Posted by: Lauren Young on May 17
Losing a child is every parent's nightmare.
In China, where schools were among the most damaged buildings as a result of the recent earthquake, those nightmares are playing out by the thousands.
China's one-child policy has been in place since 1979 to control a booming population. According to this story, the government edict means that more than 400 million births have been prevented. The Chinese government says it has successfully slowed population growth to about 10 million people a year and there is now an average birth rate of 1.8 children per couple in China, compared to six children when it was introduced.
With a wave of international adoptions from China in the past decade, Comic Mom muses whether some people should consider giving their adopted Chinese children back. That's a radical thought--I'm sure fellow blogger Cathy Arnst will have something to say on that topic.
Last summer, China cracked down on international adoptions, leaving plenty of would-be parents waiting in limbo. I have a childhood friend who has been waiting to adopt from China for nearly two years. She's on "the list" but now who knows what will happen?
The horrifying images of children being pulled out of the rubble hit close to home, since my husband and I made a decision to have just one child. When I wrote about having one kid, I got a slew of responses from readers. I'd like to hear from you again: With China's tragedy, are you rethinking your decision to have an only child?
Posted by: Lauren Young on May 16
This is written by Savita Iyer-Ahrestani, a freelance financial journalist now living in The Netherlands who guest blogs for Working Parents every other Friday.
It’s always in the house but most of the time, we’re not aware of it, having stored it at the back of some closet, behind the daily logistics of our lives. We try not to take it out but then there are times when that can of worms just seems to make its own way out of the closet, and its contents rear their ugly heads.
According to a report put out at the end of last year by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than a quarter of working women in the U.S. make more than their husbands. The number has risen by two percentage points since 2000, and continues to rise steadily.
I’m one of the women included in those statistics, and until such time as my husband finishes the PhD he has been working on for the past three years, or finds a job that’s better remunerated than mine, I will remain a part of them. (You'll find a similar tale here.)
Most of the time, I don’t even think about it. But there are other moments when being both the major breadwinner and the one (I feel) putting in the greater contribution to the smooth running of our household make me angry. Okay, I work from home – but why must I always be the one arranging and rearranging my schedule to accommodate the kids and their activities/needs? Is it right that my husband gets to disappear to a university campus all day while I’m stuck cramming work and home into my day, most of the time just about managing to meet the demands of both?
Granted, completing a doctorate is no easy task, and it is a demanding and full-time occupation. Yet I have moments in which I tend to “monetize” things, and I believe – albeit only for a brief time – that what I do is more “important” than what my husband does because it pays more.
As such, I also feel I’m “entitled” to something more – but what? I’m not totally sure.
According to an article I came across in the Boston Globe , women who out-earn their husbands by doing extremely demanding jobs, are still taking on the onus of household and child-related duties. But, the article points out, many women also are in the position they’re in because they do not want to relinquish their traditional role. They feel their husbands can’t handle the home stuff as well as they do, thereby leaving the men to fall back upon those conventional gender stereotypes.
When I’m calm and can think clearly, I realize that I am in quite an enviable position as I’ve got a husband who actually enjoys doing household related work. He may, like the best of us, shirk it when he can, but I can count on him to pitch in and go the extra mile when I need him to. Unlike another father I know who earns less than his wife, my husband doesn’t denigrate chauffering kids back home from school and to extra curricular activities as “woman’s work.” On the contrary, he has often bailed me out to the detriment of his own work when I’m on deadline or expecting a phone call, by picking up the kids from school and taking them to wherever they need to go to.
Unlike some men who might feel depressed and demoralized that their wives are earning more than them, as Donald Trump points out in a recent posting on his Trump Blog , my husband is upbeat and cheery and comfortable with who he is and where we are in life.
“With a woman bringing in more money, [a] relationship actually ends up being stronger because money always seems to make life easier,” Trump writes.
That may be true, but I’d also like to think that my husband’s attitude alone is usually enough to stuff those worms back into their can and put me back on track.
Posted by: Lauren Young on May 16
I posted this last week...but somehow it got deleted, but it's okay because I've updated it with some more recent data.
Maybe I should stay at home.
According to a survey last week from Salary.com, a stay-at-home-mom would earn almost $117,000 annually, a figure which includes ample overtime pay.
And that’s precisely why I’d like to quibble with the results. I receive no “overtime” pay for my day job, which often extends into the night or weekends. Last weekend, for example, I spent much my time juggling family with work because I had to turn around an article and fact-check the piece with a source.
Oh, and as a working parent, I am not DEFINITELY compensated for my second job—cooking, light housework, paying the bills, etc.
Lisa Takeuchi Cullen had the same reaction on Time.com’s Work-in-Progress blog.
I have no problem with the job of mom being highly valued, if only by some b.s. survey designed to garner the website some press. But what sticks in my craw is the devaluing of working moms and dads. We too perform those other roles—housekeeper, cook, shrink—but on top of schlepping off to bring home the bacon.
Amen, sister.
Like Lisa, I realize cute surveys like this one, as well as another survey from MomConnection, are designed to generate some marketing buzz. What sticks in my craw is that it’s impossible to put a pricetag on the value of parenting. Some weeks I’m the top contributor to the team. Other weeks my husband and caregiver pick up the slack.
What about stay-at-home dads? Last year's figures from Salary.com determine that dads who perform 10 typical job functions would equate to an annual salary of $128,755 for a stay-at-home dad. Stay-at-home dads, however, are in short supply. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates there are 159,000 dads who made the choice to stay at home in 2006, compared to 143,000 in 2005. Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates there were 5.6 million stay-at-home moms in 2006. We'll have to wait a few weeks to see if there are any changes for 2007.
If you had to come up with a number, how much would you say a Working Parent should earn? Should the starting salary be high, considering the physical demands of working with newborns? Or do the parents of teenagers deserve bigger paychecks for the mental challenge?
Posted by: Sarah Davis on May 14
The right to a paid maternity leave seems a simple topic to me, but a little investigation shows it to be as controversial as the health-care issue in general. (“Why should my tax dollars pay for a stranger to have more kids than she can afford?” is the type of argument you hear on the other side.) Two recent posts on the WSJ’s Juggle (here & here) and the comments that follow give a good sampling of how dissatisfied parents can be, even well-employed parents.
It didn’t occur to me to complain about my own experience. After the birth of each of my two children, I pieced together 6 weeks of paid maternity leave, saved-up vacation, and a handful of sick days so that I could be home for a full three months to get to know these new wobbly-headed creatures. I have a flexible schedule, so the return to my job was not a tremendous shock on the system. In fact, a strong record of family-friendly benefits has earned The McGraw-Hill Companies, which owns BusinessWeek, a place on Working Mother magazine’s 100 Best list for the past three years.
So I’m lucky, right? After looking into the support systems in place in other parts of the world, turns out I could be luckier. According to MomsRising, an organization that strives to improve conditions for working mothers, the U.S. is one of only four countries not to offer paid leave. The others? Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and Lesotho. Fifty-one percent of new mothers in the U.S. have no paid leave at all.
I asked Janette Eng, a Canadian risk analyst who lives in Munich with her German husband and 10-month-old baby, how the system works there. In Germany, mothers are allowed three years of leave. Six weeks before and eight weeks after the baby’s due date, all workers receive full pay. After that, until the baby is one year old, the government pays up to two-thirds of the salary (up to a maximum of 1,800 euro per month). Mothers who return to their jobs within three years are guaranteed the same position and pay (or better). Daycare is subsidized by the state and costs, depending on household income, no more than 460 euro a month for a full-time spot. There’s much more: free midwife service before and well after the birth; “child money,” or 150 euro a month per child till age 25; and on and on.
Starting a family on the right track seems the least a government can do toward creating a productive, satisfied workforce--and happier, better-balanced families. This is clearly not a U.S. priority. Can’t we do better?
Posted by: Lourdes Lee Valeriano on May 13
For Mother's Day, my daughter gave me pink and orange snapdragons, my favorite walnut sticky bun, and space—space in our busy lives to just hang out.
In a gesture almost as heroic in its quotidian context as Moses parting the Red Sea, my teen pushed aside homework and blocked out cell phone calls, IMs, and text messages to spend Sunday with me. We sat in our sun-dappled living room and picked at our breakfast, read, and even napped a bit.
Of the three members of my household—my daughter, our dachshund, and I—it was I who had the hardest time relaxing into the room in our lives that my daughter created. The irony is I've been thinking a lot about space lately. About how our bodies are actually 99.99% emptiness between atoms, according to writer Eckhart Tolle, and yet how our lives can feel so dense that we can hardly breathe. About giving my daughter space to be who she is. About creating space between listening and reacting, so I can hear what others are telling me and be aware of the agenda I often rush to push.
Even while my daughter lay on our sofa under a throw, our dog draped bonelessly on her thigh, I sat on the carpet, uncomfortable with the time on my hands. I shuffled through the Sunday Times while actually looking for an excuse to jump up and get the dishes washed. I couldn't wait for us to get going on the next items (lunch, museum) on our Mother's Day plan. I've gotten so used to juggling things, fixing things, making things happen for my daughter, that I've fallen out of practice just being with her.
It was my daughter, the 13-year-old whose job is to push away from me, who was able to set aside that role for a spell and sit with me in companionable silence. As she gets older, she'll have even less use for my reflex organizing and problem solving on her behalf. But she'll need people to be with. With practice, one of those persons can be me.
