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NOVEMBER 27, 2000

WORK & FAMILY
By Pamela Mendels

Four Better or Worse
The Margaret Mead of the minivan set says the second child is the one who tests the work-family balance

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As an anthropologist, Rebecca L. Upton studies the rituals and beliefs of her subjects. In the mid-1990s, she plied her trade in Botswana, working to understand how villagers regarded and explained infertility.

Upton is still examining human response to reproduction. But her current subjects live a world away from the mud huts of the villagers in southern Africa whom she studied for two years. In fact, they closely resemble you and me.

For the last year, Upton, a researcher at the University of Michigan, has been observing what happens when middle-class wage-earning married couples in suburban Detroit carry out a rite of passage of American family life -- having a second child.

In doing so, she says, the couples transform their "and baby makes three" world into the idealized nuclear family, father/mother/plus two -- or more. In many cases, however, they find themselves in for a rude awakening, summarized neatly in the title of a paper Upton presented recently: The Next One Changes Everything.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT. Upton believes it is the birth of Child No. 2, not No. 1, that explodes the notion of an easy balance between work and family life. One small indication, she says, comes from the Census Bureau, which reports that women who have recently given birth to their first child are slightly more likely to be back at work (61%) than mothers with a second baby (57%).

She's now trying to flesh out that statistic by observing the everyday lives of five Michigan couples with annual household incomes of $30,000 to $90,000 who have recently added a second child to the family. As the Margaret Mead of the minivan set, she does her fieldwork by observing the mundane: trips to the grocery store, visits to the pediatrician, Sunday afternoon gatherings for the televised football game. "Sitting around the dinner table is a huge data-gathering session for me," she says.

What Upton has unearthed is a collection of dilemmas facing the growing family. The list, which she discussed in a recent phone conversation, certainly resonated with me, a professional and mother of two.

First, Upton finds couples frequently fretting about the costs of child care, which are onerous enough when there's only one child. "Even if you're getting a discount, with two kids it's still astronomical," she says. The cost can be $175 a week or so. With a price tag like that, many parents understandably begin questioning the financial sense of both parents working outside the home.

Another common headache is the child-care breakdown, which is twice as complicated when two kids are involved. "All hell breaks loose," Upton says. "Someone has to leave work and pick up the children." And what do you do if one child is sick and the other is healthy, or if one can sit quietly in your office for a couple of hours while you finish work for the day, but the other is a "terrible two" in need of constant supervision?

IT TAKES A VILLAGE. Then there's the evening meal. I can't think of any working parent who wouldn't wince in recognition at Upton's observations. "Dinner can be a big problem: Who has to prepare it? Who has to get it?" she says. "We want to have this healthy lifestyle, but we just order pizza because it's easy and it eliminates the fights over 'I cooked last time,' 'Well, I had the harder day.'"

Although Upton is in the business of observation, not problem-solving, I couldn't stop myself from asking her if she had any remedies for the difficulties she observes. Cheaper child care is one obvious answer, she says. Longer leave times would help, as would a new climate in which fathers feel as comfortable as mothers in taking time off for child-rearing. Those are all solutions to which business can contribute.

Another answer lies outside the realm of the workplace. In Maun, the village that she studied in Africa, Upton found it common for parents to turn to their relatives to lend a hand with child-minding. Among the Midwesterners she is examining now, the ones who have the easiest time of it are those with a helpful parents or siblings near by.

There's probably not a big lesson in that for employers trying to figure out how to keep mothers in the workforce. But it's food for thought.

Pamela Mendels is based in New York City. She wrote about small business and had a workplace advice column at Newsday, and has written about workplace matters for Business Week, WorkingWoman, and the Web site iGuide.