Posted by: Lauren Young on September 05
BusinessWeek just came out with its annual list of the Best Places to Launch A Career, ranking 119 employers on areas such as pay, benefits, and training programs.
To find out whether these companies are also family friendly, I compared BusinessWeek’s list to Working Mother Magazine’s annual list of the best 100 companies for working moms. I realize that the focus is on mothers, but aside from lactation rooms and women’s networks, the majority of perks available to working moms, such as back-up daycare and flexible schedules, are available to working dads, too. As for parental leave, many companies offer paid time off to moms as well as dads.
Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and KPMG are the best companies to start your career and stick around once you have a family. These three companies, which hail from the accounting realm, rank in the top 10 of both lists.
Overall, 35 companies overlap on the two lists, which I spent about an hour combing through so I may have missed one or two companies. To be fair, it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison: BusinessWeek's ranking incorporates government agencies such as the IRS, while the Working Mother list does not. BusinessWeek’s survey also includes service-oriented jobs for those young idealists who want to make the world a better place such as AmeriCorps and Teach for America.
The other companies that overlap:
Deloitte
Goldman Sachs
Marriott International
IBM
J.P. Morgan
Microsoft
Abbott Labs
Merrill Lynch
Verizon Communications
General Mills
Lehman Brothers
Cisco Systems
Intel
Wachovia
Citigroup
Accenture
Kraft Foods
Met Life
Prudential
Blue Cross Blue Shield
Eli Lilly
Grant Thornton
Merck
Booz Allen
Allstate
Hewlett Packard
UBS
Credit Suisse
PNC
McGladery & Pullen
Considering that the average American will have had 10 jobs between the ages of 18 and 38, it’s unlikely that most of today's college graduates will stay with the same employer from cradle (of their first child) to grave. But aside from a gold watch and a lovely retirement package, there are some good reasons to look beyond employers as mere launching pads. To paraphrase Richard Dawson, the host of "Family Feud," our survey says these are 35 companies worth staying at for your entire career.
If there are any readers out there who have worked at these companies while raising a family, please share your thoughts on whether or not they are good places to start as well as stick around.
Posted by: Lauren Young on September 05
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 was by total accident that I got my children to both taste and like dark chocolate.
I had run out of the Kinder Schokolade they, like many European kids, always eat, and the only thing I had on hand was a bar of dark chocolate, diabetic at that, left in my fridge by my father, who’s a Type 2 patient. 
My kids were game to try so I gave them a couple of squares each.
Bingo: Since that moment, it’s the only kind of chocolate they like.
Personally, I only like dark chocolate and in recent years, I even prefer the diabetic kind my father has over regular black chocolate.
The brand is “Stella,” it’s made in Germany, has a high cocoa content and is fairly bitter. The kind I like has tiny flecks of nuts in it. It’s definitely worth trying for any dark chocolate aficionado.
But I was still quite surprised that my children liked it so much. Was there any particular reason for this, I wondered?
Professor Mary Engler, a director in the cardiovascular and genomics graduate program at the University of California, San Francisco, who has done extensive research on the benefits of dark chocolate, couldn’t really think of an explanation. But, Engler says, dark chocolate offers children the same benefits it gives adults, because of the higher amount of cocoa flavanols and the lower amounts of sugar and calories it has compared to regular chocolate.
“I have recommended 70% cocoa content (manufacturers are now putting the cocoa content on chocolate bar labels) due to the higher amount of flavonoids and better taste but dark, even at 60% is better than milk chocolate,” Engler says. “The cocoa content is a good indicator of the amount of flavonoids found in the chocolate. Typically, dark chocolate contains two to three times as many cocoa flavonoids as milk chocolate.”
It’s true that most other chocolate can be cloying after one gets used to the taste of dark chocolate. After a few days, I did stock up on Kinder bars but my children didn’t want them anymore.
For children, of course, any kind of chocolate has to be given in limitation, and Engler doesn’t think it’s wise to recommend a daily dose of even dark chocolate. Rather, children should be encouraged to eat other kinds of food that contain flavanols, with dark – or any other kind of chocolate – kept for an occasional treat.
But I’m from the school of thought that believes a couple squares of chocolate a day is fine. I was raised among kids whose “goutee,” or after-school snack, was a slice of crusty bread and two squares of chocolate, and I have kept up that tradition. Our flavor of the moment is dark, but if it goes back to Kinder, that’s okay, too.
P.S. Another great dark chocolate is the one made by Favarger, a family company located in the Geneva suburb I grew up in.
Posted by: Lauren Young on September 04
This entry is written by BusinessWeek contributing editor Mark Hyman (below), who is the author of Until It Hurts (Beacon), a book about impact of parents, coaches and other adults on youth sports to be published in April 2009. Hyman will contribute other Working Parents posts in the coming months.
What does it say about me that I truly look forward to the release each year of the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association’s survey on “Sports Participation in America.” Whatever it is, I’m not bragging.
The SGMA report always delivers a few wonderfully arcane bits of information about the sports we’re participating in and others we’ve cast aside. This year’s edition doesn’t disappoint as I learned that only 10 percent of freshwater fishers go fly fishing and just 15 per cent of freshwater fishers go saltwater fishing. (That’s quite a diss to the fly fishing community, if I’m interpreting correctly.) 
Invariably, there are also good insights into trends in sports for kids. This one, in particular, really struck me this year. The peak age for participation in team sports is 11 years old, when 72 per cent of American children are playing at least one team sport. Kids aren’t exactly abandoning sports after that - 63 per cent of all 6 to 17 year olds play on at least one team. But after age 11, the numbers do begin to tumble.
Hmm. What should we make of that?
There are multiple possible explanations, of course. By 11, kids are discovering loads of new interests. For some, rec council soccer can’t hold a candle to learning to cook, playing the piano, a hike in the woods or, of course, hanging at the mall with friends. Some degree of attrition is inevitable.
How’s this for another theory? Kids are picking up a vibe from the adults that organized sports, after a certain age, is really intended for the more talented players. If you’re 12 and can’t run as fast or swish baskets as reliably as the better players, it might be time to move on.
I see this in my own community, where it gets tougher even to find relaxed, organized recreation leagues for older kids who aren’t headed for stardom, who just want to be in the game. Adults seem more interested in establishing elite teams and grooming kids to play on the most competitive travel leagues.
I mentioned this observation to SGMA vice president Gregg Hartley and asked for his take. He said it’s a national trend that has been developing for some time. “You don’t see as much focus being put on play-for-fun programs. The emphasis is on structured sports programs that somewhat forces [less talented] kids out by the time they are 11, 12, 13,” he told me.
Maybe these kids need to form there own league. I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t invite the adults to watch.
For more information about Hyman's book, check out his blog called Youth Sports Parents.
Posted by: Lourdes Lee Valeriano on September 02
When I heard the news about GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's daughter, my first reaction was to marvel at the rich irony of a politician whose personal story is central to her appeal among conservatives announcing that her unmarried seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant.
My second reaction was: "Now that's one big work-family conflict." Imagine a parent offered the biggest opportunity in her career (a chance to be a heartbeat away from being the leader of the Free World!) just when the last thing her family needs is the harsh spotlight that comes with the process of getting the job. (For other work-family blogs on Palin, click here and here.)
It just so happened that I had been thinking about how parents weigh personal opportunity against the sacrifices they ask their families to make.
Of course, I was pondering less-elevated scenarios. A little over a year ago, a friend had moved her husband and teenage daughter halfway around the world for what seemed like the job of a lifetime. Now the job's gone, but the family is stuck there, and the daughter is trying to adapt to high school in a Third World city. My daughter is about to start high school this week, so I know how scary that can be for a kid. What must it be like for my friend's daughter, away from the home and culture she had known? And if her ambition is to go to college in the U.S. or Europe, how much harder will it be for her now?
I understand that just as parents make sacrifices for their children, sacrifices are required from kids for the good of the family. My family went through upheavals for the sake of my father's career: By the time I was 10, I had lived in four cities and been to three schools as my family picked up stakes whenever my dad, an oil executive, was promoted.
But I just can't help thinking: Is Bristol Palin being asked to make too big of a sacrifice?
Posted by: Mauro Vaisman on September 01
This week, kids across America are starting school. Do you remember that mixed feeling? Summer vacation is over, but you want to meet the new teacher, see old friends, share your stories about camp.
And you are wondering: Any new kids in class?
Yes. My wife.
My wife is also going back to school. Full time.
In April, she told us how she feels about going back to school.
If all goes as planned, she should be done in three years, but who is counting…Me. I am counting. I will support her all the way, so her dream can be fulfilled, and we can move to the next phase of our lives, the two family income.
I am proud of her. But yes, I am scared as well—our lives will change. The schedules, the papers, the school supplies—now it’s all “times 3”
I know that my job as a working parent will get harder. It will be a challenge for all of us. But we are all ready (we hope). We all want Jody to get her PhD. She will be the Doctor in the family.
Are you facing the same situation? Please share your opinions. We all need to hear from you.
I have to go. Today I am making an extra lunch for tomorrow’s lunch box.
And to you Jody: Good luck. This challenge is ours!
