Apt. 11D

How Does She Do It?

Sunday's New York Times Business Section often profiles a CEO of a Fortune 500. I always look forward to these profiles, because I'm curious what makes such driven individuals tick. What are their unique personality traits or talents that propelled them to the top of the business world? Do they have a unique vision for the business world? Did they see opportunities that everyone else missed? 

 This Sunday, the New York Times focused on Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. With Facebook's recent IPO offering, a profile on Sandberg was an obvious choice.

Nearly the entire article was devoted to the subject of how she combines her role as a mom with her career. Work-family balance is an important topic. As a mom, I have struggled with combining a career with my family's needs. However, the New York Times seems obsessed with this topic when it comes to women CEOs. They never ask a male CEO how he balances work-family, just the women. Don't men have kids, too? 

I guess I'm not the only one who was annoyed by this column. Rebecca Rosen is annoyed that the New York Times credits Sandberg's success with good "luck," rather than hard work. Penelope Trunk says that the New York Times failed to give the complete picture of what child-care looks like in a family with two hard driven inviduals who work in the tech industry. Multiple nannies are required to watch the kids. She says that you can't run a startup and expect to see your kids. She doesn't think that most women would be willing to make that trade off. Others, like Jezebel, are annoyed that Sandberg blames the victim, women, for lack of ambition for their lack of corporate accomplishments. Katy Waldman says that women do need to fight to get to the top and defends Sandberg. 

Sandberg made it to the top, not only because of luck and ambition, but because she played by rules. She didn't take off time to watch the kids when they were young. She didn't take lower positions or refuse to travel for business. She played by the rules. The trouble is that the rules don't work for most families. I would rather see a focus on leaders, both male and female, who made it to the top and did NOT play by the rules.  Because the rules suck. 

 

Other links: Sheryl Sandberg's TED speech. 

Stay at Home Spouses and Their Critics

I have long been a fan of Nancy Folbre's blog posts at the New York Times. She typically discusses the economics of parenthood, and I've regarded her as a champion of families in all their various shapes and sizes. Today's column was unneccessarily nasty. 

She refers to the recent article in Bloomberg about the rise of stay-at-home dads and their role in supporting successful career women. A reader forwarded me the article a few weeks ago, and I believe I threw out a quick link on the blog. The article discusses how many dads either slow down their own careers or stop them entirely to watch the children, as the wife works the long hours or travels for her job. 

The article was mildly interesting. I have several friends who took on the role of primary caregiver with the wives taking on the role of primary breadwinner. I didn't really need an article to be aware of this trend, but I was happy to see the guys getting props for their work. 

Folbre seems to not like anyone staying home, regardless of their gender. She prefers the Scandinavian model where the state makes it easier for both parents to work. She says that American tax policies have created unfair incentives for stay-at-home parents. 

Professor McCluskey asserts that the marriage tax bonus should be termed “aid for affluent husband care.” Given the existence of homemaker dads, a more accurate term is “aid for affluent spouse care.”

Whatever we call it, there is no reason to subsidize it. Beautifully decorated living rooms and gourmet meals are delightful after a long day at the office – but they shouldn’t come at taxpayers’ expense.

Excuse me? Excuse me? Is that what Prof. Folbre thinks that I'm doing in this house? Does she really believe that any stay-at-home parent is home and forgoing thousands of dollars of salary, because they get an extra $20 in their tax return? Folbre needs to get out of the university and actually talk to some real parents. 

I'm home, because there are no jobs that will allow me to leave at 3:00 when the school bus pulls up and for parent-teacher conferences or illnesses. The job that I was trained for, no longer exists. I am only qualified to work at jobs that pay $20,000, which would never cover the amount of childcare that I would require for school vacations and summer breaks. (Not even discussing the extra work involved with raising a special needs child.) I am not preparing gourmet meals most nights. Think hotdogs and Annie's Mac and Cheese. I am helping with homework projects and driving kids to swim practice. I'm making a few dollars here and there with writing projects when they happen. I am volunteering at the school. 

It's a huge sacrifice to be home like this. My 401K nest egg is pitiful. I feel guilty buying new shoes for myself. It took me a couple of years to get over the huge loss of prestige of dropping from a university professor to the untouchable status of stay at home parent. It's completely bizarre, mean spirited, and ignorant to think that anyone does this job for $20 on their tax return. 

Working Mothers and Hollywood

Guilt and regret are part of the parenthood package. Along with the joy and the sweet memories of bringing home the baby from the hospital and baby's first steps comes the twinge of regret. Maybe I should have had a touch more patience when my son was struggling with Algebra. Maybe I should haven't said X when I was so angry. Maybe I should have spent more time playing board games with my daughter. Everybody has those thoughts. 

At the same time, the world is not yet set up to allow two parents to work and to manage all the demands of the family without a certain amount of craziness. At the Y on Wednesday, the moms talked about how they were trying to remain employed, while managing their families. This group of moms were the parents of special needs kids, so the constraints were even larger. These moms, like all moms, wanted to work during the school hours. They needed a flexible schedule to attend parent-teacher conferences and to watch an ill child. They couldn't afford to take a job that paid less than the expenses for the babysitter and gas.  Those jobs do not exist. 

The parenthood package also involves boredom and sacrifice. Presumably if one decreases one's personal boredom and sacrifice, then one increases the guilt factor. If one decreases one's guilt factor, one increases the personal boredom and sacrifice factor. (The guilt factor is always there, BTW, if you work or you don't. I'm full of it. Of course, I'm a neurotic, so maybe don't go by me.)

Virginia Postel says that Hollywood still portrays women leaders as consumed with the first kind of guilt. They subscribe to the Anna Quindlen doctrine which is that family time is always more meaningful than any career. This Quindlen doctrine skews the Margaret Thatcher movie with 

The problem, rather, is that grafted on to what could be an affecting story of greatness and decline is an invidious, and gratuitous, moral. Call it the Gospel According to Anna Quindlen, the writer and columnist who enshrined its maxims in a commencement speech she wrote in 1999 and eventually turned into the best-selling book “A Short Guide to a Happy Life.” “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office,” she instructed. “Don’t ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: ‘If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.’”

I have no idea what I'll think on my death bed. My regrets might be that I didn't use enough sun screen in my teen years. Or that I ate too many Big Macs over the years. Or that I never bought those tickets to see Nirvana. I can't live my life trying to figure out what I'll be thinking years from now. I am just trying to make the most of the cards on my table at this moment. 

But back to the Postel piece, I'm not sure that she's right. There are plenty of movies about successful, happy working women. Erin Brockovich comes to mind. But there must be more, right? 

Domestic Violence

I'm catching up on my RSS feed and am rather shocked by these posts by Penelope Trunk. I have zero personal experience in this area (thank you, Lord), so I'm not quite sure what to say. Comments? 

UPDATE: 

I read PT, because there's enough interesting mixed in with the crazy. For example, I never really thought about the victim's responsibility in domestic violence. Not sure that I buy it, but it was interesting.

The problem with reading PT and other train wreck blogs is that I fear the Kitty Genovese affect. What if she's really getting pummeled and I do nothing? I don't know if she is or she isn't, because she put a picture of her goddamn ass on the Internet. Credibility issues. A few months back, she sounded very suicidal, so I e-mailed her to see if she was really going to put a gun to her head. What if she killed herself and I made no effort to stop it? Other bloggers have written that they want to kill themselves on the Internet. It puts me in a really bad spot.

The Two Year Window

 
The New Republic had a fantastic cover article a couple weeks ago, "The Two Year Window."  (Sorry, you need a subscription. Mother Jones has a summary. Here's a backdoor version of the article.)

The author, Jon Cohn, describes research on early childhood development, including the fascinating and horrfying accounts of Romania orphanages. The upshort of the research is that the first two years of a baby's development is incredibly important. Ignore or abuse a child during those first two years and the damage is permanent. No amount of love and attention can entirely heal the child's brain. 

Romanians horror orphanages are extreme, but there are quite a number of substandard daycare centers in America. Imagine kids strapped into carseats watching cartoons all day.

If early childhood is so important, why aren't we spending more on babies than on prisons? Cohn says we spend $4,000 on early childhood education, while we spend $11,000 on older kids. We spend even more on senior citizens.

Maybe we need to adjust our priorities. 

Over 50 and Pregnant

Is there anything wrong with being over 50 and pregnant? 

Child Welfare Bureaucracy Hell

Whenever the local news covers the latest horrific story of child abuse, my first reaction is always to rant about the incompetent social workers. After reading this story in New York Magazine, my next rant won't be about the case workers. It will be about the incompetent system.

New York Magazine profiles child-welfare supervisor Chereece Bell who was fired after the latest horrific death. She also faces a four year prison sentence. She describes 12 hour work days and long case loads - an impossible job for anybody. 

The workload was so deep that case workers would take vacation weeks in order to catch up on the paperwork:

To try to keep the computer files on his cases up-to-date, Adams would sneak into the office on Sundays to work. But even that did not seem to be enough. So he did the only thing he could to carve out more time: put in for vacation. If you took a one-week vacation, your supervisor wouldn’t assign you any new cases in the two and a half days before you left, which meant you’d have that time to enter your old notes into the computer. Adams even went one step further and came into the office during his week off. “At the time, I didn’t realize that was why he was taking vacation,” Bell says. “It wasn’t until after all this happened that I realized that was only for him to catch up.”

 

 

I Need Steve's OK to Take Out a Credit Card???

The Federal Reserve board has made it tougher for stay-at-home spouses to get their own credit cards.

If I go into Macy's and want to get a store credit card, so I can get 20% off a big purchase, I CAN'T DO IT. You know why? Because the Federal Reserve board says I have to get an okay from my husband who makes the lion share of the money around here. I need my husband permission to spend OUR money? Really? How old am I?

From Ann Carrns in the New York Times: 

All this struck a nerve with me recently, because of a problem that arose with an account I hold with my husband. A few years back, he got a new credit card so he could rack up frequent-flier miles. Even though I was working full time and had my own set of plastic, he got a “companion” card for me, so we could pool our spending and earn miles faster. I’ve used it often, without thinking much about it.

Until last week, that is. I had a question about a statement fee and called the card company — only to be told that the assistant couldn’t discuss it with me without first obtaining my husband’s permission.

I was speechless. I began supporting myself financially in my early 20s. I have my own credit history and credit score. Yet, I was being told that I couldn’t be taken seriously without a say so from a man (albeit, one of whom I’m exceedingly fond). It felt like a scene from the “Mad Men” era.

When I insisted, the representative partly addressed my question, but said a full review would require spousal approval. For me, the incident provided a good laugh and an anecdote for a blog post. But for an at-home mom in, say, a deteriorating or possibly even abusive relationship, it could be devastating. Forcing such women to piggyback on a husband’s account means that she is still subject, to an uncomfortable degree, to his oversight — which strikes me as an unhealthy step backwards on the long, hard-fought road to gender equality.

This is utterly bullshit. My husband's salary is our joint property. It's joint property as soon as that check is cut on Friday. This credit card law not only puts me on par with my children in this house, it also robs me of control over my own money. 

Beyond the Corsage and the Breakfast Buffet

I love that Mother's Day has morphed into Let's-Talk-About-How-Screwed-Mothers-Are Day. 

• The Nation reprints a column of Katha Pollitt's from last February. Pollitt writes, "Are you a tiger mother, a soccer mom, a helicopter parent, an attachment mom, a permissive free spirit who just wants your child to be herself? Congratulations. Your kids have a good chance of turning out reasonably well." Parenting styles don't matter. Poverty does. 
• Mother's Little Helper? Stephanie Coontz writes that the 50s housewife wasn't more appreciated than today's SAHMs. Back then, the 50s mom spent 55 hours per week doing house work. 
• Nicholas Kristof says that mothers would be a lot happier if they weren't dieing in childbirth. 350,000 women die in child birth every year, and 215 million women need birth control.
• Nancy Folbre looks at unemployment rates in single moms and gives a shout out to a Elizabeth's study on stimulus money and employment programs.  

Happy Fucking Mothers Day! 

Thanks to the Nannies

Amy Poehler gives the most awesome awards speech evah!