Parents employed outside the home are always trying to please two masters, as the saying goes. While some parents have jobs allowing flexible scheduling or have understanding coworkers who will cover when kids are sick or there’s a meeting at school, many more experience anxiety about managing the often-conflicting roles of worker and parent.
Although the conversation about work-family balance often stops at parental leave and child care issues, parents of older children may experience renewed tension once their kids are no longer eligible for afterschool programs — often by age 13, just in time for impulsive teen judgment to kick in. Parent educators say it’s doubly important for working parents to make sure their teenage and preteen kids know they’re connected to their family and that they “hear your voice even when you’re not there.”
Experts say parents can strategize ways to manage the time crunch and to monitor children even in their absence, including making the most of certain critical moments in the day and helping children to rehearse how they’ll handle situations that come up during work hours. Meanwhile, employers can help mitigate the pressure that working parents feel when they worry about their children. These include utilizing flexible work schedules, providing on-site parenting workshops, and allowing simple amenities like access to telephones to call kids during breaks.
“The biggest concern parents have,” says Susan Abelson, a licensed parent educator and director of the Intentional Parenting Center in Eden Prairie, “is time.” Whether they’re working a high-powered corporate job or a late-night shift at a hospital or factory, the key to making the most of the time parents do have at home is to hone in on “key times” for connection, says Abelson, citing University of Minnesota research. These key times are before everyone leaves for work or school, at the end of the school day, mealtimes, and bedtime.
For example, when you get home from work, resist the desire to check your mail, start dinner, or fire off questions about the day’s events. Instead, Abelson recommends, “Put your stuff down and shoot some hoops, have a cup of cocoa, play cards, look through a catalog together. Take time to create an easy, comfortable, fun ‘connect.’ Find a creative way to make connections, so kids feel like they are being held in the family.”
Not unlike Pinocchio’s embodied conscience, Jiminy Cricket, “Kids need to be able to hear your voice when you’re not there,” says Rose Allen, a family relations educator with University of Minnesota Extension. Parents must be “clear, [though] not dictatorial, about their rules and values.” She suggests parents and their teens could rehearse responses to situations that might arise in your absence: “Help them to answer the question ‘What would you do if. . . ?’”
There are still gaps in the socioeconomic infrastructure that supports families. “Achieving work/life balance is not a problem for just a few U.S. workers, but, rather, is the norm for the majority of the U.S. workforce,” testified economist Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in April 2007. Workers across a multitude of demographic dimensions — age, race, ethnicity, marital status, income, educational attainment, and kind of job — face work/life issues.” Despite the fact that two-thirds of families with children have all available parents at work, Boushey says, “Many — if not most — U.S. workplaces continue to act as if their workers have a full-time spouse at home to provide [child] care.”
Some Minnesota companies are ahead of the curve on work/life balance. Best Buy, the Richfield-based corporation, has widely implemented a concept developed by two employees called Results-Only Work Environment, a rather revolutionary concept whereby mandatory desk time and meetings are out the window, and bottom-line performance is what counts. If you want to take a two-hour lunch with your sister, volunteer at your kid’s school, or meet your kid’s bus at 3 p.m., nobody will ask questions as long as your job is done and you can be reached if necessary.
And Abelson, through the Working Family Resource Center, a St. Paul nonprofit, offers on-site workshops such as the one she’s currently conducting at a local law firm. “Every other week, we discuss a different aspect of adolescence,” Albelson says. “[These workshops are] topic-driven and skill-based. Without taking a parent away from the workplace, it is funded and supported by where they work.”
Tending to the issues that concern parents, notes Allen, is good for business, not just for families: “These are bottom-line issues for employers!” She says studies indicate that employer flexibility helps retain employees and reduce turnover. Not to mention reducing parental anxiety and increasing kids’ sense of security; when that happens, everyone wins.
Kris Berggren manages work/life balance issues by balancing her laptop on her lap in the most unlikely places at the most unlikely hours of the day.
