While Judith Warner’s article about the sad moms who opted out of the workforce was mean-spirited and sensational, there were some elements of truth to the article. Those elements of truth were not earth shattering, but let’s deal with them anyway.
It’s very, very hard to maintain two major careers and raise more than one child. By major careers, I’m using my Northeast bias here. I’m talking about 50-60 hour per week jobs with a two-hour commute. That’s about average around here, though I know that’s not the norm elsewhere. Using my Northeast definition of a major career, let’s move on. Because it’s very hard to manage two time-consuming, inflexible jobs, one person often has to either stop working altogether or take a part-time job to manage school vacations and sick children and the mountain of tasks that go along with raising kids.
If you step off the full-time career track, it’s very hard to get back on. In some professions, it is simply impossible to find work, after a year or two hiatus. It’s also very hard to find part-time work that helps keep your seat warm until you go back. That’s the reality, even if it is a rather short-sighted reality.
A number of my friends need to get back into the workforce, because their spouses’ salaries have shrunk in the new economy or because their kids absorb less time than they did in the past. Some are more successful than others. The ones who are happily getting a paycheck now are the ones who were willing to start at the bottom at a new career. One friend took a job as a secretary at daycare center. Another teaches a spin class at a local gym. One writes PR copy for a medical firm. All three are massively, over-qualified for those jobs, and their paychecks are much smaller than they were in the past, but they have a job. Because my friends don’t have college-aged kids yet, they still need some flexibility in the jobs, and those low-level jobs give that to them. Going back into the workforce requires a lot of humility and realistic expectations.
The friends who spent their free time honing some skill or adding small jobs to their resume are in better shape than those who spent too much time doing PTA or church volunteer work. I used to think that those volunteer jobs provided networking opportunities and skills that would translate into local political or community jobs down the line, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Volunteer work, which is extremely important to running schools and community life, is sadly a dead-end pursuit.
The other element of truth to the Warner article is that your work at home can create conflict in your marriage, if you married an asshole. Warner focuses in on one guy who thinks that his wife could be continuing managing her children’s schedule and the household responsibilities, while bringing in her pre-child paycheck. That simply is not possible. Of course, if you have married an asshole, then that’s a problem regardless of your employment status.
If you’re at home, then you do have to keep your partner informed about all your work at home. Even a well-meaning partner needs to be reminded once in a while that the laundry isn’t being done by house elves, and a fresh loaf of bread didn’t magically regenerate in the cabinet. If you communicate with your spouse regularly, this isn’t a big deal.
If you’re the parent who has taken the flexible job or stopped working entirely, there will definitely be long-term implications for your career. However, with a little humility, creativity, and strategic activities, a return to the workforce is not impossible.
Apt. 11d 
I often joke about how it’d be so much easier if it was still the middle ages and as a family we were assembling shoes around the fireplace.
It comes down to communication, as you note. And appreciation of the sacrifices that each person is making. If one parent is the unpaid worker and point person for the home, they “lose” the extrinsic rewards of promotions and cash and pats on the head and stimulating work. The other parent who is full time in the paid workforce loses out on regular time with the family.
If the paid worker is happy to skip out on the unpaid work, then that’s another problem in the marriage/relationship that needs to be addressed.
For a professional career, the 50-60 hour workweek is pretty standard out west too.
Unluckily, we don’t really have any extended family to fall back on. Luckily, because of that, the man and I have had to be interchangeable as much as we can. When I travel out of town or am busy on a project locally, he’s on deck as the point person for the home – parenting, meals, activities, playdates, homework, laundry, etc. And vice versa.
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I think, though, that the recession and its impact on gender roles took many of us by surprise. We had kind of a weird summer where my husband was furloughed from the military and he, along with every other military guy in our area, found himself at places he doesn’t usually go during the workday — like the orthodontists’ office, the hair salon, the dog groomers, the grocery store, returning stuff to Kohl’s — while I worked.
We have found that once the kids are ten or so, there are very few things they do that require a SPECIFIC parent, though there are lots of things that require A parent.
This is not a statement that I would have expected myself to be making when I was growing up. (I’m almost 50.) Somehow or other, I did expect that I would do the vast majority of the parenting and I would have a smaller job (in our house, we’ve used the term ‘joblet’ over the years. I was the press attache at an embassy in Eastern Europe while breastfeeding and we determined that this was not, unfortunately, a joblet — not with the war in Yugoslavia and all. Luckily Skype wasn’t big yet which meant that you could still juggle phones and guys in Washington and they couldn’t see that you were simultaneously leaking all over your blouse. Might be harder to do nowadays. But when I needed a joblet I couldn’t find one and so I kept the job, and later when I needed a job, I was only offered joblets)
Currently we both have good jobs and we need both of them. To me, it feels weird that my husband has a better relationship with the cheer moms than I do (never big on catty, mean girls), and my sense is that it feels weird to him as well. (I was in the drugstore today and there was an old man on the phone explaining that he couldn’t do something because he babysat his granddaughter on Tuesdays — and I thought “Wow, even old people are gender-interchangeable — who would have thought that?”) I’m still kind of confused by all the commercials that are starting to come out that show men using Tide and buying toilet paper — but it’s nice to think that in another twenty years or so, kids will equally mystified by the old ones that showed only women buying toilet paper, as though it was some kind of gender-specific activity.
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Things I found hard:
– realizing just how much I relied on my work to give me a social network and context. I spend a lot of time feeling lonely.
– I do not enjoy house work. I never did and just because I work (much) fewer hours and from home does not mean that I got much better at it. I just can’t blame it on having an intense career anymore and look pointedly at my husband if the house is a mess.
– I miss my job. Not that I was enjoying it at the end, but the fun and good parts I still miss. That it was something that I thought was making a difference in the world and that I was good at it. What I do now for money seems really trivial in comparison. And really, the work parts of raising children (you know the making of snacks, walking kids to school and activities, cleaning, laundry, dealing with sticky messes) rank pretty low on a work satisfaction scale (mainly because you have to do them all over again tomorrow).
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I missed the network too! And while I’ve found friends here and there through the girl’s school, I actively search out my own connections. Thank heavens for the internet because we aren’t limited by geography for likeminded people.
There IS something that is challenging about caregiving – it’s partly how we value paid over unpaid work and also, like you note Mia, that you can’t point to a pile of papers and say “I did that”. Every day you provide three hots and a cot plus laundry. Not many kudos for it.
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“…that you can’t point to a pile of papers and say “I did that”.”
Actually, isn’t grading a lot like housework–you do it today, but there’s always going to be more of it?
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“but it’s nice to think that in another twenty years or so, kids will equally mystified by the old ones that showed only women buying toilet paper, as though it was some kind of gender-specific activity.”
When my daughter and I talked about gender discrimination when she was 4 or so, and, in particular, the idea that someone would feel bad if you said “boys couldn’t do that or girls couldn’t do that”, the example she came up with was how her dad would feel bad if we told him that boys weren’t good at washing dishes, and offered to do it instead of him (he was always the dishwasher).
I think the world is changing and it’s actually pretty amazing the changes we’ll see in our lives. We see a fair number of fathers in roles that fathers didn’t have when I was a kid, and even though its still mostly women at the orthodontists, I do see changes. And, I know grandfathers who are delighted to have had the personal relationship with their grand kids that they didn’t get with their own children.
When I was growing up, I think I thought that the elves would do all the work while the adults concentrated on their jobs. What I learned was that even when you have “elves” (in the form of grandparents, relatives, and paid helpers), there’s still a lot for the parents to do.
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Mia, your comment made me sad. I’m not sure how old your kids are. When my kids were young, we lived in the city and I had entirely different methods for keeping sane, so I’m bad at giving advice to parents of smaller kids. When I moved to the suburbs, I made friends with people I met through part time jobs, book clubs, activities with the kids, and neighbors. It’s a lot harder to make friends with people who have different interests and education levels from yourself, but it can be done. I arranged lunch dates and family-pizza nights with acquaintances, who then became friends.
Housework always sucks, but it goes a lot faster if you get a head-set and do it, while chatting with friends.
The past few weeks have been very tough with lots of hands-on parenting work and lots of driving, so I’m rather burned out on being the primary parent. Only two more weeks of summer break and then I’ll have more balance. Right now, I’m limping until Steve walks in the door at 7.
re: Dads as the parenting point person… I’ve been pretty lucky to have a lot of SAHD’s in my network. Steve has had to do that job on weekends and did it more intensely during Jonah’s first year. So, seeing Dads manage the calendar and the house responsibilities is normal around here. I love all the new commercials that show dads doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen, because that’s what we’re used to.
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I a in my early 30s and have lots of late 20s/early 30s friends who are starting families these days. One thing that is not often remarked on in the public discussion is that people my age are very much afraid not to have two working parents. After the recession, there is a lot of worry that something might just happen to a previously good job and it never comes back, or at least it takes a long time. It’s a lot easier to downsize to 50% income loss, and so almost everyone I know wants to find a way to make two professional jobs work. How this will actually work is a hard question, but the desire to find a way is very strong.
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Even us oldie’s in our 40’s are scarred by the recession. In the past five years, both Steve and I lost jobs that we thought were secure. We’ve dealt with the stress by keeping our spending to grad school levels. We don’t pay for childcare, housecleaner, or landscaper. We have no paid help. We’ve cut way back on food expenses. We cook at home as much as my sanity can handle it. We don’t do any home improvements that can’t be paid in cash. Steve logs into Quicken every line on the credit card bill, so we know exactly how much money we spend. We haven’t been on an airplane in four years.
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Ditto Laura’s comment about fear. And I think my husband and I fear that if we lose our jobs in our mid-40s, we will have a hard time replacing them because of the drive for youth, youth, youth. We have to pay for childcare because we both work but we are living with a circa 1980s kitchen and do the basic yard maintenance and sigh at the rest right now, with the idea that shortly (as my youngest comes out of toddlerhood) we’ll have a bit more leisure time on evenings/weekends to do it.
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I think Mia’s comment echos how my wife felt about leaving the work force. She did not particularly like work-work, and she does not like house work, but at least work-work provided a social outlet. My wife ended up homeschooling our children (which was not something we ever thought we’d do at the outset), and has found much of her satisfaction in that endeavor.
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Yes, I think everyone has been scarred by the recession. I think, in the same ways that blue collar folk were scarred by previous recessions, professionals have been scarred by this one. In the old days, there was a hard work/talent/rules based way to attaining a stable job at one institution (tenure at a university, partnership in a law firm, and, I presume some equivalent in the financial sector, and even, an engineer at an established firm like IBM). In boom times, some of those professions had to pay well, even while offering stability.
The recession accelerated the trend towards everyone being considered an at will employee, susceptible to being laid off at any time (or if not laid off, to seeing their firm collapse, as happened with many law firms and financial firms). Universities eliminated some departments, but there were also some universities that failed, and more importantly, they quietly switched to a mostly adjunct workplace.
One of the big risks of a single-earner household is the loss of 100% of the income. But, notably, I think that many of the folks who opt-out didn’t opt out of 50% of the income, and, a dual income household sustains other risks (the one that comes to my mind is the location-risk, of having to stay in one location).
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“But, notably, I think that many of the folks who opt-out didn’t opt out of 50% of the income, and, a dual income household sustains other risks (the one that comes to my mind is the location-risk, of having to stay in one location).”
There’s also risk if a household contains two middling earners, versus one star earner (which might happen if both earners prioritize family activities, career and domestic equality rather than maximizing career growth for either spouse). On the one hand, the household with one star earner is in trouble if they lose that one income. On the other hand, there is security in being a high performer. A star earner may be less likely to be laid off than either of the middling earners and likewise may have an easier time finding a job even if laid off. (For example, say that instead of having one very good tenure track academic job, my husband and I each had an adjunct job and turned down any better options if there wasn’t a job offered for the other spouse as well. That would rather obviously be a less secure option.)
The option to be a star or not a star is obviously not open to everybody, but if one does have that option, I think this is worth thinking about.
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Elizabeth Warren wrote in one of her books that 2 income families weren’t any more secure than 1 income families, when these emergencies happen. She argued that 2 income families never just bank 1 income. They spend all that money. They buy bigger houses, get hooked on household help, and buy more cars. So, when 1 person loses their job, they are serious screwed. In contrast, a 1 income family has smaller expenses. If a person loses their job, both people can hit the streets and try to find a job, which doubles the chance for success.
I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but it’s an interesting theory.
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I think there’s an element of truth to Warren’s point. However, those of us who know and acknowledge that we’re in a tenuous job situation can avoid living up to our means. For the first time in 2 years, we are about to be a two-career family again in a few weeks. We plan on increasing our spending by no more than 50% of the added post-tax income, however–including increased child care costs and travel expenses. The other 50% will be banked against future job loss chances.
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It’s not just that 2-income families buy bigger houses–they are also bidding for real estate against each other, so the more money they have, the more money they are going to have to lay out to buy access to desirable public schools, safe, clean, convenient neighborhoods, etc. It’s a Red Queen race.
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” They spend all that money. They buy bigger houses, get hooked on household help, and buy more cars”
I think a lot depends on how they spend the money. Some expenses can be downsized (household help, travel, . . .) while others (mortgage, car payments, potentially tuition) are more difficult to downsize. But, it’d be interesting to see the study since it seems fairly counterintutive to me.
I guess the bottom line effect would be that 2 income families are likely to be living on more income than a 1 income family and thus, the higher level of income is harder to replace (i.e. it’s harder to replace 200K of income than 100K, and the effect is non-linear, with higher levels of income becoming increasingly more difficult to replace). Empirically I can see that effect playing out in 2-income couples, but dependent completely on their level of spending (not on their level of earning)
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It’s in The Two Income Trap.
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