditional, reverse traditional, equally shared parenting, or dual-earner, I hope that it can be made by two people thinking together as a team about what makes both of them – and their children – happiest. That unilateral burden and privilege are not assumed. And that gender is taken out of the equation.

Are we ready for that?

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by Jacquie I’m back (said sheepishly with eyes cast down.) As for why I’ve been MIA for so long, I could use the excuse that I recently gave birth to my first child – a girl named Meghan! O I…
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This entry was written by Shari Storm, chief marketing officer for Verity Credit Union and author of the upcoming book, Motherhood is the New MBA: Using Your Parenting Skills to be a Better Boss.

A colleague was recently telling me about her experience potty training her young son. “I can’t believe I actually told my husband he needs to start keeping the door open when he goes to the bathroom! We are both modest people, so we naturally keep the door shut when we are in there. It dawned on me the other day that my son probably has no idea what the toilet is for!”

Parents understand that they are always on stage and they teach by doing. In her book, If You’ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything, Ann Crittenden points out that, whether we like it or not, we are constantly setting an example. Valerie Hudson, a political science professor at Brigham Young University suggests we tend to pay closer attention to the moral weight of our actions, once we realize we are under the steady gaze of our impressionable children. She calls this “habits of integrity”.

The same is true at the office. As managers, we continually guide our people, not so much by what we say, but by what we do. Our conduct sets the tone for everyone else.

If you want your employees to behave a certain way, you must model that behavior. If you want your employees to have a healthy work-life balance, don’t work until 8 pm every night. Conversely, if you want your team to go above and beyond, don’t spend long lunch hours at the shopping mall or duck out early to golf. If you want your department to get along well with others, don’t speak disparagingly of anyone not present. If you want your staff to own up to their mistakes, be the first to apologize when something goes wrong.

Give careful thought to the kind of team you are working to build. Take every attribute you want to see in others and build your habits of integrity around them.

I love the bumper sticker “Lord, please let me the person my dog thinks I am”. Once I had children, my mantra became, “Lord, please help me be the person I want my children to be”. The same can be said at work. Be the employee you want your staff to be.

Storm blogs on work-life issues at Motherhood is the New MBA.

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Call it the generational vise: canceling Father’s Day with my fast-declining 93-year-old dad because my 11-year-old came down with the flu. Stressful, definitely. Heart-wrenching, yes. Welcome? Of course. Despite all the juggling and hard choices that have to be made about competing demands for care, I’d rather be stuck in this vise than face the void of the alternative.

But it sure isn’t easy. “Caring for an aging and frail parent or disabled relative may be the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life,” says Howard Gleckman, author of the newly published Caring for Our Parents: Inspiring Stories of Families Seeking New Solutions to America’s Most Urgent Health Crisis. “But it can also be the most rewarding.” Gleckman, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and former BusinessWeek senior correspondent, talks about the “silent society” of some 44 million Americans now caring for some 10 million elderly and disabled friends and relatives.

Our family is now a member of that society. Since September I’ve been commuting by car or plane at least once a month to see my ailing father 700 miles away as my brother, mother, and I face end-of-life issues head-on: Through episodes ranging from dehydration to surgery (at his request) to replace a broken hip joint so he wouldn’t be bedridden, my father has defied the odds and tenaciously journeyed through his 62rd year of marriage. Each crisis has weakened him, yet with his humor, logic, and longer-term memory mostly intact, he remains at core the kind-hearted man who raised me.

I consider our family to be among the fortunate: Years ago my father, a white-collar engineer, ensured that his wise investments would allow my parents to spend their later years in a highly rated, soup-to-nuts retirement community. But smart planning still doesn’t prepare a family for the reality of elder care. Decisions made long ago about interventions are no longer abstract—and are revised (no, now, to CPR; yes to antibiotics). Costs that can be pared (a private or shared bathroom?) are weighed; quality of life decisions often trump pocketbook concerns, at least for now. Even a caring staff seasoned in end-of-life care —doctors, nurses, chaplains, social workers, medical assistants—can’t predict how each individual will slowly fail.

Meanwhile, as President Obama takes the lead in an historic debate about reforming health care, questions abound about end-of-life care and its demands on caregivers and resources. Warning that “the weight of 77 million aging Baby Boomers will devastate our nation’s already fragile system for funding this critical day-to-day assistance,” Gleckman provides ideas about how to repair the safety net essential to the nation’s aged and disabled, as well as resources. Organizations like the International Longevity Center take on such notions that putting limits on health care for the very old would save Medicare significant amounts of money. “Limiting acute care for the very old at the end of life would save only a small fraction of the nation’s total health bill,” said the center in a study debunking financial myths about health care for older adults.

Human dignity has no expiration date. That much has become clear to me as I sit in my father’s skilled nursing dining room while policy wonks in Washington debate their abstract questions. To outsiders, the bibbed, napping diners—many are former professionals—may seem lost to life as we know it. Spend meals with them, though, and the small gestures of pride (“Did I spill that?”), compassion (a resident helping another with her wheelchair), and companionship among the residents gently tug you into a world where time is irrelevant and human connections precious. My brother, who lives nearby and visits often, and I slip into the elder zone with ease. Using Styrofoam pool noodles, he engages in mock swords fights with our wheelchair-bound dad—at least for the few minutes that Dad has the strength to play the game.

And what about the generational squeeze? I find habits from not-too-distant child raising come back quickly, such as this past weekend when I was able to reschedule my visit. Singing “Hush Little Baby,” I massaged my father’s thin shoulders as he soaked up the sun on a patio. At lunch as I gently suggested he eat a few more morsels, I ran a mental search of feeding strategies (and rejected “open wide, here comes the airplane!”). But there’s no greater evidence of how welcome this squeeze is than seeing my dad’s thin face, most often nodding these days with his eyes closed, lift up and brighten with a wide smile when he hears my 11-year-old on the phone. “Hello,” he says in a voice muffled with age but suddenly stronger, “And how is my grandson?”

Reader, are you a member of that “silent society” of caregivers? And do you have advice about coping with elder care as well as the generational squeeze?

For information about long-distant caregiving, see the Web site of Caring from a Distance. “Whether you live across-the-world or an hour away,” the site says, “you and your family face special challenges. Where can you find the local resources they require? How can you, family and friends communicate in an emergency? What can you do to help when you visit?” CFAD provides links to information and services.

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More grim news on the obesity front. An annual survey of obesity in America found that adult obesity rates increased in 23 states last year, and did not fall in a single state. Adult obesity now exceeds 25% in 31 states, and two-thirds of adults are considered overweight or obese. Worst of all, the survey also looked at children age 10-17 and found that 30% or higher are overweight or obese in 30 states. 30 states! The rate of obesity in US children has more than tripled since 1980.

Study after study has found that overweight children are more likely to become obese as adults, and obese children are almost certain to remain that way. “There is a huge wave of obese adults coming that will bankrupt us as a nation unless we get this under control now,” said Dr. James S. Marks, senior vice-president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

We might be inclined to blame the schools for filling them up with unhealthy lunches and cutting phys ed programs. But a 2007 study discovered that home may be far more dangerous to our children’s waistlines. Body-mass index (BMI) gains were greater during summer vacation than during the kindergarten and first grade school years. We have met the enemy and it is us, the increasingly-fatter parents.

So what do we do? A New York City councilman, Eric Gioia, has proposed a bill banning fast-food chains from opening new restaurants within one-tenth of a mile of a school. He was inspired by a recent California study that found that when fast food outlets were in a short walking distance to a school the student obesity rate was 5.2% higher than those schools without such easy access.

In fact, according to the BusinessWeek story Alcohol, Then Tobacco. Now Fast Food? , consumer advocates are calling for regulations that would make children off-limits to fast food marketers, much as they are to alcohol and tobacco companies.

The food and restaurant industry needs to be responsible in how they market to children or else the government will step in and then require them to,” says Dr. Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Lots more could be done, according to the researchers who put together the state-by-state survey. Despite the fact that every state has some form of phys ed requirements for its schools, nationwide less than one-third of all children age 6 to 17 engage in vigorous activity for at least 20 minutes a day. Activity rates by state range from a low of 17.6% in Utah to a high of 38.5% in North Carolina. Perhaps we shouldn’t count on the schools, and instead make sure our kids spend some time running around at home, instead of vegging out in front of a screen.

Parents can also agitate for healthier school lunches and a ban on soda in schools, although that won’t do much good if they don’t follow through at home. Does anyone else have suggestions on how to combat the obesity crisis swamping our children, and ourselves? Because we will all pay the cost, economically and physically, if this problem isn’t addressed now.

If you want to see how your state stacks up on the obesity rankings, check out the full report, titled F As In Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing In America, by clicking here or just roll your cursor over this interactive map.

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