Working Mother

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This guest post was written Kristin Sundin Brandt, who is a work-life balance contributor for BusinessBalance.com

I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted. After another year of working, traveling, shuttling kids, housework, home improvements and other commitments, I am pooped, and so is the rest of my family. Which is probably why, when my husband starts talking about our vacation plans, I just want to run upstairs and hide under my bed.

This year, in light of my need to slow down, and my husband’s desire to save some money, we have decided to spend our two-week vacation (mostly) at home. While the idea of limiting our time in the car does sound lovely, there is one major challenge – ensuring we actually vacation, and don’t just spend two weeks at home doing laundry and yelling at our incredibly bored children.

With that in mind, here is what I have planned for our staycation:

• Play tourist for the day – How many of us live near landmarks (natural or manmade) visited by tourists, but never by us? A visit to my state’s office of travel and tourism web site has provided me with a list of fun daytrips including the Butterfly Place in Westford, Old Sturbridge Village (which I haven’t been to since I was a kid) and the Brockton Rox (a minor league baseball team).

• Explore new rail trails – We love riding our bikes on local rail trails, but they are packed with people during the weekend. Our vacation is the perfect opportunity to discover new trails, using TrailLink.com as our guide, while everyone else is at work!

• Take in a movie –There are very few things better than taking in a double-feature at the local drive-in, snuggled up with the kids and my husband on a big blanket. And, since we can sleep in the next morning, we don’t have to wait for the weekend. Visit DriveInMovie.com to find a theater near you.

• Hook up with friends – As much as I enjoy hanging out with my family, there can be too much of a good thing. Fortunately, we have friends who will be on “staycation” during the same weeks as my family, meaning we can work together to have fun and keep everyone amused. It also gives us the opportunity to share childcare so both families can get things done around the house.

• Hit the road – We are planning a three-day trip to a local amusement park, including a stay at a local hotel where we plan on swimming in the pool, renting movies in the room and taking advantage of the available spa services (okay, that last one is for me). We used tripadvisor.com to find a family friendly hotel that was near the park.

• Make a photo album – At the end of each vacation I always make a photo album of our adventures. It’s a fun way to relive each trip, and easier if I do it right away. I’m already working on this year’s book in iPhoto.

Are you taking a staycation this year? If so, what have you got planned?

In addition to co-hosting “ManicMommies,” Kristin Brandt is a full-time account executive and project supervisor with a marketing and advertising agency outside Boston. Kristin blogs for the work/life section of BusinessBalance.com, a web site designed by Embassy Suites Hotels specifically with an eye for how to help business travelers on the road. She is credited with coming up with the name “Manic Mommies,” a term many American moms now use to describe themselves! The mother of two small children, Kristin is the more “computer-savvy” of the Manic Mommies and is responsible for editing the podcast and maintaining the Web site. Kristin is fascinated by any new, shiny gadget and often jokes that her daughter is doomed to inherit a pile of junk jewelry and old technology.

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The health care reform debate seems to have been hijacked in recent days by misinformed people claiming that President Obama and Democratic congressmen want to establish death panels that will kill granny. This is completely false (the New York Times today has an article investigating the genesis of this lie). The anti-reformists base their charges on section 1233 of the House reform bill, which in turn is based on language first proposed by a Republican, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) (although Isakson, who voted against the Senate health reform bill, has since tried to distance himself from said language).

At any rate, what the bill actually proposes is that doctors be reimbursed for counseling dying patients and their families on their different end-of-life options. Medicare doesn’t compensate for such counseling now; as a result, far too many patients are subjected to intrusive, painful and fruitless treatments that may or may not prolong life a few weeks or even days, at considerable physical, emotional and financial cost. The bill also calls on doctors to advise patients on how, if they so choose, to prepare advance directives, often called living wills, that would inform doctors and relatives on how they would like to die.

It would be a good thing if all this ranting about death panels led to more thoughtful family discussions about living wills and the end of life. Most of us likely have stories about needless interventions taken as a loved one lay dying (my stories can be found in a recent Working Parents post, How Would You Ration Health Care?). Doctors are often opposed to such unnecessary treatment–which is why the American Medical Association supports the House provision, as does the AARP. However, physicians often feel forced to do everything possible, whether medically recommended or not, by family members who want to go the extra mile out of guilt or an inability to let go. Some of that guilt might be alleviated if we all had living wills.

One way to start the discussion is to visit Engage with Grace, a web site started by a woman whose sister-in-law suffered an extremely painful death from breast cancer. The site has a one-panel slide you can download that contains questions every family should discuss about how they would like to be treated in the event of a calamitous illness.

There are certainly many people who would want every extraordinary measure possible taken at the end of life. There are others who want to end it all quickly once they learn they have a fatal disease. For example, I read recently that Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who killed John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, shot himself at age 57 shortly after learning he had brain cancer. Most of us, though, lie somewhere in between these two extremes, but does anyone in our family know it?

End of life is a huge issue, both for each individual and family, and for the nation as a whole, which spends enormous amounts on the dying, far more than on wellness or prenatal care. As a Wall St Journal article recently pointed out:

About 5% of Medicare beneficiaries die each year, according to a 2001 study published in Health Affairs. But spending during the last year of life accounted for 27.4% of total Medicare spending, the report found…The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research center, found that the government could save $90.8 billion over 10 years by better managing end-of-life care. The savings would result from training aimed at discouraging doctors from providing care simply because they would get paid for it, and from having teams at hospitals help terminally ill patients manage their pain once they chose to stop treatment, among other things. The institute’s report, issued last month, concluded that much end-of-life spending isn’t sought by patients and goes against their families’ expressed preferences.

What do you think? Have you discussed your end of life wishes with your family? Do you have a living will? And would you appreciate counseling from a physician on these issues?

If you’d like to prepare an advance directive, this site provides state-specific downloadable forms, and the AMA web site contains more information on directives.

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Even before I brushed my teeth today, I logged on to my computer around 7:30 a.m. First I checked email, then Facebook, and then I looked at my Twitter account.

When I saw fellow Working Parents blogger Mauro Vaisman’s Facebook status (posted from Twitter), it seemed utterly apropos.

New morning routine: check Twitter, FB, email–all before breakfast

I didn’t realize until later that Mauro was referring to today’s New York Times front-page article about the new morning routines of families: “Coffee Can Wait. Day’s First Stop Is Online.” (I save reading the actual paper versions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for my morning subway commute.)

While the article is light on actual statistics and academic studies about the impact of social media on family time, it says “Internet companies that used to watch traffic levels rise only when people booted up at work now see the uptick much earlier.”

Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyzes Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 a.m. on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. “It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 a.m,” said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist. Akamai, which helps sites like Facebook and Amazon keep up with visitor demand, says traffic takes off even earlier, at around 6 a.m. on the East Coast. Verizon Wireless reported the number of text messages sent between 7 and 10 a.m. jumped by 50 percent in July, compared with a year earlier.

Indeed, I too have fallen victim to the morning social networking time suck. This morning, for example, I planned to spend just a few minutes in front of the computer in our home office. Ha. When I checked the time again, it was almost 8 a.m. My son was still sleeping, but, had he been awake, I may or may not have continued my morning social media “workout” as he watched television in the other room.

What does the constant barrage of email, texting, Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media mean for work-life balance? In today’s Wall Street Journal, another article examines whether or not emailing and returning work calls by cellphone during non-work hours counts as “work.”

To cope with technology infringing on family time, some families are banning laptops and cellphones at meals. What’s happening in your household? Has technology been eating into your family gatherings? Have you set any new media rules for your family?

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Stay-at-home moms have more to worry about than the potential loss of their husbands’ income during this recession. Over 1.4 million women have lost their health insurance since the economic downturn started in December 2007, and 71% of them lost coverage because their husbands lost their jobs, and their family benefits. Those numbers come for a new study issued by the Democratic members of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC).

The weak job market has been particularly rough on single mothers, according to the survey. The number of unemployed female heads of household has increased 53% over the past twelve months, and 121,000 of their children lost health insurance as a result.

Then there are the women between the ages of 55 and 64 who lost their health insurance benefits because of their older husbands’ transition from employer-sponsored coverage to Medicare. The JEC said 75% of these women reported delaying filling prescriptions or taking fewer medications than prescribed because of cost.

On top of all that, the health consequences of inadequate insurance coverage are more severe for women than for men. The committee reports that 27% of women had health problems requiring medical attention but were not able to see a doctor, compared to 21% of men.

The report was released as part of the Democratic campaign to rally the public behind comprehensive health care reform. As JEC member Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) said:

Our current health system—the most expensive in the world—needs urgent surgery to insure women, especially those most grievously affected by the recession, receive equal care. For far too many women and their families, quality, affordable health care is out of reach. More than two out of every five low income women today lack health care insurance. With urgent warnings about a renewal of swine flu this fall and steep declines threatening even deeper cuts in state Medicaid funding, it is critical for us to act.

What would happen to your family’s insurance coverage if one spouse lost their job, or worse yet, both? How would you cope?

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The New York Times set off a minor tempest in the blogosphere with an interview a week ago with Carol Smith, senior vice president and chief brand officer for the Elle Group, publisher of the fashion magazine Elle. The headline: No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers. You can imagine the reaction.

The article was part of a regular Sunday feature, The Corner Office, in which some exec spills the secrets to their success in a question and answer format. Author Adam Bryant at one point asks Smith to share her observations on men vs women as managers. Her response:

In my experience, female bosses tend to be better managers, better advisers, mentors, rational thinkers. Men love to hear themselves talk. I’m so generalizing. I know I am. But in a couple of places I’ve worked, I would often say, “Call me 15 minutes after the meeting starts and then I’ll come,” because I will have missed all the football. I will have missed all the “what I did on the golf course.” I will miss the four jokes, and I can get into the meeting when it’s starting.

Have to admit, loved the part about coming into the meeting 15 minutes late so she can miss the sports talk and the four jokes.

The interview was on the Times web site’s most-read list for over a week, and garnered more than 300 comments. The paper revisited the issue this past Sunday in its Room For Debate blog, asking several experts about the differences between men and women as managers. Alice Eagly, chairman of the department of social psychology at Northwestern University, warned about overgeneralizing based on gender, but then made this observation:

Women are less “bossy,” probably because people dislike bossy women even more than bossy men. As a result, female managers are more collaborative and democratic than male managers. Second, compared with men, women use a more positive approach by encouraging and urging others rather than a negative approach of scolding and reprimanding them. Third, women attend more to the individuals they work with, by mentoring them and taking their particular situations into account.
Finally, there is the matter of getting the job done efficiently. Most managers, male and female, get their work done in a timely way, but some do not. When you find one of those barely functioning managers — that is, someone who avoids solving problems and just doesn’t get the job done, that person is more likely to be a man than a woman. Why? Perhaps because a woman would be fired or demoted more quickly for poor managing.

Over at the web site for Workforce Management, editor John Hollon laments the whole subject, saying

In my long career, I’ve discovered only one clear truth about men and women as managers. It’s this: You simply can’t make a blanket judgment about the quality of managers by their gender. Anyone who tries to do so is foolish and shortsighted, and perhaps hasn’t worked for enough different kinds of managers—male or female—to figure that out.

So what do you think? Do women make better managers? Or are some of them just too outspoken?

For more reactions, check out The Downtown Women’s Club, the blog by CNN’s Jack Cafferty, Jezebel (which argues that women also make better corporate whistleblowers) and Feministing.

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The Cash for Clunkers program continues to entice American consumers to trade in their gas guzzlers, despite ongoing confusion about rules and rebates.

As BusinessWeek’s David Kiley reports in this video, the No. 1 traded car is Ford’s (F) Ford Explorer, which got around 17 miles per gallon when new in the 1990s. The No. 1 car it is traded for? Ford’s svelte Ford Focus sedan—which gets up to 35 miles per gallon, but is not exactly a big family friendly set of wheels. (I can’t imagine carpooling my son and his friends in it.)

My friends who live in the suburbs cart around their kids in SUVs with trunks that are larger than my friend Mary’s first New York City apartment. (Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but these cars are bigger than plenty of New York City kitchens.) I’m curious whether the Cash for Clunkers program is motivating families in suburbia to dump their ginormous Chevy Suburbans, still billed as the car that “fills the big needs of big families.” (Thus, explaining why they called it Suburban in the first place!)

What about mini-vans? Are families with several kids shedding them for smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles? (None of the top 10 cars bought through the Cash for Clunkers program are pick ups or SUVs, incidentally.)

Working Parents: Have you participated in the Cash for Clunkers program? What kind of car did you trade in? And what kind of automobile did you trade it for? Most important, how does it meet your family’s needs?

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Are you more likely to shop for clothes and other items during tax free holidays?

Given the economy, it seems like tax free holidays are less likely to lure consumers to the mall. For the past five years, shoppers in Massachusetts, for example, have enjoyed a weekend-long holiday from state sales tax every August. But this year, the break is gone due to budget shortfalls. In fact, shoppers will see state sales taxes jump from 5% to 6.2% on August 1.

Lucky shoppers in Georgia, meanwhile, are gearing up for their own tax holiday which exempts taxes on school supplies, clothing and personal computers.

In addition, Mississippi residents are getting a taste of tax free shopping for the first time. They won’t have to pay the usual 7% sales tax on clothing and shoes priced under $100 this weekend. (Accessories, such as backpacks and jewelry don’t qualify for the tax exemption.)

Most tax free holidays are tied to the back-to-school shopping season. In Texas, consumers can stock up clothing on without paying state and local sales taxes on August 21 to August 23.

Of course, cash-strapped tax “evaders” aren’t expected to spend as much on back-to-school items this fall. According to a new survey just released by the National Retail Federation, in conjunction with consumer habits research firm Big Research, spending on school supplies is set to drop this year. The average family with students in grades K-12, the survey states, is expected to spend $548.72 on school merchandise — a decline of 7.7% from 2008.

I live in an geographic area with a lot of, dare I say it?, taxing choices. There is no sales tax in New York City for most clothing items under $100. But if you are buying something more expensive, it’s a smart move to head to New Jersey where there is no sales tax on clothes.

All told, at 16 states will have tax free holidays this year. SmartMoney has created an excellent guide to state tax free holidays with a list of what is exempt.

How much consideration do you give to taxes when you are doing your back-to-school shopping?

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As President Barack Obama and Congress wrestle with the difficult details of health care reform, various politicians and pundits warn that no legislation will pass unless voters first can understand “What’s In It for Me?” The “me,” of course, is the majority of Americans who already have some form of insurance and are generally satisfied with their care. It is not the 47 million uninsured, who evidently do not have enough electoral clout to matter. But I wonder–are we Americans really so cold-hearted that self-interest is all that matters when it comes to national policy?

As parents, most of us teach our children from their earliest years about empathy, about considering the feelings and needs of others. We urge them to donate at church, volunteer in the community, raise money for their school, join sports team where the whole is more important than the individual. Once they become voters, are they supposed to forget all that?

As Washington Post colmunist Ezra Klein asks, What Happened To The Moral Case For Health Care? The same could be asked about the moral case for climate change regulation, immigration reform, tax policy, education financing and any number of other public issues.

I’d like to believe the talking heads on TV, the pollsters and the politicians, are underestimating the American spirit. After all, the moral case certainly carries weight in every other nation; Why not here? At the moment I’m reading The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care, by T.R. Reid, an excellent book that I will soon review for BusinessWeek. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, investigates health care systems around the world in an effort to understand why other nations have better medical outcomes for half the cost of the U.S. All the advanced countries he visits have universal health care in some form or another–that is, every resident is guaranteed access to affordable, high quality medical treatment. The one exception, of course, is the U.S.

One common denominator he found in all the countries he visited is that there is a sense of shared responsibility. Here’s a French professor on the subject:

“The solidarity principle,” explains Professor Rodwin, “requires mutual aid and cooperation among the sick and the well, the inactive and the active, the poor and the wealthy, and insists on financing health insurance on the basis of ability to pay, not actuarial risk.”

Or listen to Reid’s conclusions about Taiwan and Switzerland, two countries that only in the last 20 years instituted universal health care (proving that systems can change even in the me-decades of the late 20th century):

Both countries decided that society has an ethical obligation — as a matter of justice, of fairness, of solidarity — to assure everybody has access to medical care when it’s needed. The advocates of reform in both countries clarified and emphasized that moral issue much more than the nuts and bolts of the proposed reform plans. As a result, the national debate was waged around ideals like “equal treatment for everybody,” “we’re all in this together,” and “fundamental rights” rather than on the commercial implications for the health care industry.

For a window into the American approach, Reid includes a case study of Nikki White, a U.S. taxpayer who was diagnosed with lupus shortly after she graduated from college. Though a serious chronic disorder of the immune system, lupus can be managed with drugs, but they are costly. But once she was diagnosed she lost the health insurance she had gotten through her new job, and Nikki wasn’t poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. She could not afford all the drugs, tests and doctor appointments she needed and as a result suffered a seizure due to kidney failure. The emergency room had to treat her under federal law, and over the next 10 weeks she underwent 25 operations in an attempt to undo the damage of delayed medical care. It was too late, and she died in 2006 at age 32. “Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” her doctor told Reid. “Nikki died from complications of the failing American health care system.”

A French primary care doctor said of her country’s health care system, “Everybody must have equal right to the best medical treatment we can provide…Surely that is the basic rule of health care in every country.” Surely, but why not here?
Harold Pollack, a University of Chicago professor, wonders if the debate should be reframed, in The New Republic blog The Treatment:

In conceding ground to a dry policy discourse that downplays the moral urgency of collective obligation, we unilaterally surrender some of the best moral and political arguments for health reform. It’s a genuine dilemma. We must legislate in the society we actually have, not in the society as we wish it to be. So we present a rather cold-hearted calculus to sell humane policies. This isn’t a stupid calculation, but I’m starting to think it is the wrong approach.

What do you think? Do we really only care about what’s in it for me? Do the lessons we teach our children somehow disappear as we grow up?
And if not, how do we chnage the debate to one of shared responsibility?

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My daughter has swine flu. That we can deal with. But keeping a 16-year-old isolated for seven days and making sure the rest of our family doesn’t get it? Now that’s a challenge. Amid new reports that swine flu could eventually affect 40% of Americans if vaccine campaigns and efforts to slow it fail, families like mine are finding out firsthand what it takes to slow the spread of the highly contagious H1N1 virus. Armed with facemasks, wipes, latex gloves, and prophylactic doses of Tamiflu –even living apart until my daughter recovers—the four of us are holding our breaths that we’ll be contagion-free in time for a big family wedding in a week. With swine flu, it seems, that’s no sure bet.

Like scores of summer programs across the country this year, my daughter’s three-week summer session on Duke University’s East Campus took the extra precaution of closing early because of an outbreak of the virus. When I got the call to come get her (I was visiting my parents’ retirement community, where my frail dad is in skilled care), she was fine, just sad to be saying goodbye to new friends, a stimulating class, and campus rituals she’d been anticipating. Scrambling to make arrangements for my 11-year-old (and with my husband back in New Jersey working), I made the 4-hour drive to Durham the next day. Midway through the trip she called—she was achy, should she go to the office, where they would quarantine her? Yes, get checked out, I told her. She called back in tears. “My temperature is 99.3.”

By the time I arrived an hour later, my daughter’s temperature had climbed a degree. When she stepped out of the quarantine room, her skin clearly clammy, her eyes sad above her facemask, I stopped, at a loss. Do I hug her and hold her close, like I always do when she needs comforting, or do I keep my distance and protect myself, the only caregiver for both my kids on this trip? Hours later, I still regretted not rushing up to hug her. I kept my distance—though not for long. Wearing a mask offered by the office, I finally held her. As we made our way to the van, she skirted the clumps of students hugging goodbye, saying her farewells through the mask.

Hundreds of miles from our pediatrician, and fearing the risks to my elderly parents, I arranged an appointment for her at Duke’s student health center. An hour later, we walked out with the verdict that she had “all the classic signs of swine flu,” a prescription for Tamiflu, a promise of test results, and orders to keep her in isolation for seven days, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. In close quarters in the minivan on the way back, she went through a box of tissues while I ran through all the possible permutations of isolation. Throwing caution to the wind, I suppose, I drove without the facemask—how could we sing the lyrics of Hair together through the masks? But she was too sick to sing, and preferred softer music. And I forgot about the mask.

Trying to minimize the chance that anyone else will get sick, we’ve decided not to return home right away (a 12-hour road trip can’t be good for recovery, much less for reducing exposure to the virus; do you expose travelers at a rest stop to a masked kid with swine flu? In fact, the CDC recommends patients avoid travel.). We’re fortunate: We have our own quarantine house, the original homestead on my brother’s Blue Ridge acreage where we stay when we visit. My brother has offered to keep my son at his house while we remain isolated. We disinfect door handles, phones, and other surfaces; I wear a mask when I briefly see my brother or his wife, and am taking Tamiflu. As long as I don’t develop symptoms, it should be fine for me to be with the rest of my family, but we remain afraid I could transmit the virus to others. With frail, elderly parents, we feel we can’t be too cautious, so for now I’m remaining isolated with my daughter. But are we going too far? As a mother, should I be caring solely for the sick child while letting other family members care for the healthy one?

The highly contagious nature of the H1N1 virus makes it a challenge our family has never faced. Already I’ve violated one of the CDC’s recommendations for caretakers: “Avoid close contact (less than about 6 feet away) with the sick person as much as possible.” Maybe I should have worn that mask in the minivan after all—though time will soon tell. Readers, any suggestions?

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It’s unofficially eldercare week here at Working Parents. This guest post is written by Julie Davis, the managing editor at Parentgiving.com, a web resource for boomers and their aging parents.

They sat you down for the talk when you were a kid. Now it’s time to return the favor.

Unfortunately, many of us would rather talk about sex with mom and dad than the topic of this conversation: their plans for managing the last act of their lives—where they hope to live, who will care for them if they can’t take care of their daily needs, how they will pay for assisted living if they are unable to stay in their home.

These are not easy questions to ask. The more independent-minded your parents, the less comfortable they might feel sharing this information with you. And your interest may be misinterpreted as butting in, especially if you show up with all the answers.

You may not even be ready for the talk yourself. Some of us still think of our parents as there to take care of us in a crisis and haven’t yet wrapped our minds around to the possibility of our having to care for them. I certainly haven’t. When, in the course of three months, I had to have emergency surgery, replace our home’s water well pump, learned our dog had to have a tumor removed along with the toe it was growing on and had our daughter come back from college for a summer internship only to find out she had to have all four wisdom teeth out immediately, I cried uncle (except it sounded more like “Daddy”).

Another reason this conversation is hard to have is because it forces everyone involved to acknowledge that there are end-of-life issues to address, the possibility of a disabling illness and the certainty of death. As much as we wish it for ourselves and for our parents, we won’t all be blessed with a long healthy life during which we stay relatively functional until the day when we peacefully pass away in our sleep, right next to the envelope with all the necessary documents our heirs will need to settle our estate which, in this perfect scenario, won’t have been decimated by home health care bills or years at a nursing home.

Compounding the awkwardness, the best time to sit down and learn about your parents’ wishes and the provisions they might have made is when it feels the most inopportune: when everything is fine, when you think, “Knock on wood, they’re doing great—I’m not going to jinx it.” The worst time is when the inevitable crisis happens and you are the proverbial deer in the headlights. A crisis comes in many shapes and sizes, from an Alzheimer’s diagnosis to the call from a hospital admitting manager telling you your parent is in intensive care following a stroke, a fall, a heart attack.

Parentgiving.com was started because the founders had crises with parents and had to make snap decisions. They couldn’t easily find all the resources they needed in that instant. And when you’re operating in panic mode you don’t have the luxury of being sure you evaluated all the options and made all the best decisions.

Are your parents old enough for the talk? The short answer is, if you’re old enough to be reading this, they’re old enough for this kind of conversation. And there are compelling reasons to talk about future issues now. The sooner a plan is in place, the more time there is to figure out the costs and how to fund it. The reality is most people have no idea just how expensive living longer is.

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