Brown Bagger
This section is set up to provide a ready-made Brown Bag Session for you to use with employees and/or managers. Use as is, or adapt this information for a general employee group. You may reproduce as many copies as needed.
Sharing Parenting and Making it Work t’s easy to talk about the importance of balancing work and family, but such “balance” is a myth for many families, especially for women. The fact is, most women eventually move into the “executive” ranks of parenting, regardless of whether they join the 45% of new mothers who stay at home, or the 55% employed outside the home. More than 60% of the men in the dual-income households that sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied performed between zero and 30% of the child care and household duties. Scores of other studies have yielded similar findings — men do more than they used to at home, but they still do far less than women. In fact, Hochschild found that, compared to their husbands, employed mothers work the equivalent of a “second shift” attending to child care and household responsibilities. The so-called “mommy trap” snares a mother whenever: • She takes on parenting or household responsibilities that result in more unpaid work, and has less leisure and personal time than she would like, particularly compared to her husband. • She does nothing to change the situation beyond expressing anger, bitterness, and resignation. • Inherited preconceptions prevent her and her family from finding a solution to their problem — including those about what men and women can and should do, and how child and household care should be performed.
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The term “mommy trap” should not be construed as undermining the importance of parenting. Far from it! Rather, it describes a failure to understand the wide range of options available to modern parents. It Takes Two Have you ever heard this one? “I don’t know how she does it. It’s much harder to take care of February 2008
the kids than it is to work. I could never do it as well as she does.” Of course women are better at tending to child and home — they’ve had all the practice! Women’s perceived superiority in childrearing turns out to be largely a matter of environment. Our current division of parental labor doesn’t allow men to see how good they can get at taking care of children. Most dads stay home for a couple of days to maybe a week after a baby is born, and then go back to their jobs. This lack of involvement occurs as a result of the way we structure our lives. But it doesn’t have to work that way — take the example of Marjorie and Jake Pappas. Jake lost his job during the eighth month of Marjorie’s pregnancy, and her salary alone would not pay for both their mortgage payment and daycare. They decided Jake would stay home with their baby, at least until he found a new job. After some initial “bumps in the road,” Jake started to master baby care. In fact, Jake took great pleasure in seeing that baby Benjamin needed and enjoyed him. Marjorie admitted that Jake developed more parenting skills than she ever imagined he would. This is no fluke. A study by the Yale University Study Center demonstrated that fathers who are given the chance to nurture have similar experiences. Over the course of 10 years, the study followed 18 families in which fathers served as the primary parent or shared child care with their wives. Some of the dads took on the role voluntarily, others reluctantly. In both cases, all of the fathers formed deep attachments with their children. Additional results revealed that: • Children with dads actively involved during the first eight weeks of life manage stress better as they get older. • Children who receive quality and quantity attention from two parents are more independent, secure, and develop more problemsolving, personal, and social skills than the norm. EA Report Brown Bagger 1