Recline!

35 thoughts on “Recline!”

1. Brooks alludes to the fact that the increase in work expectations has been coupled with a similar leaning-in in the parenting sphere. She doesn’t really focus on leaning out of parenting though, only out of the workplace. My personal solution to finding a balance between my children/work/personal priorities has been to lean out of the hyper-involved parenting that is expected of UMC parents. I’m doing well in my job, I have time for several hobbies, and my children are happy! I think leaning out of that kind of parenting is a legitimate option as well and doesn’t make you any less of a good parent, just as leaning out of the workplace doesn’t mean you’re an awful employee.

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2. A lot of things are possible, but some things are not. Among the things that are probably not possible is to be considered a star by your colleagues at work, and to be admired as Perfect Mom by your peers in the mommy circle. There just isn’t enough time in the day. The two groups don’t generally overlap, so you have to choose which group you want to be admired by, and let the other one go.

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   1. It’s important to me that my children and spouse think I’m a good mom (to some extent, as bj says below sometimes being a good parent involves making decisions your children don’t like) but other than that I could care less what other moms think.

      An example of how leaning out of parenting has been good for me and, I think, for my kids too. My youngest son was assigned one child in his preschool class to make a valentine for. A few days before Valentine’s Day I set him up with the craft box, explained to him what he was supposed to do, and let him design his valentine. I helped him out here and there–cutting out a couple hearts for him and helping him spell some words–but he did 95% of the work. While he was creating his valentine I thought to myself “the valentine R made is going to be the shittiest looking one in his class” and, lo and behold, the morning I dropped him off that was the case. All of the other valentines had clearly been put together by an adult (i.e. mom). I didn’t feel bad about it: having him do it saved me from having to do crafts, which I hate, and R actually did what was asked, but I do recognize that their is pressure put on women to “perform” in these kinds of situations and those that choose to abstain can be viewed in a negative light.

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      1. I think you made the right choice. When I hear about parents doing their children’s creative assignments, I always think about how much they’re crippling their children. Learning how to do creative, semi-complex work with the relative freedom of elementary school is a key part of development. Your pre-schooler got practice fine motor skills, design, and also confidence that his work was good enough for the job, and that he did have the ability to imagine something and then carry it out. Imagine how your son would have felt had he made something and then you said it wasn’t good enough to give to a classmate, or worse, just made it for him without letting him even try. If a teacher assigns valentines to preschoolers and then judges the product negatively if it looks like it was made by a preschooler, then she needs some sort of remedial pedagogical training.

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      2. One day my husband and I went to a parent-teacher conference, and we were waiting in the hall and saw a lot of student projects, and our kid’s was in the middle to lower end of quality. My husband said, Wow, some of these are really good. I said, Yes, because their parents did it for them. You can just tell when the parents have done it.

         I have some angst over some involvement we’ve had. Sometimes S has a vision and she asks for my husband’s help with Photoshop. She had to do a book trailer and poster for Slaughterhouse Five. The trailer is awesome, but my husband was the cameraman. S figured out all the shots she wanted, then she edited it herself, but her father is a skilled photographer and that made it look nicer than if a kid had done it. For the poster, she had the idea, but it was totally my husband’s Photoshop skills that made it happen. And then he printed out a large poster on his super photo printing printer. Hers stood out in class as a result.

         Btw, I don’t do crafts, so all parent involvement is actually my husband. He is a photographer and graphic artist, so he likes that sort of thing.

         I lean out of parenting a lot because I am profoundly lazy. My biggest effort is to try to get other people to do the things I should be doing, like teaching E to get organized. Why would anyone expect me or my husband to teach our kid organization/”executive functioning” skills when we lack the ability to do it for ourselves? Have you *seen* our house? (Well, no, I guess. 😉

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      3. I love that you had R do it! And, it’s much more endearing if made by the child!

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3. Presumably the goal of being the “perfect mom” is not to be admired by your peers, but to raise and support your children in the way that you believe is right. My personal goal is to be a good mom to my children (not perfect, which is too much to expect of anyone). That goal doesn’t have a lot to do with what other people think about me (well, except for my family. Some days they give me pretty good reviews, other days, not so good, and it doesn’t really reflect too much on how good a job I’m doing. Today, I got a bad review because I didn’t pull my kiddo out of bed early enough for her to make treats for school and wasn’t willing to drive to the grocery store in the morning to buy treats and she had to take chips and salsa and she hates salsa. Being hated by your reviewers when you’re doing a good job is one of the unique challenges of parenting).

   Work, on the other hand, has slightly different rules, since your peers’ evaluation of your work does matter.

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4. I have been having a lot of thoughts on leaning in. My issue, always, is the issue of gender. We still don’t have gender equity in these things. If people want to lean out, lean in, recline, or huddle in the fetal position–I don’t care as long as it’s pretty much not determined by gender.

   But I’ve been watching some things happen at work. I considered applying to be the director of the honors program, but I leaned out, in part because of kid commitments and trying to manage everything (also, there was at the time MASSIVE instability among the higher-ups, and I did not want to go there). And another friend of mine was considering being department chair (we tend to have long chair tenures–chair for life. If we like you, we keep you). And she leaned out (she also had some family stuff going on, but also there was some other stuff). And in both those cases, men took the jobs–and we don’t have a lot of men around here, and both men who took the jobs have kids 7 years old and under. And the outgoing honors director leaned up into an assistant dean job, even though he has a faculty spouse at another college, and he has 2 kids 7 and under, one of whom has special needs, and even though his home is about an hour away. There’s still something going on, and I don’t like it. Meanwhile, another friend of mine is thinking about stepping down as chair of her department (again, administrative stuff going on is catalyzing this), and I found myself counseling her to do it sooner than later because her kids are 6 and 8. And then I wanted to smack myself.

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5. I think the author wasn’t talking about either being a good parent OR being a good worker. She wants women and men to relax on both fronts and just have a lazy day on the sofa.

   I find myself (and my husband) in a position where we have so little freedom. He can’t lean out of work obligations without a real fear of job loss. He can’t find another job, because there are no jobs. I can’t work to my higher capacity at a paying gig, because I have too many responsibilities at home — responsibilities that would be impossible to farm out to someone else, and responsibilities that aren’t optional.

   I recently applied for a job that I knew I couldn’t take. It was a job for someone who could relocate without concern of a spouse’s career and who had no family responsibilities. I was pretty clear about my limitations in the cover letter, so I didn’t get a response. I knew that would happen, so my feelings weren’t crushed. The job went to a women without my sort of limitations.

   The author may hate Sheryl Sandberg, but I also hate her. She can talk about reclining as an option. Most people just play the cards in front of them.

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   1. I don’t like the essay because Brooks tries hard to present herself as some kind of “hippy mom,” a world away from Sandberg (Sheryl worked so hard at college, but me, I just wanted to read!, etc.). But a quick look at her profile reveals a classic Washington careerist, who obviously worked incredibly hard, 24-7, at incredibly demanding jobs–driven every much as Sandberg (acc’d to her cv, Brooks was a Marshall Scholar, Yale Law, columnist for the LA Times while also tenure-track at UVA law, and until recently Counselor to the Undersecretary of Defense). All well and good, I suppose. But now, after she’s made it to a secure spot at G’town, she’s lecturing everyone else on how we all need to recline?! There is something deeply strange behind this essay.

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      1. YES! Laura and monboddo — I agree that “there’s something deeply strange behind this essay” and with what Laura said about hating Brooks too. She’s too damn privileged to be able to “recline” and as monboddo said, it doesn’t look like she reclined at all to get to where she’s at.

         yeah… regular people have to make do with the situation they find themselves in.

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6. There seems to be a second wave of my peers/friends leaving the workforce. I’ve been a SAHM since adopting my children but did work part-time for a few years in there. The usual keeps me from working FT, kids, husband’s career, house. Right now, several career oriented friends are either going PT or leaving all together. They didn’t stay home when the kids were born and at 5-8 years old finding they need be home due to the same reasons…kids, husband’s career, house. Leaning out later.

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7. I worry about Wendy’s problem, too, that the men seem to be the one’s willing to lean in while the women step out at work (and the reverse, I presume, at home). It creates a gender imbalance that trickles down into changing the environments that people are working and learning in. I do value the women who make it work for them. And I value people trying to figure out how to make it work. Talking to their adult children can help a lot. A friend of mine, whose mother definitely leaned in throughout his life had such tremendous respect for his mom, even when it meant that she might miss the occasional event in his life because he respected what she did outside of the home. I think it’s important to remind women of that the children will be OK (unless they really are worried), if they start to go down that path of mother guilt.

   Now another part of Wendy’s story is that the women are just much less willing to put up with the petty difficulties. That’s where we need to counsel the men, too.

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8. My children are 4 and 6 and it would take something extreme for me to leave the workforce at this point. Everyone’s situation is different, people have different priorities, different things make them happy, that said, when a woman says she is leaving the workforce for her husband’s career, I want to cry. I understand that it is often the most rational decision to make but I hate that there are apparently so many women that feel like that is the best option.

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9. I think she was talking about being willing to be a “good enough” parent and “good enough” worker and not to strive for more and more reward and admiration on any front. She was also trying to be funny. I find

   “Some college students, like my friend Suzanne, take aerobics classes. Some college students, like Sheryl Sandberg, teach aerobics classes. Other college students, like myself, lie around the dorm reading novels. ”

   both funny and amusing, especially since I went to college with a “Sandbergian” type, too — she felt nervy and edgy if she had a free moment, and, at one time, was majoring (not minoring, we didn’t have minors), in electrical engineering, biology, and physics (which meant that she was taking upper division classes in all those things) (and, she played tennis and piano and was in student government). There are people who want to live that way, and leaning in is fine for them.

   Now, whether she is funny or not, does depend on where you think “choices” are being made. Part of the debate is bout making tough choices. To the extent that one feels pressure to make your children’s valentines, really, I think we are all agreed that that one should go. That’s a choice we can all make (kind of like not throwing money away on something we really don’t want). But, sometimes you have to make tough choices about how to spend your time, as you do about how to spend your money. Do you miss your child’s performance? Do you tell them you can’t drive them to sports practice, so they’ll have to quit. Do you tell them that you can’t lead the mother/daughter book club, so there won’t be one? Do you let your HS junior be an average student?

   Some of us have the luxury of more time (and/or money) to spend and, yes, that makes the choices much easier.

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10. My mother got three extremely high performing children by telling us she didn’t care what happened and that if we wanted good lives, we had to do well so we could provide for ourselves. She was bluffing to some extent, probably, but she backed it up enough when we were in high school so that it seemed pretty real. She would go on business trips without telling us and simply disappear for days on end, leaving a note we’d later find buried under some newspaper. She had no clue if we went to school and had no idea if we did our homework. We had no curfew and no bedtime. She was helpful if she was around and you asked her specifically, but otherwise no questions asked. My fairly severe depression and pathetic attempt at an eating disorder senior year which led to me to skip school extensively also went under the radar. I was a good enough student that my teachers didn’t care and I wrote my own excused absence notes. I don’t think the school even knew what my mother’s signature looked like. I could have been doing drugs and having unprotected sex under a bridge and she would have been none the wiser. Instead I was getting A+s and taking the bus to my 40,000 extracurricular activities since I wanted to go to a good college and not end up homeless.

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    1. Very intriguing….why do you think your mother took this approach? And, would you recommend this approach to parenting?

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       1. In fairness to my mother, a big part of it was necessity, though some of it was dispositional. After my father died, my mother worked 60 hour a week job with lots of travel, which left little time for parenting. In addition, my mother tends to over commit herself and then get stressed out. She took on a lot of voluntary commitments and was so stressed about fulfilling them, she didn’t have time to worry about her kids. If she was gone 14 hours a day, there simply wasn’t any way to check up on her kids (this is pre cell phone). Also, my mother is an “out of sight out of mind” parent. If we weren’t in front of her with some sort of concrete need, she simply doesn’t think about us. When I first lived abroad for a year, I talked to my mother a total of two times. In contrast, my more conventionally raised boyfriend got a phone call every week. In college my mother would call every Sunday, talk about her day for 10 minutes, and then hang up. I remember deciding I wouldn’t tell her anything unless she asked a question about it. I went months without telling my mother a single thing about my life.

          My mother has competitive, perfectionist tendencies. When she was a SAHM, they were channeled into parenting. When she started working, she dropped parenting cold turkey and turned all her energy into her career and church. In many ways I respect my mother enormously for her political commitments, which were reflected in her work. I also respect the hardship she had to deal with from going from SAHM to single mom of three kids and more than full time job. It’s hard to balance with the complete neglect on all levels I felt as a teenager, when I really needed support. I suppose realizing parents are complex people and relationships with them are complex is part of growing up. My circumstances meant I had to do it at a younger age than most kids.

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       2. B.I.

          I’m feeling really judgy about your mom’s volunteer commitments.

          A lot of kids would not have handled that total lack of structure anywhere near as well.

          In high school, my parents had two self-starters and one non self-starter, with the two self-starters coming first, and they didn’t even notice his academic issues for a long, long time. (His report cards had a way of disappearing and both my parents were distracted by a new business.) It all worked out in the end (the military was quite helpful in providing needed structure), but it could easily have gone very badly.

          With having a third child now, I definitely notice that I’ve been de-Tigermommed. I couldn’t manage close supervision of school work even if I wanted to, as Baby T would shred any homework or textbooks she was allowed near. Also, ever since I had bed rest nearly two years ago, the big kids have been in charge of making their lunches and taking over the morning getting ready process and putting away their clean laundry. The latter involves reminders, but it’s a totally different world than the old days when putting away the kids’ clothes used to suck up huge amounts of my time.

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11. Again, bj, you have presented options — go to a performance or skip it, go to sports or skip it. You presented tough choices, but still they are choices Sometimes we don’t have any choices in front of us. Some examples:

    In the past six weeks, the kids have been home more than they’ve been in school, because of breaks or snow days. If I had a full time job, I wouldn’t have a choice about staying home to take care of them. I would have to stay home and get fired. I have days and days of meetings ahead of me as we figure out what to do with Ian for middle school. I can’t get out of that obligation. I have to go inspect those schools and meet with awful case managers and do my homework on those matters. It simply impossible to skip out of those chores, no matter how much I hate doing them.

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    1. I’m curious, is Jonah not old enough to babysit Ian? Or does Ian need special care that Jonah can’t provide? I started being a “latch-key” kid at 11, and I was baby-sitting for money at 12. I feel like that was pretty common among my peers. Certainly by early high school we were considered old enough to be alone all day, if not over night.

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       1. Yeah, I consider myself lucky that E is pretty much watchable by his sister. I had to work all last week, and the kids were home alone playing Minecraft and Beatles Rock Band all day. I can leave E home alone quite a bit, in fact. Today when I take S to dance, I will walk the dog over by her studio (Abby loves it–there’s lots of great smells over there) and leave E home alone. He won’t even notice I’m gone.

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       2. I was also babysitting for pay by 12 and left home alone overnight by 14 (my siblings were all out the house before I was in jr high.) It was common among my peers.
          Many professional jobs are not going to fire people over this issue (waitresses, cleaners, etc, yes – just another way they get screwed – Wall Streeters likely fired, but that is an exception). Most professional positions will expect you take leave or do work from home, but they are unlikely to fire you. It is another privilege of being upper middle class, let’s not pretend it doesn’t exist.

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       3. Jonah can babysit Ian for a few hours here and there, but I can’t rely on him. A)He’s not home after school to wait for Ian’s bus. Ian’s bus won’t let him off, unless there is someone waiting at the door. B) Jonah has track after school every day. His school is too far away to walk home. I have to pick him up from school. There is no “late bus.” C) If I’m not home, the boys would play 12 hours of video games. That wouldn’t hurt Jonah, but Ian’s speech suffers if he stops communicating for a day. I can’t put that burden on Jonah.

          But that’s it for me and our personal situation.

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    2. As others point out, you do have special circumstances that limit the choices (as do many others). And, even if you do reach the point when your children can be left out home on a snow day without you, there are others families who will never get there (at least without additional help like respite care).

       My kids can be left alone for the day, and although we might end up spending as much time researching schools as you do, we certainly don’t need to. So, yes, the advice to to save time by making choices doesn’t apply to everyone, and to some, it sounds like the advice to the mcdonalds worker to save by skipping their lattes, when, really they have to skip the heat.

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    3. No matter the situation, people just figure it out, somehow, and cobble together a solution to things that seem impossible. We’ve had eight days of cancelled school this year and my husband and I both work. It’s been hard and each day off has lead to a new patched together care arrangement that feels not optimal, and we’re much better off than most because we have somewhat flexible jobs. I have no idea what single parents do. Every day we’ve had off I’ve thought of an acquaintance who is part of a dual-income family with five kids. I don’t know how they’ve made it work this winter, but somehow they have.

       Same for most families with children with special needs. Many work, because they don’t have a choice so they give up on meetings with case managers and put their children in so-so care. What you are doing for you children is wonderful but, if something happened and you HAD to go back to work you would figure it out. Your children would adjust because that’s what people do.

       Rereading that it sounds dismissive and I’m not trying to be. It’s more that my sense is that we’re never supposed to say we are in our situation because we want to be in it. It’s always supposed to because we have no choice in the matter. But, for me at least, a parent’s choice is the most compelling reason to live a certain way. To say “I am home with my children because I want to be” doesn’t feel acceptable (nor does saying the same but about work) so we go through all of these reasons to justify why the way we live is the only possible way given our circumstances. I wish it was more acceptable to say, “I live this way because I want to,” full stop, and have that be ok.

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       1. I am home (not actually with my children all the time) because i want to be and am fully comfortable saying it.

          But, I think that to feel that it’s a choice for me doesn’t mean I think that it’s a choice “because I want to be” for everyone (and, of course, the same goes for “I am at work because I want to be.”).

          I agree with scantee one of the psychological burdens of parenting these days, among those of our ilk, is that there’s psychological pressure to only choose the “nonoptimal” path (whatever the dujour nonoptimal is) when we “have no choice” (i.e. the arguments about breastfeeding, or staying at home or home schooling, or whatever), when, really, there’s a large range of things o which parents should just make their decision and, really, the kids are going to be OK. But, agreeing doesn’t mean that there are not exceptions for people who really don’t have a choice.

          (And, it matters when people really believe that they don’t have a choice, even if we think they might, because we aren’t them.)

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       2. If I responded to your whole comment, I would lose my cool, so let me just take one sentence.

          If I didn’t pay attention, what kind of place could Ian end up in? What’s the worst that can happen? Well, Ian could end up at a school with low functioning children with problems with violence. Ian has no behavior problems and is high functioning, but still he could get placed in such a program. If that happened, Ian could be physically harmed on a daily basis or frightened by 6-foot tall teenagers with an IQ of a 4-year old. He could be placed on a bus for an hour or two. He could be placed with people who abuse autistic children. He could be ignored and placed in front of a TV for a whole school day. There are a lot of really bad things that happen when special ed parents don’t pay attention.

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       3. It’s not that I think what you do for you family is unimportant, what I was getting at is that the concept of choice is an inadequate frame for these kinds of parenting decisions. I wish it was acceptable to say “I live this way because I want to” and have that be a legitimate reason in itself. Instead, I feel like women are pressured to justify their lives as parents in stark terms of choice/not a choice,when really the situation is much more complicated than that.

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       4. There are many of us dealing with some more complicated situations and truly, we aren’t home because we “want to be”. a mother of a girl with an eating disorder isn’t home because she “wants” to be – she’s home because without supervision, her daughter will starve. The father of a boy with suicidal ideations isn’t home because he “wants” to be – he’s home because without supervision, his son could die. Laura has written below about the challenges of other special needs. I think for many families, “choice” is a luxury. So, although I agree with your general sentiment, I”d take out the “no matter the situation…” introduction sentence. Because, trust me, there are situations out there that *are* actually impossible if you can’t be home. Snow days are easy. The rest of it, that can get really hard for some families.

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12. I had forgotten about this until now, but at 15 I used to babysit for a 16 year old girl with severe mental retardation. It was my first glimpse into how hard it is to be the parent of a special needs child. At the time I remember being struck by the fact that our parents had been raising children for equal amounts of time, but while my mother could send me to earn money, her parents still had to pay to spend time without her. My mother intensively parented for the first 12 years and then almost stopped cold turkey, in part due to outside circumstances. It was a little hard on us, but we were fine in the long run. That wasn’t an option for someone with a child who is the perpetual mental equivalent of a 5 year old.

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13. This is really timely. My husband and I both work FT and I got promoted this year into middle management. I love my job in an industry that is “transitioning” and he does not love but is excellent at his job in an industry that tends to pitch older workers out. We have a 3 year old and a 8 year old. While we do manage it every day and have fun doing it, I feel like we are holding onto the edge of a cliff.

    Our latest challenge is that we have had a string of mediocre public school teachers and my bright but disorganized child has hit a “make it or break it” grade 3 math curriculum that is highly word-based and moves fast. The result is that we are now basically homeschooling last term’s math curriculum and realizing we have to teach this term’s as we go. He fell a little bit in the cracks of our life (although the school also did not communicate that he was struggling in math as much as he was which is a whole other issue.) Yes, we have half an hr a day to do, sure, it but it feels to me, the mom, like if only I were at the school doing pickup at 3:30, this problem wouldn’t exist. All our friends work about as much as we do. Our extended family for the most part isn’t close, and the grandparents that are are gone 5 months of the year.

    And he’s a neurotypical kid. If he weren’t I am dead sure one of us would have to quit, and it would be me. I find there’s understanding in the workplace for the one-offs for the most part…when my kid had appendicitis I blew out my vacation time and it was okay. But having to leave a meeting because your kid has a math test coming up isn’t okay.

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14. “I feel like we are holding onto the edge of a cliff. ”

    I remember that feeling, and how much I hated it even now.

    I will say that it’s unlikely that a child has fallen through the cracks of life at 3, because they are struggling with math, while still being fed and clothed and loved.

    But, eating disorders, depression and chronic absences at school in HS? A lot of kids don’t recover from that, and the fact that some do doesn’t mean that it’s a choice to reorganize your life to fix it. A superstar adult I know had to figure out entrepreneurship in grade school to pay for his lunches, because his mother wouldn’t remember to feed him, but that doesn’t mean that not feeding her children wasn’t a pretty big failure on her part (though, I do understand why it might have happened).

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    1. Yeah, and this sort of sympathy is something that can be hard for people who did have those problems and didn’t have parents there to help them but remained high functioning. It’s hard not to lash out with some sort of self-righteousness. As I wrote above, for me it felt sink or swim. I didn’t have a mom who cared about my depression or eating disorder, and the option really was to starve, or kill myself, drop out, or succeed on my own. There were some days I had no human interaction outside of school. I had to choose to succeed and make choices to be healthy, because no one was there for me. From a young age, I had to learn to be completely emotionally self-sufficient. But for every me, there are probably 9 kids who don’t make it. That I made it says something about my upbringing or disposition (stubborn as all get out), but it doesn’t provide many lessons beyond my particular situation. Nor does playing misery poker help create a better, more compassionate society. I don’t think we should have a society where only the emotionally strong survive. I think we should have a place which nurtures everyone, and allows space for others to nurture other people. If that means opting out, I think we should allow it. As is, the kids of wealthy or UMC people get nurtured, and poor kids get dropped. I think we should provide a way for everyone who needs the support to get it.

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15. To Shandra Above: THe ages that your kids are now were actually the parts of parenting that were the hardest for us, and the ones that felt the most precarious. There can be huge developmental gaps in a classroom when kids are in early elementary school and it’s really easy to look at the kids in a room and feel like there’s a vast chasm between your child and the others. There are some kids who have the verbal skills of a high school student and who are already writing sophisticated essays. There are some kids who are really, really physically coordinated and then you had my kid who couldn’t make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without help. YOu have kids who already have executive function skills who can plan out their week and then you have the kid who still forgets the lunch that mom made. Kids who still struggle with tying their shoes. It’s really easy to feel like a failure at that age, and it’s really easy to feel like you need to put in huge amounts of time so your kids can catch up.

    We’re about to send our oldest off to college and the “Lean Out” essay made me wonder how old the author’s kids are, because we’re finding ourselves doing a lot of soul-searching right now. My husband had a serious career in the military and I managed to write three books and get tenure while we raised three children — but it felt like insanity the whole time. Even now, it feels like the kids are getting ready to leave and there never seemed to be time for a family vacation, and even a family dinner is sometimes tricky to do. We have a month coming up that consists of multiple people traveling different places for conferences and business trips and different activities and we have had a heck of a time scheduling my son’s senior violin recital which culminated in a conversation, the gist of which was “How important is it to you that BOTH of your parents be there? If you had to pick would you rather schedule it when Mom was in LA or when Dad was in Paris?” I am not proud of that. And I don’t really care if Sheryl Sandberg would be — It made me feel icky and like a bad person, and yes, we need both incomes, and it doesn’t feel like a choice.

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