and just in case you didn’t see these and are interested:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/columnists/ct-balancing-act-sun-1004-20150929-column.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opinion/sunday/a-toxic-work-world.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/
This thread is an effort not to derail recent threads by a couple of young women, both of whom have me thinking about lots of different ideas, many of them connected in one way or another to Anne Marie Slaughter’s recent writings about family/work balance. One idea Slaughter proposes is thinking about life stages, and that at some stages you may be a competitor, but at other stages a caregiver. In an ideal world these labels are gender neutral, but in the real world women are the only ones giving birth so that complicates the discussion somewhat. Some individuals (regardless of gender) don’t want children at all; some adopt and obviously both are just as valid choices as giving birth. But a woman who desires and plans to give birth, probably doesn’t want to put it off too late. Some of us have kids making these work/life decisions at the moment. A same age couple is usually at the same career stage of being competitors. If one scales back to become the caregiver, that one will most likely lose career traction. Lots of young women are choosing not to have children and birth rates are down. One of my favorite posters, before disappearing last winter, said her own daughter wasn’t sure she could “afford” children. I understood this to mean not just the immediate financial cost but the long term career ramifications.
CaliCash’s thread, about age differences in couples, reminded me of a friend who never married until he was in his mid/late 40s, and then became a first time father at around 50. His wife is at least ten years younger. They met because they are in the same field. It is her first marriage and child as well. This friend had always been very career driven and is really at the top of his field. It was a surprise to many when he completely scaled back his professional pursuits after becoming a father. He became the caregiver and this enabled his wife to be the competitor and potentially achieve the same level of professional success and recognition. He told me he felt at a point in his career it was possible take a long break and just focus primarily on his child. And he was loving it! The significant age difference worked very well for this couple, in terms of Slaughter’s life stages.
Then I started thinking about a seven to ten year age gap in younger couples and how it might benefit women wanting to have babies in their 20s, or early 30s. if they had partners secure enough career-wise to be able to take off the sick days, go to the school events, and all the other activities for which, as Slaughter points out, you really sometimes need a parent. Of course, I can also see this age gap as perhaps being a positive for same sex couples in staggering life stages to maximize the potential for each individual. Staggering life stages seems like it could benefit all couples, parents or not.
So if anyone is interested in discussing Slaughter’s recent writings, or their own approaches to family/work balance, or how we helicopter our kids through this stage of figuring it all out… 
When we had our baby, H had TONS of sick leave and seniority at his workplace. Nonetheless, he was told that if he took more than 6 weeks, his job would no longer be seen as ESSENTIAL. He took exactly 6 weeks and worked evenings at his job, plus all day on Wednesdays, staying home with our baby during the MTuTh & Fs. It was good for him and me and our S. He loved his job and I was happy to be the primary caregiver after this brief trial where he stayed at home. My friend had her H be the primary caregiver. She worked full time at a scientific lab and he had a lab in his basement. At some piont, the needed to hire a fulltime nanny, but he had a better disposition for staying at home with the babies and kids than she did.
Slaughter has a series of questions she asks her students when they are thinking about how to combine family and work. For instance, what do you do if you have an important presentation scheduled on the same morning your child has a school play and your partner is out of town on a business trip? She assumes the child should have a parent there. I don’t know if that is true. Does this require a parent’s attendance? Is the child okay if nanny is attending? The questions that bring up health issues are more clear to me. Sometimes it just has to be a parent taking the child to the doctor. For routine check-ups, I am not so sure.
While I appreciate the points that Slaughter makes (I read the original article in the Atlantic when it was published), we should all be so lucky if scaling back means turning down the state department for a high-ranking position at Stanford. Most working women don’t have such cushy safety nets.
I have not read her book; I hope she addresses how these decisions play out for middle and lower class families.
Nearly always, when a family is formed, one parent’s career will be put on hold and one will move forward. There are only so many hours in the day and somebody had to do the reproductive labor of maintaining the home and raising the kids. More often than not that’s the mother. The percentage of families that can hire a full time nanny is rather small. Put your kid in day care and prepare yourself for frequent illness, translating into lost days of work and trips to the doctor. Take some time off to raise the kids, and depending on your profession, you may or may not be able to resume your career. My mother had an engineering degree - by the time we were all in school, her degree was no longer current.
I remember parenting being much more hands off when I was a kid. Parents were not expected to attend every sports game. Graduation was for high school, not kindergarten or the fifth grade. In elementary school, I sometimes came home to an empty house, made myself a snack and then did homework or went to play with the neighbors. Part of the work/family balance dilemma comes from the much higher parenting standards of today.
Yes, I’m a working parent, and yes, I have prioritized parenting over career, and no, I do not regret that decision. If given the choice, I’d do it all over again. However, I teach, and that offers maximum flexibility with children’s schedules. Other professions make different demands.
She does address the accusations of elitism in the book, and talks about women dealing with the “sticky floor” as well as the “glass ceiling” She recognizes that second wave feminism was pretty elitist and expands the discussion well beyond the original article. She offers some ideas for changing society entirely to be more family friendly. One is valuing childcare and paying childcare workers appropriate salaries.
I am looking forward to reading her book, and I perused one of the articles. In theory I agree, but personally I never could be the kind of mom I wanted to be, and the kind of professional I wanted to be, at the same time. That was the hard reality.
Now I’m 45, trying to on-ramp back into my career. It’s weird but exciting too.
If I had it to do all over, I would make the same choices, except I would have accepted reality more quickly.
She is advocating thinking about life stages and divides us into caregivers and competitors, with the idea we should be able to have different designations at different stages. She is including elder care in the caregiving stage.
Anyone disagreeing with my reading of the book, please feel free to correct me. I am positive I got lots wrong.
Oops, I meant Princeton, not Stanford. A predictable CC slip that can’t be corrected more than 15 minutes after the fact. 
Shifting from caregiver to competitor, easier said than done. Especially if the competitor spouse is happy with the status quo and doesn’t want to downshift.
Elder care is going to be a bigger and bigger problem - glad she addresses that. My husband and his sister are classic “sandwich generation” boomers with kids still at home and a desperately disabled mother who needs constant oversight and care. Who is going to do this for the boomers when they start to become disabled? They are a huge generation (I’m a Gen-X’er).
Women can’t do it all. Yet women seem to be the more “natural” caregivers (of course there are exceptions to this general idea).
Exactly. She quotes some studies (I am not going to look it up) that say what plays out is not necessarily what the partners had planned. and that women are generally the ones disadvantaged. She uses your example of a spouse not being willing to take turns when it gets to that point. She also points out the economic realities that sometimes one spouse is the higher wage earner and that influences decisions in a way the couple may not have originally anticipated.
Slaughter talks about this societal default idea that women are the “natural” caregivers and that women really need to let go of the idea their husbands need to parent in the same way they do. She criticizes the idea fathers are babysitting and also that they can’t just have a different, but equally valid, parenting style than mothers. She advises women they have to let go of some of this control to achieve successful co-parenting.
She compares parenting by same sex couples to husband/wife parenting styles to make us think what is necessary or a norm…
H and I did something of the sort. We’ve both been employed at the same huge company for 35 years (him) and 30 years (me) in different fields.
When it looked like my job was going stronger, I worked more and he did more of the home stuff. When he switched to a new program, my job went on the back burner and I was more home focused.
I dropped the girls at child care or school and he usually picked them up. We didn’t travel at the same time. At least one of us was there for school things and we traded off medical appts and sick kids.
We did the baby handoff when we were both going strong and one of the girls was sick, with one of us working morning and the other afternoon.
My mom was sometimes available to pick up in an emergency, but for the most part we did it ourselves.
We are a good partnership. That said, would I do things differently? Probably, but I have a strong work ethic and lived in fear of H dying young (for no reason other than my dad did).
Honestly, it is almost harder now with my elderly mom and the ILs. With children you know they will grow and become more independent. It is opposite with the parents; it will only get worse. It’s harder to back off work at this stage and we aren’t united in parents as we were with children; it is more go it alone. This stage is incredibly hard and without the benefit of youth, we struggle.
These are the prime earning years, but I cannot wait until I leave this job and retire at 58, in 4 years.
^^this! With my elderly MIL who has a very high level of need due to her Parkinsonism, we don’t feel as united as we were with the kids. I simply cannot invest as much of my own time in to her situation, but I do what I can. And I wouldn’t expect my husband to do it with my parents either (though they are quite a bit younger and healthy thank God). Yet I often feel that H’s family sort of expects me to pick up the ball and run with it (because I’m the woman in the equation).
Slaughter describes being raised to be a breadwinner (competitor) and only in recent years realizing how valuable the contributions of the caregivers really are to making the family work. As you point out, someone has to do these things. All of it can’t be hired out. Even if you hire it out, someone does the hiring and overseeing.
She wants young couples to think about these questions before they start families.
Out of curiosity, does she mention any of the challenges of raising a child with serious special needs who requires specialized, round the clock supervision, even into teen years and beyond? Nobody ever plans for this, but sometimes here we are. Or what can happen when a spouse becomes disabled in midlife and needs this type of care?
One of these encounters haunts me still: the quiet woman who hung back amid the crush of people who came up after a public lecture and then pulled me aside just as I was leaving to tell me that twenty-odd years ago she had a son who was severely disabled. She left her job, and her dreams, to care for him. She thanked me for my article and my talk, saying that for those twenty years she had felt like a failure. I can still see her face and remember my own emotion at the thought that someone of such courage and strength should carry the additional burden of not living up to social expectations. She is a different kind of role model, one that U.S. society, at least, could use more of. It is we who should be thanking her and millions like her who put their families ahead of their careers.
Does anyone want to read it and then discuss?
It won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t. I don’t think it is a great book. A lot of it is pretty obvious. I think though it’s a good start in thinking about these issues. Her point of view was interesting to me.
I guess I would recommend it because it is a starting point for a discussion a lot of us may be having with our own kids at this time. She seems to feel young people want this discussion. I believe that as well.
I would like to think we could change society. I am hopeful.
I would be happy to read the book and discuss it. I just don’t know when I will read it.
@alh - thanks. I could have been that woman.
Over twenty years ago we came to the realization that there was no way that our family could support two adults with full-time careers. I gave up my dreams. It was not even a choice, it was a necessity. Even H had to dial back on his career.
The costs to our family, including siblings, have been enormous, but largely unacknowledged and likely to remain so since other family members value their privacy. I have tried to give back to the autism community (I am a contact person for parents with younger children) and provide guidance to professionals entering the field who have sought my input.
frazzled2thecore: I am so sorry. Thank you for all that you do.
In Slaughter’s ideal world, I believe caregivers, at the very least, get positive reinforcement and societal approval. She values the caregivers. She wants those that caregive for a living to be paid a decent wage. She talks about the unpaid contributions society depends on to keep going. That is the main reason I would recommend the book. It isn’t all about urging women to succeed by duplicating traditionally male business/career models. When she did that, even with a partner who was the anchor parent (her description) she still finds her work impossible to reconcile with family life, when family life becomes difficult due to a troubled teen. She needed a flexible schedule. She explores how everyone could have a more flexible schedule. This, too, gets away from traditional business models.