SubscribeTopic: Work Life Balance
Is Daycare Killing Women’s Careers?
The rising costs of daycare may be hurting career women’s career ambition. Day care costs have increased in the last two years and more states have slashed budgets for full-time childcare programs, leaving working families struggling to pay for huge child-care bills. This takes away encouragement and support from women looking to return to the workforce.
Having both parents work is actually proving to be less cost-effective than having one stay at home to look after their children. For some families with two children, getting daycare costs more than rent! So then would a second income even be that important? And it is women that are bearing the brunt of feeling like it is more logical to stay home with the kids. One 2010 survey showed survey showed that there has been an increase of 32,000 in the number of women who have opted out of paid employment to look after their children in the last year. More »
18 States Receive A Big Fat ‘F’ Grade For Accomodating Working Parenthood
If America was a kindergarten class, let me just say that many of us would not be promoted to the first grade. More »
Authors Who Happen To Be Mothers Talk That ‘Selfish’ Writing Life In Time For Mother’s Day
Solitude, quiet, and shutting the proverbial door were all topics of conversation at “Are You My Author?”, a panel exploring the particular flavor of mom guilt that comes from being a writer. The Strand bookstore in New York City hosted authors Rebecca Land Soodak, Jillian Lauren, Kaylie Jones, Sheri Holman, Martha Southgate and Rachel Zucker as they shared not only their work, but also how they wrestle that raging guilt complex to the floor just in time to meet deadline. More »
Flex Time Is Great, But A Flex Husband Is Even Better
What does it take to reach the upper echelons of success in the business world? Ambition, intelligence — and a stay-at-home husband. At a panel discussion yesterday, three top female bankers agreed that women who get to the top “often have husbands who have cut back their careers, or quit their jobs altogether to support their wives.” Women have focused a lot of time on angling for more flexible work environments. Should we instead be fighting for more flexibility at home? Meet the flex husband.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek brings the news from the panel about women in financial markets that took place yesterday in Toronto. “When you look around at our bank, all of the women in the most senior management positions have families and also have husbands who have chosen to scale back their careers so that their wives can do the 24-7,” Wendy Hannam, an executive vice president at Scotiabank, said. More »
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act Would Be An Actual Mother’s Day Gift
So while a fancy brunch or a big bouquet of flowers certainly will have the Hallmark industries celebrating mothers, a more authentic way to show appreciation for ladies with kids would include acknowledging their needs in the workplace. More »
Happy Mother’s Day! 10 Reasons It Still Sucks To Be An American Mom
At Mommyish, we’re not really fans of Mother’s Day. Call us crazy, but an influx of roses and cards simply doesn’t compensate for the rather pronounced injustices that American women with children confront everyday. From our pathetic excuse for a maternity leave to your employer breathing down your neck about breastfeeding to the gender pay gap, being an a mother in the United States could be celebrated in ways more beneficial than a one-time spa visit. Like protection in the workplace, preventing insurance companies from claiming pregnancy as a “pre-existing condition,” and kicking that infant mortality rate down a few rungs. More »
College-Educated Career Women No Longer Childless Crones
Women who dared to prioritize an education or career before family may have earned a spinster label once upon a time. Even contemporary films never fail to represent career-oriented childless women as cold and unfeeling monsters incapable of looking up from their BlackBerries. But times they definitely are a changin’, as new research reveals that these women are having babies after all. More »
Highly Educated Women Reverse Childless Trend By Having Babies
For decades, the stereotype of an ambitious, educated woman was that she’s cold, ruthless, perhaps single, and definitely childless. Think terrifying Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, or hapless Diane Keaton, who could barely figure out how to feed the infant she had to take care of in Baby Boom. But a new study says that highly educated women in their 30s and 40s are having significantly more children than they were a decade ago. Call it the a new baby boom.
The old stereotype was actually borne out by the numbers: By the 1990s, about 30% of college-educated women were childless, compared (roughly) to just 18% of the general population of women. Now, that trend seems to be reversing: Between 1998 and 2008, the childless rate of college-educated women dropped by five percentage points. More »
All The Single Daddies: More Men Than Ever Raising Families
Welcome to the club, fellas, and might we interest you in a mommy commune? More »
Be Jealous: A Week In A Finnish Mother’s Maternity Leave
Mommyish interviewed a Finnish mother named Liisa about her day-to-day life while on maternity leave in her home country, asking her to keep a diary of just one week. Liisa is a registered nurse and a mother of three. Her two sons were born in 2005 and 2007 respectively, and she and her husband welcomed a daughter in 2011. Her older son goes to preschool for fours hours a day while her younger son attends daycare a couple of days a week.
The following account is of her most recent maternity leave with her infant daughter. In addition to having her undivided attention on her family, with spare time for friends, her marriage, and even herself, Liisa was able to work on her nursing certification while on maternity leave. More »
WORK Act Gives Low-Income Women A Piece Of That SAHM Privilege
All this talk about Ann Romney‘s privilege — and therefore ability — to choose stay-at-home motherhood for her five boys has the entire country revisiting the “work” that is motherhood. Regardless of whatever gaffe some CNN pundit makes, her comments about Ann Romney “never work[ing] a day in her life” have recharged a debate that mothers on all corners of the playground have been having for years — and not the SAHM vs. professional working mom one. Although Mitt Romney has since to square his wife’s stay-at-home work with the “dignity of work” for low-income women, a new piece of legislation may bring the two worlds together.
Huffington Post reports that The Women’s Option to Raise Kids (WORK) Act cuts a small piece of that SAHM privilege for women on welfare, allowing them a brief window where they don’t have to choose between their kids and dinner. More »
If We Value Stay-At-Home Moms, Why Don’t We Have Paid Maternity Leave?
If we’ve learned one thing this week, it’s that the country values stay-at-home moms. We value the hard work they put in to raise our country’s children and care for our country’s families. After Hilary Rosen‘s serious political gaffe this week where she said that Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life,” literally every political pundit or media personality in the country rose in agreement to defend the difficult work that goes into raising children. It was a pretty unifying moment on the Mommy Wars.
But this discussion about the value of stay-at-home moms has made me a little confused. While everyone’s quick to leap to Ann Romney’s defense, as they definitely should, our culture rarely seems to put financial worth behind the actual work she dedicated much of her life to. In fact, we care so little about raising children, we don’t even support the mothers who want to take a short break from their normal employment to do so. More »
Ann Romney’s SAHM Work Is Confirmed By All Corners Of The Universe As ‘Work’
One of the biggest — and perhaps one of the longest — causes of consternation among feminist circles is that “women’s work,” or rather work that is commonly delegated to women, is not considered “real work.” It’s an ugly and demeaning notion culturally held that raising children and “running the small country of home” as novelist Allison Pearson once said, is somehow not challenging and trying. And in the wake of Hilary Rosen‘s gaffe about Ann Romney having “never worked a day in her life,” the assertion has resurfaced. But luckily — she appears to be alone in this slip up that SAHM aren’t “working.” More »
‘For Better Or For Worse’ Cartoonist On Why Comics Aren’t For The Weak
Growing up in suburban Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, I read the comics pages in the Chicago Tribune every day in a very precise order, starting with the boring ones (“The Lockhorns,” “Peanuts” — sorry, Franzen — and “Cathy”) and working my way toward my favorites (“Fox Trot,” “Brenda Starr”). The very last comic I read every day was Lynn Johnston‘s “For Better or For Worse.”
“Fox Trot” was funny, but fundamentally gag-based, and the family never aged or grew; Jason scares Paige with his iguana over and over and over, and she never gets a clue. “Brenda Starr,” told stories about its “girl reporter” heroine, but Brenda, too, never aged, and the strip was dramatic, not funny. More »
‘How The Pressures Of Marriage, Motherhood, and Work Made Me An Alcoholic’
Many women will be able to relate to Brenda Wilhelmson‘s story. She was mom, wife and employee trying to do everything perfectly, but in reality she was over-worked, stressed-out, lonely and feeling like she wasn’t doing any of it well. So, she turned to drinking.
One glass of wine turned to two or three each night, and things just escalated from there until, one day, she realized she was a full-blown alcoholic–with a child in the next room. After nearly 10 years of this “hellish existence” Wilhelmson’s journey was captured in her book, Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife. In honor of Alcohol Awareness Month, we talked with Brenda, who, among other things, says that her battle with drinking made her realize the unhealthy strive for perfection that so many moms have today. More »
Your Boobs May Recover From Breastfeeding But Your Income Won’t
So in the long term for many many women, this means significantly less money in the bank for the first five years of the child’s life — a breastfeeding tax, if you will. More »
‘Adoption Worked Better For My Career’
Last week on this site we talked about women who were happy they put off having children in order to focus on their careers. But what about women who wanted children, when they were still climbing up the career path, but decided adoption fit better into their lives and may have worked better for their careers?
There are many reasons for adopting a child but could career be one of them? It is estimated that around 120,000 children are adopted by U.S. citizens each year. Approximately half of these children are adopted by individuals not related to them (called “stranger adoptions”) and about half are adopted by relatives such as grandparents or stepparents. With more and more women are waiting to have children later in life, adoption could be a great option.
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‘My Job Got Me Through My Pregnancy’
In a recent interview with The Daily, Mad Men star January Jones said though working while she was eight months pregnant was challenging she said, “I think that having work was really helpful … I just didn’t lose myself into ‘baby-world.” January is probably not alone in her feeling that a career that you love can help give you a sense of identity outside of being someone’s mother. After all it was Gloria Steinem who argued that having another identity besides being someone’s mother and wife was the essence of feminism. And especially during a pregnancy, which comes with lots of joy but lots of stress and worry as well, going to work can be a great relief. We talked to some women who said their jobs also helped them get through their pregnancies.
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Increasingly, Companies Are OK With Babies At Work
When attorney Becky McElduff went back to work after a 3-month maternity leave, she had a few extra things to bring for her first day back at the office. A pack-and-play. A stroller. A diaper bag. And, the user of all that gear: her 12-week old daughter, Audrey. Becky’s employer, Kansas-city based National Association of Insurance Commissioners, is one of a growing number of companies that allow new moms and dads to bring their babies to work.
To clarify, we’re not talking about an employer having a daycare facility or provider in its offices. These are programs in which you simply bring your infant with you and plop him on your lap or in a swing by your desk while you work. Or at least try to. As hard as it is to believe, companies who’ve tried this swear by its effectiveness.
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Meet Founder Of Moms Into Fitness, Lindsay Brin
This week on That Girl, we are celebrating moms who stay fit. Lindsay Brin is the founder of Moms Into Fitness–a national fitness program to help women achieve healthier bodies and minds during pregnancy and afterwards. Lindsay is on a mission to help women “find a flat stomach again” and teach them how to get fit and eat better while juggling the responsibilities of raising a family. The former NFL cheerleader knows the toll that having kids can take on our bodies and has not only lost 40 pounds herself, but continues to challenge herself to get in better shape every week knowing that “exercise never gets easier, you just get better.” More »
