President's Perspective - February Voice 2023

Kindness and children's Motrin welcomed

On-going pandemic woes run deep - for everyone

As I sit at my computer in my basement writing this article—about 15 days past deadline and pushing the printing deadline beyond reason—my four-year old daughter is upstairs recovering (well) from a crown on her tooth, my 20-monthold is alternating between crying and laughing as he fights a 101+ fever and my husband, who left work early to pick up my sick son while I was on a work call in the preschool parking lot to pick up my daughter, is keeping the house running.

It’s January 26. In the past 26 days, we’ve dealt with three days of unexpected daycare closures, eye appointments in Madison for both kids (which involved a 20-minute procedure during which my 20-month-old ugly cried the entire time), a scratched cornea involving one immediate care and two eye doctor visits (me this time!), strep throat, family dentist appointments, two follow-up dentist appointments, now a fever as my husband starts to come down with a cold, and general bleh-ness for a few days in me. All the while, there’s a Children’s Motrin & Children’s Tylenol shortage nationwide.

While this month’s insanity has been a bit excessive, it’s really not that out of the ordinary for working parents these days. I’m sure that those in the trenches of parenthood right now reading this are nodding their heads thinking “us, too.”

It’s easy to blame all of this on COVID—and the pandemic SHOULD get its fair share of the blame. But the demands on working caregivers have been intense for a long time now. Our society is built around the idea that today, most households are dual-income households meaning those with children need to find outside care. Daycare availability and affordability was an issue before the pandemic but is even more of a crisis now. You're already behind the eight-ball if you aren’t on a daycare waitlist quite early in your pregnancy. Preschool wait lists (assuming you can figure out transportation) is over a year long. School days end well before the working day ends, but after-school care can be difficult to find. Full-time summer camps fill up extremely fast leaving working parents scrambling for options.

On the other side of the spectrum, many working professionals are caring for elderly parents who need medical assistance. Between doctor appointments and in-home nursing care shortages, the scheduling demands can be just as intense as they are for me and my young family.

While sitting at Meg’s Daily Grind trying to push out a good amount of work before an important 10 a.m. meeting, I got a call that my daughter needed to be picked up from daycare and tested for strep. I hung up the phone and just started to cry—right there in the coffee shop, into my smoothie. I had just returned from having to take extra days off from work over the holidays due to daycare closures, followed by more days of unexpected closures. I had finally gotten back into the groove and had just a few moments to do actual work, and the call left me feeling defeated and destroyed. Luckily, my mother-in-law happened to be in town (helping watch the kids while daycare was closed) and offered to stay for three more days to help out. She got strep, but she saved our week, and I can’t thank her enough.

What does any of this have to do with the business community? Well, in some ways, not much. And in other ways, everything. Working caregivers are faced with record levels of illness in children and record shortages of skilled help for adults. Our systems don’t align with reality. Our 24/7 available work culture is burning us out. And our community needs healthy, loved, read-to, resilient kids to grow into the community we want to be.

I don’t have any big answers right now, but I do have this suggestion:

The days are cold. People are tired. Kids are sick. And everyone is dealing with some sort of something. If you see a mom crying into her smoothie at Meg’s or an employee taking another sick day for her kids' never-ending illness, don’t stare or scoff. Just help her through it the best way you can. Maybe it’s picking up some Children’s Motrin for her that you happen to see during your weekly grocery trip. Maybe it’s gladly rescheduling a meeting for another day to give her a little breathing room. Maybe it’s moving meetings to 8 a.m. instead of 7:30 a.m. to help a dad make school drop off or allow an employee to wait for their in-home caregiver to arrive before they must leave for work. Or maybe it’s just saying, “Hey, we know you’re doing the best you can, and we appreciate that. This too shall pass.” And then mean it. Turns out, kindness goes almost as far as a highly sought-after bottle of Children’s Motrin.