Working at the White House eats up every waking hour. It’s almost impossible to work there and raise kids without a partner as a full-time caregiver.
An article in the Wash Post discusses the weird disconnect between the family-friendly rhetoric of the Obama administration and the real life pressures of being a White House employee. A very old friend is a big mucky-muck at the White House. He is able to do his job, while raising the two small kiddies, because his wife, an Ivy League MBA, is a stay at home mom.
These work-family arrangement – one big pressure job and one SAHP – is very common around here. It some ways, it’s a throw-back to a traditional marriage, but in other ways, it’s not. Most of the SAHP’s around here are highly educated and not necessarily female. They are putting their own spin on stay at home parenting.
One SAHP that I spoke with last week practiced law part-time, when her kids were in school. Another teaches spin classes in the evening, when his wife is home from work.
It’s not an ideal situation. If you talk with people who are in these arrangements, they will complain that one person has too much work and the other has too much home. But the unique ways that these family cope is really interesting.
Apt. 11d 
I think there really are some jobs that are almost impossible to do without a SAHP OR without a lot of paid help. Families with the latter arrangement seem to get judged very harshly (the why-even-bother-having-kids strain of parent hate).
There is also a whole class of jobs just below that level that are definitely easier with a SAHP but don’t necessarily require one. It’s the people in these jobs that are a better target for more family-friendly work policies. A family-friendly* work environment might allow the spouses of these people to go back to work and it would allow them more time with their families. (The unspoken thing here being that some SAHP don’t ever want to go back to work, even though you’re supposed to want to, and some breadwinners don’t want to spend more time with their families, even though you’re supposed to want that as well.)
*Reframing this away from family-friendly and more towards work-life balance has been a good thing, I think. There are lots of people who are both dedicated to their work and who also have other important life commitments (e.g. caring for a dying loved one, and intense hobby). Including as many people as possible in making work more flexible is a good thing.
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We live in a city, but it’s not a very big city or a very cosmopolitan city. People move here so that they can have two jobs — the commute’s not too bad, the cost of living is reasonable; nobody makes big money in their jobs, but everyone makes a reasonable wage. I think that the one high pressure job plus a SAHM or SAHD is largely something you see in places like NY and DC. People that don’t want that move somewhere else. It’s the job plus the logistics that make two careers unworkable in a place like that. It’s a choice people make, to take the kind of job where you’re unable to say “I can’t go out of town that weekend. My child is graduating from high school/having surgery/starring in a play/going away to college.” I guess there will always be jobs like that — and people to fill them. But there will also be people who say no to that.
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This definitely seems to be true where I live. There are certainly people in our city with “high-powered” jobs but the culture just isn’t the same as on the east coast. Most days they’re out of the house maybe 9 to 10 hours including commute time and usually there is some travel but nothing overwhelming. Some of these people have spouses that work and some have spouses that stay home but both arrangements are doable, it more depends on the family’s preferences.
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Our small-ish midwestern city is very similar to what you describe. Far fewer high-power jobs – and most people are home by 5ish every night. I find a huge culture shift between here and where I used to live (Wash DC). But even here – there are high power doctors/lawyers etc. who work insane hours and have SAHPs. I moved down to 30 hours/week when the kids were born…I thought I’d be back to full time now, but it just works better for us to have someone home after school. I wonder if there is more flexibilty here than in the big cities? I know a lot of people who work 75% schedules here.
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I would have titled that “some jobs require that the worker no other responsibilities” And, I can see why that should apply to a high level WH employee. I want to agitate against that lack of external responsibilities becoming a requirement for every job.
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My sister’s husband is a contractor for one of the big companies you’ve heard of. The South Asian employees there have wives who bring them a hot, piping lunch every day. BIL wants to know where his hand-delivered hot lunch is.
A different ethnic group hand delivers lovely sushi lunches to school kids at my nephew’s school.
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There are a lot of seemingly progressive workplaces where having a stay at home wife is considered a status symbol. My cousin works for Microsoft and when he first was employed there it was remotely and his wife continued to work. Once they moved to WA though, they both felt a lot of pressure for her to quit her job (also remote work) because that was the arrangement that all of the men in his unit had. The sense was, “you must really not be serious about your career if your wife works” and it also upped the cred of the men there to show that they were be able to support a wife in comfort. She did eventually quit her job and it’s really hard to know if she’s happy about that or not. There are things she like about being at home and things she hates.
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Exactly. I don’t care if someone at the white house lacks work life balance. In fact, good. If you want power over others you should sacrifice. I do care about mid level managers. But high level government, high level wall street, cceos, screw ’em
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Just as there are jobs that require you to always prioritize the job first, there are parents who want to prioritize their family responsibilities first. Both sets of priorities highly limit the choices you can make/have available in the other venue (i.e. if you want to be there for every play and every pickup for your family/kids, you will be limited in the kinds of jobs you can do or you can’t have a job; if you want to be there for every work opportunity, your outside responsibilities, including to your family, will have to be handled by others, or you can’t have a family).
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It’s nice to have a choice, but not everything is a choice. You do mention other reasons besides children for needing a better distribution of time between work and non-work life, and I understand the focus on children having raised 2 of my own, but right now I’m temporarily partially disabled (2 cranial surgeries last year, still recovering) and my husband’s long-term underemployment has had an unexpected positive effect: because he only works part-time, he can do everything I can’t do. He can do the shopping, the housework, the meal prep, the laundry, and the bill paying, so I can conserve my energy and abilities to keep working at my full-time job (which pays the rent and most of our expenses as well as providing us with health insurance) while waiting on, and working on, my recovery.
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Yes. Best wishes for a good recovery.
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Kai — Glad that you’re recovering. Best wishes for a speedy full recovery.
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