Why Parents Think They Can't Stay Home
Keisling, Phillip
Why Parents Think They Can't Stay Home Phillip Keisling "A lot of time I just have this helpless feeling. I'm downtown in my office and I have to be there no matter what, from 8 in the morning...
...Why do so many parents rely on care they themselves consider a second-best choice...
...The law firm that insists upon the career timetable could simply say that the seven years will not include three years spent at home with the child...
...This is instead addressed to those who already question that assumption, who think that the sensational headlines of late only mask deeper, more common problems with day care, who believe it's preferable for at least one parent to be at home during a child's early years...
...The heightened expectations of young parents have been described as well as anyone by Kay Kouzma, whose 1978 book, Prime Time Parenting, popularized the notion of "quality time...
...These older workers recall their sacrifices and the dues they've paid...
...The kids have any feeling for family life, the old-timers are too scared a jeopardizing their pensions to anything ." -A 32-year-old factory worker comment his unsuccessful efforts to rearrange hi schedule so he and his wife can spenc time with their children...
...Isn't it pathetic for anyone to be embarrassed to say, "I'm staying at home with my child...
...And if each parent spends three years at home, their child can stay at home until it is time for school...
...The average family buys and borrows a great deal more than its 1957 counterpart...
...But for a good many others— including a large part of the young professional and managerial classes—need is less clear...
...An employment recruiter, recently qoted in The Wall Street Journal The really ambitious, coming women get back within two weeks one month...
...Today, even though households are smaller, the figure is nearly 1,600...
...But there are other reasons, ones that involve attitudes, values, and the customs of our culture with regard to work...
...To stay at home for these few years does not mean that parents have to sacrifice the kind of dedication to their work that will make them hard chargers the rest of their lives...
...Bu union won't change things are here, either...
...When asked at Manhattai Georgetown cocktail parties it is best answ with "I write for the New Yorker" or "I' foreign service officer," or "I'm with Sullivan Cromwell ." To respond instead by saying, a mother" or "I'm a father" or "I'm taking s time off to be with my children" is likely to I the same conversation-stopping effect as "I b ed a 245 the other night...
...They can challenge the managers and unions who oppose part-time work, job-sharing, and working at home...
...And the loss of time from the job can be further reduced by work that is parttime or can be done at home...
...A second problem is The Fraternity Ha Syndrome...
...Such people are talking about maintaining a level of consumption to which they have become accustomed...
...When we take a v look around and who do I Teenage kids like I was when 1 st here, and old men...
...This might mean a loss of income, but when what's at stake is keeping the 1979 Ford instead of buying a new BMW, then parents simply have to decide what is more important—the child or the new car...
...Does the money young people need really include all that is necessary "to buy everything it took parents a lifetime to accumulate...
...Sometimes the deadline exists onl the mind of the ladder-climber, but emplc themselves can also create the problem...
...Up-and-coming lawyers, doctors, porate managers, and others are expected to A their hardest during the years from 21 to 35same years most of them have children...
...In his recent book, The Joyless Economy, economist Tibor Scitovsky observed that while the hours of work had "consistently decreased" for the workforce as a whole in the past half-century, the work week of managers and professionals had "steadily risen ." In Western countries such as the U.S., Austria, and West Germany, Scitovsky discovered, the work week of such employees was up to 50 percent longer than the 40-hour week of ordinary workers...
...They can support efforts to drastically overhaul governmentassistance programs so that single parents and the working poor, who don't now have the freedom of choice, would be able to remain at home...
...Most accounts of the daycontroversy carry a sentence like this: "TI parents must work out of economic necessi For many couples, the excuse is real...
...Free the residents These, then, are five important reasons that people won't stay at home with their children: Pretend Work, The Fraternity Hazing Syndrome, The Career Timetable, What Do You Do, and We Need the Money...
...Betty Lehane Ha a business consultant on why f executives should be short their mo "Try telling Goodyear about my ly...
...In urging the notion on parents in their twenties and thirties, Kouzma observes that "This is the time to finish school, to establish a career, to mortgage a home, to keep up with the Joneses, to buy everything it took parents a lifetime to accumulate...
...That eyebrow-arching question, "And M Do You Do...
...This concept, eagerly embraced by millions of working parents, holds that what really matters is not how much time parents spend with their young children, but the quality of the contact, even if it's only an hour a day...
...Rare is the day that has eight hours of real work in it...
...They are not talking about need...
...for not staying at home, they can then help to remove the obstacles that now make this step difficult...
...Yet if anything, the current trend among professional and managerial workers is toward spending more hours at the office...
...Once we have done that, we can work for the kinds of public policies that affirm our best instincts rather than undermine them...
...Asso, lawyers work weekends and late into the even to meet their quota of billable hours...
...Most people who work in large organizations, whether private or public, know that inordinate periods of their working days are filled with dead time— reading the paper, writing pointless memoranda, attending dull meetings, performing useless research, indulging in idle speculation about office politics...
...Phillip Keisling is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...The first such obstacle that thwarts parents who'd prefer to share child-rearing responsibilities at home can be called Pretend Work...
...Things our parents never dreamed of—a home computer, Betamax, Cuisinart, or private school for the children—are now viewed as necessities by many young parents...
...If a hundred or so senior physicians who have admitting privileges at the typical hospital would work nights just two or three times a year, the brutalization of residents could be halted...
...I'm downtown in my office and I have to be there no matter what, from 8 in the morning to 6 at night...
...The number of part-time jobs would increase enormously if we applied the notion of "quality time' to the workplace instead of to the child, and eliminated Pretend Work from our corporate and government bureaucracies...
...The elimination of the other excuses is well within our individual and collective ingenuity...
...Here we find couples who buy a BMW with fourchannel sound not because they really need a car that costs that much, but because of what the car says about their intelligence and taste...
...I'm one voi don't count...
...Consider, for example, the Fraternity Hazing Syndrome...
...There isn't a male I know of in an executive position who would accept raising kids as a legitimate excuse for not working for three years...
...It is addressed, most especially, to parents who believe all this.—yet turn to day care nonetheless...
...One re study of working wives, for example, found nearly one-third had husbands making less t $10,000 per year...
...Once parents strip away all the phony excuses...
...A be ping doctor will be on call at the local hos] every third or fourth night...
...if they have two, spaced a year apart, it's three and a half years—still less than most of us spend in college...
...is another powerful deterren staying at home...
...A close cousin to the Fraternity Hazing drome is The Career Timetable, which dice that people must race the clock to attain a ca goal by a certain age or within a fixed nun of years...
...Consumer debt has risen 20-fold to $350 billion...
...You think they give a shit...
...they loo their working lives now as Miller Time...
...younger colleagues to perform much of the I work...
...The figure actually understates the considerable rise in living standards...
...Even by one widely accepted standard of diminished expectations—the difficulty young couples face in buying their first home—it's worth noting that in 1950 the average new home contained about 900 square feet of space...
...We Need the Money is probably the most c mon explanation working parents give for staying at home...
...In 1983, the average income for families in the 25-to-34 age bracket was $22,776, according to the Census Bureau-25 percent higher in real terms than in 1957...
...I count on the kids being responsible and I-well, I quake...
...From James L Who 14411 Raise the Ch Many people are convocted that improved day care is the best-fi not the only—answer for working parents with pre-school children...
...Elaine Herman, quoted in New York nmagazine...
...Spending three years or so at home a child amounts to career suicide...
...lags far behind the rest of the industrialized world in providing such basic accommodations for working parents...
...If a couple has one child, three years each at most is all that is involved...
...What follows will not change their minds...
...A few statistics suggest why the rationale of "economic necessity" deserves a closer look...
...They can be proud to be parents instead of keeping up appearances by doing work that is less important and that doesn't satisfy them to begin with...
...We can, in short, refuse to consent...
...The U.S...
...There are often practical reasons: money, the absence of part-time jobs and opportunities to work at home, the unwillingness of most employers to provide paid maternity/paternity leave...
...What is most striking about these excuses is their collective absurdity for most middle- and upper-class people...
...Many firms, for example, require a young associal make partner by, say, his or her seventh yea the job...
...Yet by the time I children reach adolescence (when typically are demanding money rather than time, an fact may well be hoping that their parents get lost), these same professionals have real their futures and often begin to relax, relyin...
Vol. 16 • December 1984 • No. 11
