I have long been a fan of Nancy Folbre's blog posts at the New York Times. She typically discusses the economics of parenthood, and I've regarded her as a champion of families in all their various shapes and sizes. Today's column was unneccessarily nasty.
She refers to the recent article in Bloomberg about the rise of stay-at-home dads and their role in supporting successful career women. A reader forwarded me the article a few weeks ago, and I believe I threw out a quick link on the blog. The article discusses how many dads either slow down their own careers or stop them entirely to watch the children, as the wife works the long hours or travels for her job.
The article was mildly interesting. I have several friends who took on the role of primary caregiver with the wives taking on the role of primary breadwinner. I didn't really need an article to be aware of this trend, but I was happy to see the guys getting props for their work.
Folbre seems to not like anyone staying home, regardless of their gender. She prefers the Scandinavian model where the state makes it easier for both parents to work. She says that American tax policies have created unfair incentives for stay-at-home parents.
Professor McCluskey asserts that the marriage tax bonus should be termed “aid for affluent husband care.” Given the existence of homemaker dads, a more accurate term is “aid for affluent spouse care.”
Whatever we call it, there is no reason to subsidize it. Beautifully decorated living rooms and gourmet meals are delightful after a long day at the office – but they shouldn’t come at taxpayers’ expense.
Excuse me? Excuse me? Is that what Prof. Folbre thinks that I'm doing in this house? Does she really believe that any stay-at-home parent is home and forgoing thousands of dollars of salary, because they get an extra $20 in their tax return? Folbre needs to get out of the university and actually talk to some real parents.
I'm home, because there are no jobs that will allow me to leave at 3:00 when the school bus pulls up and for parent-teacher conferences or illnesses. The job that I was trained for, no longer exists. I am only qualified to work at jobs that pay $20,000, which would never cover the amount of childcare that I would require for school vacations and summer breaks. (Not even discussing the extra work involved with raising a special needs child.) I am not preparing gourmet meals most nights. Think hotdogs and Annie's Mac and Cheese. I am helping with homework projects and driving kids to swim practice. I'm making a few dollars here and there with writing projects when they happen. I am volunteering at the school.
It's a huge sacrifice to be home like this. My 401K nest egg is pitiful. I feel guilty buying new shoes for myself. It took me a couple of years to get over the huge loss of prestige of dropping from a university professor to the untouchable status of stay at home parent. It's completely bizarre, mean spirited, and ignorant to think that anyone does this job for $20 on their tax return.
Apt. 11d 
Today’s column was unneccessarily nasty.
The internet has been really grumpy for a couple of weeks now.
Anyway, hot dogs and Annie’s Mac and Cheese is our usual Tuesday. I like the shells kind. Once my wife got fancy and made fettuccine alfredo. It was almost as good as Mac and Cheese.
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Are you opposed to the Nordic-style policies Folbre mentions that might make it easier for someone like you to work?
While Folbre’s correct that there is a tax benefit to one spouse working while one stays home that doesn’t mean there aren’t other drawbacks to such an arrangement. That most SAH parents are spending their extra dough on lavish home interiors is a bit ridiculous when it’s my understanding that many of them are at the lowest end of of the SES spectrum. I think that’s a challenge to formulating policies that affect SAH parents: they are among the poorest and most well-off of families and what is good for one is likely not good for the other.
Folbre’s presentation seems needlessly caustic but overall I agree with her understanding of the problem. I’m certainly not counting on any type of Nordic policy change happening anytime in the near future since our political climate seems very far, and moving farther, away from that. It sounds like you also agree with her: you want to work but something would have to change to tip the scales in favor of doing so.
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That “marriage tax bonus” is a complete muddle. It’s the wrong comparison and doesn’t mean what the author thinks it means.
The point is supposed to be to compare the benefits of marriage to “just shacking up.” If I make $150K per year and my live-in-lover, stay-at-home-nonspouse co-parent is unemployed, we can lower our combined taxes by getting married, since I can attribute half the earnings to the spouse, and more of it gets moved to a lower bracket. If I make $75K and my live-in-lover makes the same, then there is no (tax) advantage to getting married.
But that has nothing to do with comparisons between married couples. The $150K/$0 couple pays identical income taxes to the $75K/$75K couple (all else being equal).
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I would love a Nordic style policies, but they simply don’t exist here. Tax policies aren’t making it more likely for me to stay at home. The lack of support programs means that it makes more sense for me to stay at home. I’m marginally less poor, if I stay at home. It’s ridiculous that an economics professor can’t understand that. And to insinuate that all I’m staying home in order to decorate my living room is just bullshit.
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The $150K/$0 couple pays identical income taxes to the $75K/$75K couple (all else being equal).
True for income taxes specifically, but not for payroll taxes in general. SS taxes stop at a bit over $100k.
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I wonder how much of the decision-making (as much as they are decisions) for the college-educated in regards to work is regional. It seems like attachment to the traditional model of breadwinner/homemaker is strongest on the east coast where there are more high status jobs that require longer hours and a greater commitment to work. I live in a midwestern, mid-sized city and very few of my friends follow that model. Rather, the most common arrangement is one person who works a standard 40 hour professional job and one person with some sort of flexibility in their schedule whether it be part-time or independent contractor work or a work from home arrangement that allows them to work when they want plus some child care. This makes me believe that change towards more flexibility is slowly happening but that it might take longer in areas where there is a greater reliance on the traditional model.
(All of this is for “professionals” as those with lower incomes or without a college education have a different set of constraints on their decision-making.)
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I think the commute time does a fair bit to destroy flexibility in the really big cities. If I get home after 6:00, it’s because I’m working late or stopped to go drinking. In other words, it is possible to work and feed kids early enough to get them in bed by 8:00. It is a very rare day when both my wife and I are more than 15 minutes travel from the school. If there was some type of a problem, that gives you more flexibility.
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That is “both my wife and I aren’t within 15 minutes travel from the school.” That is, usually, either of us are physically capable of getting to the school quickly so we can pick based who has the most adaptable schedule that day.
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And the payroll tax effect plays an even bigger rol when we’re talking abut the poise of a 200k earner whose income would come from self employment, with a marginal rate of 45% so, before taking locall income taxes into the calc. Think that number does play a role in decision making, because it’s theater tax income that’s being considered against the cost of the secons earner working.But it’s hard for tax policy not to advantage some behaviors over others and the effects are even more complex a a function of amount and distribution of income level.
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I don’t think payroll taxes are quite so clear cut. “Lopsided income” couples pay lower taxes because of the cap, but may also receive lower benefits in retirement, because those are also capped. So, if you are arranging working arrangements based solely on tax considerations, this might be close to a wash as well.
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They are pretty lopsided because everybody gets Medicare when they retire, regardless of how much you worked. The most you can get from SS is $2366/month. That wouldn’t buy craptastic health insurance for somebody 66.
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The $150K/$0 couple pays identical income taxes to the $75K/$75K couple (all else being equal).
But the married couple have significant advantages from a tax standpoint, when one of them dies. http://www.forbes.com/2010/12/23/married-couples-guide-new-estate-tax-personal-finance-deborah-jacobs.html
Beautifully decorated living rooms and gourmet meals
And raising the next generation. The nordic countries beloved by the NYT are all, as far as I know, not managing to produce enough children. Their total fertility rate is below 2.1.
http://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=31
It isn’t possible to sustain generous family benefits with an aging and shrinking workforce. We have good friends in Europe who have decided they can’t afford more than one child. It’s a rational economic decision for those parents–but in the long term Europe does not look stable.
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But the married couple have significant advantages from a tax standpoint, when one of them dies.
Which just gives your wife more reasons for resorting to murder.
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I didn’t even have to read the article to know that the professors responsible for it (as authors or as supporting pundits) were going to be economists and/or law faculty. As they in fact are.
What this is about more than anything is the idolatry shown in those quarters towards: a) incentives and b) formalisms like law as a way of explaining c) complex patterns of social behavior, cultural practice, identity formation and belief/ideology. And d) of allowing you to launder a visceral personal dislike for cultural practices and social constituencies through policy wonkery.
The notion that incentives alone, even ones that have some real financial punch behind them, produce all by themselves profoundly important life decisions and daily routines is pretty much a secular religion for most economists and pretty much all public policy wonks both practicing and aspirant. It’s also the favored refuge for both conservative and liberal political pundits, because it’s how you explain why people do something you don’t like them doing (especially opposing your own ideological preferences).
Staying at home in our generational bracket, whether it’s men or women, is deeply caught up in a whole vast tangle of things:
yes, in the job market;
but also, in our ambivalent memories of our own childhoods;
in our utopian visions of romantic domesticity and fulfillment;
in alienation and disgust from the public sphere;
in seeking refuge from the manic squeezing of productivity from American workers at both ends of the class spectrum;
in low-intensity but persistent moral panic about strangers and abduction;
in mischevious, faintly affectionate exasperation with and tweaking of the single-mindedness of first-generation feminists and 60s-era liberals;
in the expression of complex currents of sentiment and yearning that we can scarcely put a name to, let alone understand,
and so on.
None of which are remotely well-discussed or evaluated by people who think that a simple tax incentive here or federal directive there suddenly causes people to robotically overturn the entirety of their habitus and do something else instead. Fuck, even the Nordic countries aren’t the way they are just because of public policy. If by some magic, you could transplant the government of Finland root and branch to the United States tomorrow and by some other magic there wasn’t an immediate riot, we wouldn’t all magically become Finns in every respect but the vodka and the reindeer within a decade.
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The nordic countries beloved by the NYT are all, as far as I know, not managing to produce enough children.
Of course the less beloved Southern and Eastern European countries aren’t either. That’s pretty much the story across the OECD. The US usually comes close, though statistically speaking it’s immigrant families who are doing all of the, er, work.
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“So, if you are arranging working arrangements based solely on tax considerations, this might be close to a wash as well.”
I’ve never parsed through the SS benefits rules sufficiently to understand them. But, with our hypothetical 200K earner (whose spouse can earn another 80K), would the 80K earner get more SS benefits if they continued working (and paying the payroll tax?). Or would their benefits be caped anyway? (let’s ignore the divorce question, which I think throws more monkeys in the equation).
My scenario isn’t necessarily a “marriage penalty” (because it depends on how the marginal tax rates balance out at different levels). But the calculation does influence the economics of 2nd earners in affluent families (as scantee points out, the equation is different for the poor and the middle class). In the family that makes 300K, or 1M, or, it often makes more sense for the family to invest in the primary earner earning more money, from an economic point of view, rather than having a 2nd earner. The counter arguments are the non-economic benefits of the work, the threat of job loss, future income benefits, . . . .
I’m usually pretty unresponsive to the arguments that higher marginal tax rates means that the “rich” will work less. But, I do think that this is one situation in which the scenario plays out — second earners in families where the primary earner earns enough to supply needs and wants. It really can cost 2nd earners money to work, at particular income levels, and with particular child care needs.
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For me staying home is for both financial and lifestyle reasons. I used to be corporate girl back in the day when my husband and I started dating. Over the past ten years I have switched careers to something more flexible. Now that we have a child, I am primarily at home.
We were at the same level on the ladder but I cannot imagine the team we’d need for both of us to swing a big career. And he is as flexible as a corporatey guy can be.
Maybe I am too tired to juggle it all but i can’t see how it all would come together.
Like Laura, I both resent the implication that all we ate doing is decorating AND I resent the implication that making a home for my family is lesser than paid work.
Finally, I miss the intellectual stimulation and do wish that there was some challenging work that would fit with a parent with kids in school.
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FYI, it’s framing like this: “the implication that making a home for my family is lesser than paid work” that feeds directly into the “mommy wars” stuff. It’s very easy to read a sentence like that and bristle, if you are a working mom who also feels like she is “making a home for her family” even if she works outside it.
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Too true, Jackie – it does feed into it! No judgements from this end. Well, that’s not true. Judgements about policies that ensure that a free choice between paid/unpaid/some combination is only for the privileged few.
As long as employers assume that high flyers have someone else bringing up the rear, people will have to work crazy hours. I can only imagine that most people would choose some combination of paid/unpaid work if they could.
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I once accidentally pissed off a friend. We were e-mailing during work hours. My kids were home for some holiday, Arbor Day or something. Then the kids began hollering for something and I needed to hound them to do their homework. I wrote that I couldn’t continue chatting, because I had to do some parenting. I meant it innocently. I really couldn’t chat any more and I had to take care of the kids. But she got all mad at me. She said that just because she was working and her daughter was in daycare that she was still parenting, too. OK. I shrugged. Whatever. I needed some word to explain that I had to directly care for my children. What is the right word that one should use in that instance?
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I think of it as caregiving (taking, whatever). I’m a full-time parent to my kids but I’m not their full-time caregiver.
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Actually, if I stayed home instead of working, my kids would get financial aid for college and we might even be able to afford an Ivy league education due to the rules that say that below a certain household income limit tuition is capped at 10 percent of your income. However, since I choose to work, we have to pay full price. I’ve never understood why universities subsidize men or women who chose not to work. Why do you get more financial aid simply because someone chose not to work and save money. Clearly here SAHM’s are getting a subsidy, and it doesn’t really seem fair unless there’s some compelling health problem that explains your not working.
Also the Obama mortgage bailouts in our neighborhood all went to families who met the income qualification because there was a SAHM. Can someone explain to me why I’m working to subsidize your mortgage while you stay home — because it doesn’t make sense to me.
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I don’t really like “caregiver”. I think of a caregiver as someone who does low skilled, physical maintenance work, like wiping butts or making sandwiches. The work that I’m doing during the day involves brains. I’m helping Jonah with his algebra homework or I am correcting Ian when he says the wrong thing. I need a new word, please.
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Arg. Mommy war time. Wanted to avoid this. It’s so 2004.
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Laura, maybe “supervising” in a case like that? Also though, your friend seems to have been feeling a little defensive, which I totally get.
I think also this is a time to remember that traditionally “female” occupations like nursing and K-12 teaching do offer a lot of what you are talking about here, but not every woman wants those jobs any more, nor are they always easy to get. I don’t have to find summer childcare and I still take my kids to lessons and volunteer in their school, but I’m a K-12 teacher in a family-friendly private school.
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Right but working parents are doing that stuff too ( hence the controversy over the term full-time parent).
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Right, but I was helping with homework and words at that particular moment. I need a word that describes what I do with my children. It’s more than supervising, because I’m actively involved. I think of a supervisor as someone who is just making sure that a kid doesn’t run away from a playground and gets hit by a car.
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I don’t mind the word caregiving but I also don’t think of it as low status work. From what my SAH parent friends have said a lot of devoting their lives to their children is thankless drudgery but it’s something someone has to do. Someone has to wipe the butts and drive to soccer practice and the benefits of being able to be with their children outweigh some of the less savory parts.
When it comes to the “mommy wars” it’s not something I’ve ever run into except online. Most of the people i’ve met in real life are pretty respectful of other family’s situations whether they were chosen or not. It’s my belief that the best reason to stay home is because you want to stay home and the best reason to work is because you want to work but most people don’t have those options. I feel like I do to some extent so I always tell people I work because I want to, because it gives me a sense if purpose, because it’s important to me to be able financially support myself and my children should it come to that, and that it challenges me in ways I value.
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“Also the Obama mortgage bailouts in our neighborhood all went to families who met the income qualification because there was a SAHM. ”
Whoa–more than one family in your neighborhood actually got significant mortgage modifications? That’s amazing–I thought the mortgage modification process was just bait-and-switch to keep the suckers paying until the last penny is squeezed out of them.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/261152/time-kill-hamp-kevin-d-williamson
http://housingdoom.com/2011/10/07/are-programs-like-hamp-the-governments-version-of-peggy/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/26/homeowners-protest-hamp-i_n_773582.html
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Choose not to work – oh, really, think about that phrasing. I know my husband hasn’t chosen a life of under-employment but we feel backed into a corner. Unless we’re willing to pony up for two households so he can be employed someplace where he’s valued while I do the same, there’s not a lot on tap.
Because of the constraints of caring for special needs youngest, one of us is always left holding the bag, even with Canada’s superior social services.
Unless we separated and cast our kids into the social welfare system, we can’t be fully fancy-free enough to exploit our career potentials to the fullest. Even with a raft of social services, a special needs kid is not easy to manage nor is the reality that not every person’s employment potential can be harnessed in a system that also allows for humanity.
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Scantee – I agree in that I’ve primarily found the “mommy wars” online. But then, for me, that gets back to my point about surmising whether people would choose some mix of paid/unpaid work if they had the option. I imagine that buttons get pushed because lots/most are in situations where they are doing more/less paid work than they’d ideally like.
Laura – Finding the right, non-charged word to describe what you do as a SAHM IS difficult. Sometimes just talking about my day as a SAHM comes across as judgy without meaning to.
My first instinct would be to say “parenting” because for me that does evoke the one-on-one activity of being engaged. But then if you have an employed caregiver doing the same activity, are they parenting also? I suppose that they are too.
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laura, when I need to say something like that (note: this would be comments between me and my friends who all work outside the home) we say “oops, have to go and actively parent” or “actively supervise” or “deal with the kids” or something like that. In other words, we are indicating the active nature of the immediate situation.
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How about, “I hear glass breaking. Got to run. Send me an email.”
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I’m with MH.
Avoid mentioning the “actively parent,” which sounds like the interlocutor is inactively parenting (if they’re that touchy to begin with). Another possibility: “… I think I smell smoke?” or just “Uh-oh.”
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OK folks, what would all of you do if you got a call right now (well, you have to time shift, say at 12:30) that you had to pick up the kids from school?
I do think that it’s this kind of event, a stream of them, that makes the juggling seem to stop working. And, how can work be compatible with the request? If mom is in court and dad is in surgery, it seems like there’s no solution that doesn’t require a 3rd caregiver (and that requires the two incomes to support 3 incomes + taxes).
(BTW, it’s a snow emergency, so an act of nature, and thus, we can’t blame the school)
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I’ve gotten that call more than once and have been able to easily leave work and go take care of my kids. However, and again, I’m a teacher. Traditionally female forms of employment are also the most traditionally flexible and family-friendly, but women are no longer willing to be confined to those fields. The question becomes how we can move other fields to be more accepting.
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Also, to explain all my commenting today, I have the day off for midterm exams week at my school :).
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I’ve never understood why universities subsidize men or women who chose not to work. Why do you get more financial aid simply because someone chose not to work and save money.
The counterpoint is government funding for day care — either through tax deductions or direct funding. The family with the stay-at-home parent thinks, “I’m giving up money and career to stay home with the kids — and you want me to spend more money to support your career and take care of your kids too?”
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“OK folks, what would all of you do if you got a call right now (well, you have to time shift, say at 12:30) that you had to pick up the kids from school?”
Go and get the kids. And next year, I’ll just walk two blocks to get them (we’ll be temporarily renting very close, if my plans work out), so neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night nor tornado nor flood nor hail will stop me.
This is a very big issue that I was planning on mentioning myself. I’d hate to have to explain to a boss, “My kid is having a meltdown right now at school and is being sent home for the afternoon.”
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Jackie: A follow-up — how is your leaving (your class?) handled at the school? Are there roaming subs? does a principal or administrator step in?
I’m really interested in how people make the flexibility work at the workplace level, because I think answering those questions is how we figure out how to make the work possible.
In the example I gave, of surgery and court, there’s really no replacement. A doctor shouldn’t sub out of surgery because a child needs to be picked up from school for a snow emergency. But, clearly, many other jobs could be made more flexible (with a cost). We need to price out those costs and think about them when we think about flexibility.
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nor tornado nor flood
No really, let those stop you. (I’m having nightmares of that couple in my dad’s old hometown in Maryland that attempted to drive home to be with their kids and were swept away. Kids were on high ground, but there was low-ground in between.)
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When I was teaching at various colleges, this was a huge problem. Huge. Many of my students would drive 40 minutes to get to my class and I didn’t feel like I could cancel class like that. If everyone lived in a near by dorm room, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But I always taught where there were a lot of commuters. So, when I had emergencies, I had to call my mom to help out. Mom wasn’t that happy about it. She has a life, too, and didn’t sign on to be my back-up caregiver or whatever we call it. Steve can never, ever take off. He also works in the city, which can mean a 2 hour commute in the middle of the day.
What happens when your child gets whooping cough, is immediately ejected from school, and is not invited back in the school for two weeks? And that happens during finals week?
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OK folks, what would all of you do if you got a call right now (well, you have to time shift, say at 12:30) that you had to pick up the kids from school?
I think it is pretty rare that Mr. Huxtable is delivery a baby while Ms. Huxtable is arguing in front of a judge,as the snowstorm is bearing down on New York. A think even the most demanding careers have some emergency-level flexibility built in 75% of the time.
In my experience, “child care emergency” is considered an acceptable excuse to duck out at almost any point — but only if it occurs at “emergency level” frequency — once or twice a year, tops.
Having a two-career family without a nanny requires multiple levels of backup to prevent these things from happening. We are friendly with multiple stay-at-home (or mostly stay-at-home) parents who we could call once or twice in an emergency (and would always pay back with a free night or two of babysitting for a weekend dinner date).
I know that the burden tends to fall disproportionately on the woman, but hearing “I’ve got to re-schedule, I’ve got a sick kid” every other week shows me a failure to adequately plan for things to not go perfectly.
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Actually my sister is a nurse at a hospital and she’s also the single mom of four. There could be a hurricane bearing down on her town and she would be told “we don’t care what you do with the kids. We need you at the hospital. You’re mission essential personnel.” I’d take the kids in a heartbeat but we live a couple hundred miles away. She’s had to go though some incredibly complicated maneuvering to cover that situation. ON the other hand, since she’s a single mom, she also doesn’t have the option of being a SAHM.
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OH, and you wouldn’t believe how many college prof moms will occasionally “take a sick child to work.” You put the kid in your office with crayons, hope they don’t barf on the furniture, and head off to teach the class down the hall. (One more reason why adjuncts need offices.)
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Someone has to be home with a sick kid so you take the lesser of the evils. Our daycare is associated with a medical school so the majority of parents, often both, are physicians. One of them has to cancel appts for a sick kid. We’re fortunate that we can both take off relatively easily and my parents are 4 hours away and will pitch it at a moment’s notice. But we’ve also both given up a lot of opportunity to have that safety net. Choosing two jobs with a lot of flexibility has been our choice.
So what would happen if Steve were to miss a day for a sick kid? Does he fear losing his job or would the next two weeks be shear hell to make up the day?
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Who’s had a kid puke in the hallway outside of your classroom? ME!
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Laura, my solution to that was only adjuncting in the evening, when my husband was home. It made for some really long nights, but helped with the childcare issue. I taught 7-9:30 pm several nights a week for a few years. I also taught with strep throat, bronchitis, and one week post-surgery after a car accident for the same reasons you cite about not wanting to short-change my commuting students.
If I needed to leave school immediately, I know either an administrator or a fellow teacher with a free period would step in. I could also, at last resort and for real emergencies, send my students to the library and have a librarian supervise them. Either way, schools are traditionally (with exceptions, of course) more family-friendly because they have had to be.
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Steve has worked from home once or twice when emergencies occurred. But that happens very, very rarely. Some days, working from home is just impossible. Anybody who takes off more than once or twice a year, as Ragtime noted, would not be employed for long. It’s not so much of the work pile up for Steve. It’s that stuff needs to happen immediately at his job. If nobody is there to do it, then bad things happen.
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My spouse and I work at the same University and have very flexible schedules. I work three days a week, a 75% appointment, and could leave at almost any time with no questions asked. Spouse’s job is a little less flexible because he’s in IT but they’re generally still very understanding if he needs to take off with short notice. We split the kids’ sick days.
The trade-off for all of this flexibility is that we’re paid poorly. I would certainly make more if I worked full-time at the University and we would both make a lot more if we worked in the private sector. If one of us took on a high-paying, demanding job we’d probably come out better financially because of daycare costs but neither of us is interested in devoting that much of our lives to a job. There is no perfect scenario but this is the one that works best for us at the moment.
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I will never, ever adjunct for $2,500 per semester again. I would rather work at McDonald’s. I would get paid more money per hour. I can’t work evening anyway, because Steve doesn’t walk in the door until 7 and we can never predict what time he’ll get home. Sometimes traffic sucks.
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Laura, have the two of you ever considered having him take a less demanding job so that you can work? Maybe when your kids are older? How much care will Ian need when he gets into middle or high school?
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Last week, I was in a classroom observing a promotion candidate and wasn’t looking at my phone (I don’t think I had it either). And when I checked my mail on my iPod when I was leaving, I saw that a whole thing had happened during the hour I was in the class where my son had an asthma attack at the afterschool program and there was no inhaler there. (Doh! My fault.) I eventually found out that they called 4 of my numbers (home, cell, office, and dean’s office) before they even tried my husband…
who sits at his desk all day and keeps his cell phone with him at all times. There’s never anything on the emergency contact forms about which numbers to call first, so they just call the mom, I guess. Yet I am the least accessible because I refuse to leave my cell phone on while I’m teaching.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Re kid emergencies, my husband and I both work equidistant from home/school (about 15 minutes by car). We kind of take it on a case by case basis. We both have understanding bosses. But sometimes I have a can’t-miss thing, or my husband does. But every year we fight over what to do the last week of August. Every. Year. No child care, no camps, but both of us have to work a lot.
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“A think even the most demanding careers have some emergency-level flexibility built in 75% of the time.”
Travel (and commutes) reduces the flexibility substantially. Of course, when it involves a physician and a lawyer, the solution is hiring a 3rd caregiver (and then, you need backup on top of that).
I looked at the stats at my admittedly completely unrepresentative sample. Among my daughter’s classmates, about 50% of the families have stay at home moms. Another 20% have families where the dad makes most of the family income (and the mom does nearly all the flex). There’s a remaining 20% where the income is roughly equal (and, I think, interestingly, many of these couples involve one or two physicians). Another 10% have moms who are the chief earners.
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Steve would love a more flexible job. Love one. Been looking for one for ages. There are no flexible jobs. And those with flexible jobs were the first ones against the wall when the financial crisis hit. Really. Maybe this is a NE, non-university perspective on life, but it’s our reality.
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“The family with the stay-at-home parent thinks, “I’m giving up money and career to stay home with the kids — and you want me to spend more money to support your career and take care of your kids too?””
Yeah.
“nor tornado nor flood”
“No really, let those stop you. (I’m having nightmares of that couple in my dad’s old hometown in Maryland that attempted to drive home to be with their kids and were swept away. Kids were on high ground, but there was low-ground in between.)”
Yeah, I have to take those two back.
I hope they have enough crackers at school to deal with an emergency.
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My husband travels for work 25-30%, has to be IN the office when not on the road, no family within a 10 hours drive, and Twins. There was no way it would work if I worked a full time job. Plus any job, which I was in corp america pre-kids, would have paid enough for childcare for twins
As it is, I just started a tiny part time job working for a friend who opened her own law practice. And I am already stressing about childcare in the summer (camp will be more than my income).
Sometimes it just doesn’t work to have both people working.
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The short term flexibility of university work is one of it’s very big perks (or, alternatively, part of its market compensation). I do believe that legal jobs have it to some extent, too, and computer jobs. But, flexibility for these jobs doesn’t mean less work, just the ability to move it around during the day. I think that part of what’s being discussed here is also doing less work, not just when that work occurs.
For example, working while the kids are at school, but with enough time to drop them off and pick them up and to flex the time when they have breaks, holidays, illnesses, snow pickups means not that many hours left.
(The McCluskey article is pretty silly — framing taken to the extreme. She seems to think that if you say “affluent husband care” really fast over and over again, everyone’s mind will change and the old balancing in the tax code will magically fix itself).
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Laura, I hear you about the exploitative pay for adjuncting, but you have to see the economic privilege in being able to say you’ll never do it again. And honestly, you’d rather work at McDonald’s? I find that hard to believe. Even if the pay sucks, adjuncting is more mentally stimulating by far. I believe you about the inflexibility of Steve’s job, but there’s a lot of privilege in your choices here too.
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“I hear you about the exploitative pay for adjuncting, but you have to see the economic privilege in being able to say you’ll never do it again. And honestly, you’d rather work at McDonald’s? I find that hard to believe.”
Nah. I can believe Laura means it right now–there is such a thing as burn out. A woman I knew years ago got totally burnt out by low-level college teaching and I heard her say that she would rather be homeless than teach college Spanish again (and she wasn’t an adjunct, either, I think). Some years later, she repented and went back to teaching. And then her program got closed…I don’t know what happened next.
I got pretty burnt out at ESL before I started having my kids. At some point, after you’ve corrected “he don’t” for the thousandth time and wondered for the thousandth time why somebody from a fully-conjugated verb system can’t handle the -s ending in the English third person singular, being an SAHM looks pretty darn good. The errors that you deal with (especially in the languages) are so repetitive and boring.
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Having kids to get away from correcting bad grammar? That only works for two years.
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The problem with me and academic teaching is that I put waaaaay too much time into grading and prep work. My per hour wages are below minimum wages. I’m dead serious about preferring retail work to adjuncting. I also am dead set against contributing to a system of exploitation.
Quite honestly, this traditional division of labor that has evolved in our house has its pros and cons. Pros are low stress levels for everyone & quantity time w kids. I’m just starting to get the time to pursue new work and hobby opportunities. Cons are no 401k, lack of prestige and engaging work environment. If I really had a choice, I’m not sure what I would do, but things are alright right now.
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“The problem with me and academic teaching is that I put waaaaay too much time into grading and prep work.”
That goes away after a while. I’ve started to not even start grading until 24 hours before I plan to hand back the papers. Decreases my grading time drastically. Also, my hours of sleep, but that’s temporary.
I am realizing how lucky I am to have stumbled into one of the few marketable humanities-type of professions (English/writing). I loved lit, but I’m good at teaching writing to recalcitrant non-English majors.
Also, MH FTW again.
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Amy P, I’m actually an English teacher, who adjuncted for years and also did ESL/SAT prep tutoring–believe me, I’ve corrected all those errors more times than I would like to count. Unfortunately, I still think saying you’d rather be homeless or at McD’s is needlessly hyperbolic.
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“Cons are no 401k…”
There is such a thing as a spousal Roth IRA.
http://fairmark.com/rothira/spousal.htm
You can open a tax-advantaged retirement account in your name as a SAHM, if you can find some money to put in it.
(I want to do taxes when I grow up.)
“Unfortunately, I still think saying you’d rather be homeless or at McD’s is needlessly hyperbolic.”
I didn’t say that–Laura and my acquaintance did (and my acquaintance eventually returned to college Spanish teaching). I would prefer ESL to homelessness or reeking of beef tallow all the time, but I wouldn’t go back to ESL unless I absolutely had to.
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“That goes away after a while.”
I think it depends to some extent on what kind of personality you have and what your other choices are. I think it really is hyperbole to say that you’d rather be homeless than teach spanish again, but depending one’s personality the retail job, with set expectations and hours might be preferable to the job that can (and you find it difficult not to let it) fill your life. Some people are good at compartmentalizing and concentrating effort; others are not. In the days when there are no other responsibilities letting the work/obsession/art/novel writing fill your life is an option. With the responsibilities, it’s not anymore, but the draw/demands/need for perfection that drove the work before don’t go away.
McDonalds seems a bit extreme, but the pottery barn fantasy, well, I can get that. Doctors, actually, can set up their lives as “retail” providers, if they chose the right job and specialty. Airplane pilots? They have to work odd hours, but after their done, their done.
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Wow, $2500 per semester? And Elizabeth Warren gets $430,000 a year? Why is academia so unequal and oppressive?
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I have two elementary-age kids right now. When my youngest was in kindergarten last year, I had a lot of concerns about illness, because in past years there had been many weeks with four or five absences. Tfoo-tfoo (spitting over shoulder), the kids haven’t been sick that much this year (not like they used to), but I didn’t know that would be the case. I had two small nanny gigs last year and peace of mind. This year, I had a bunch of health stuff myself in the fall, but am hoping for a healthy spring. The kids have been mostly quite well and quite responsible. There’s the possibility of a full-time nanny gig for me during school hours next fall, which is very welcome financially. I would make $10 an hour for a 32.5 hour week with an infant with no need for new work clothes for me or child care for my kids. The taxes on this make it somewhat less inviting, but I like the family and we’re buying a house in 2013 and I just got a quote for $20k in exterior work on the house we’re looking at (roof, repairs, painting). Oh, and we’re moving both in 2012 and 2013. I can’t really see past those moves, although I would eventually like to do tax work.
With the kids both in school, I can’t say that I’m devoting myself to either gourmet cooking or decorating. I’m a sleepy, dormouse type person, with about 8 hours of daily activity in me, rather than 16, and I enjoy having a nice quiet house to myself. Between a long walk, some laundry, an afternoon nap (shocking in North American culture, I know), some emails and phone calls (booking doctors’ appointments, collecting roof estimates, asking an insurance guy to say if the roof has to be replaced to be insurable) and maybe some mending (I worked on three different items today), school pick-up time comes very quickly, which is why I didn’t participate in this thread earlier today. I try to be rested and energetic and not overdo things in the morning, so that by the time the kids come home, I’m ready to put in a good 8-hour day. I’m chronically behind on my non-personal emails, but I’d like to think that nothing really important falls through the cracks.
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I wonder if we read columns like that one through our own filter, biased by our own situation. Admittedly, I read it quickly, but my take on it was “Oh, she wants there to be more companies like the one I work for: professional jobs with flex-schedules, 75% schedules, generous paid-time-off, ability to work-from-home…so that more parents could work, if they chose to.”
Like Scantee, I am also in the Midwest. At the risk of generalizing, I do find both employers and employees to be genuinely more interested in the work/life balance here than I did when I lived out east. It’s a trade-off: we seem to make less money here…but have a lot more time with family.
Most of my friends/neighbors out here have one parent with some type of flexible work-arrangement.
Most of my friends from back east do not. Either both work full-time (with a nanny,) or one stays home full-time. That is surely anecdotal at best. But I wonder if there are regional differences in work schedules?
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“…depending one’s personality the retail job, with set expectations and hours might be preferable to the job that can (and you find it difficult not to let it) fill your life.”
Yeah. When I was younger (for instance as a Peace Corps volunteer) I liked the idea of a job where you do half of the work at home, as I did with my teaching. However, as time goes by, I have a growing preference for work that doesn’t slop over into off hours. Of course, that preference could reverse in the empty nest years.
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Like Scantee, I am also in the Midwest. At the risk of generalizing, I do find both employers and employees to be genuinely more interested in the work/life balance here than I did when I lived out east.
Yes. I think that many of us on the East Coast within minutes of the main BosWash Amtrak like do not recognize how much of the cost of living is paying for the benefit of being so close to so much great stuff.
Eldest Raggirl’s 11th birthday is coming up, and I just went online and bought the whole family tickets to “Wicked” on Broadway for a birthday gift. We will drive up 90 minutes, spend the day in the City doing Newyorky stuff, (eating at the Carnegie Deli, shopping in Times Square, getting gaymarried . . . ) and then drive home that night. The ability to do that is built in to the cost of living in a way it is not in, say, Columbus, Ohio. But work/life balance suffers because while you can live in New Jersey and choose to have a smaller house, or choose to eat out less often, you cannot choose to not be an easy, convenient drive to New York City and Philadelphia.
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Columbus, Ohio is clearly much nicer than Philly.
I recall the time we had friends in New York and DC who wanted us all to meet in Philly. They told us to take the train like they were.
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“I recall the time we had friends in New York and DC who wanted us all to meet in Philly. They told us to take the train like they were.”
I’m afraid to ask, but what kind of train ride is that?
I’m assuming that Pittsburgh-Philadelphia is best by car, or (at a pinch) Greyhound. (The Pittsburgh-DC run by Greyhound isn’t bad at all–that’s how my husband and I moved to DC when he got a job there.)
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It’s 7 1/2 hours and only one trip a day. Megabus is probably what I would take if I couldn’t drive. Southwest used to fly there, but they stopped recently. Now US Air has a monopoly and tickets are over $500 even with advanced purchase.
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Will someone kick me in the head, if I ever link to such garbage again? It brings in a lot of traffic, but a. linking to idiots only makes the idiots happy and b. this whole SAHM v. working mom stuff is complete garbage.
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Gee, I thought Laura was reading lifestyle drivel in the Times so I didn’t have to. But in the future I’ll be happy to step in and point out that a Chicago-educated mind should be applied to higher things.
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