The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (38 page)

The government would give tax credits to developers who build affordable housing near places of work and shopping centers, with nearby meal-preparation facilities, as Dolores Hayden describes in her book
Redesigning the American Dream.
It would create warm and creative day-care centers. If the best day care comes from elderly neighbors, students, grandparents, they could be paid to care for children. Traveling vans for day-care enrichment could roam the neighborhoods as the ice-cream man did in my childhood.

In these ways, the American government could reduce the number of children in “self-care,” draw men into children’s lives, and make marriages happier. These reforms could even improve the lives of children whose parents divorce, because research has shown that the more involved fathers are with their children
before
divorce, the more involved they are with them
afterward.
If the government encouraged corporations to consider the long-range interests of workers and their families, they would save on long-range costs due to higher absenteeism, turnover, juvenile delinquency, mental illness, and welfare support for single mothers.

These are the real profamily reforms. If they seem utopian today, we should remember that in the past, the eight-hour day, the
abolition of child labor, and the vote for women once seemed utopian too. In his book
Megatrends
, John Naisbitt reported that 83 percent of corporate executives believed that more men feel the need to share the responsibilities of parenting; yet only 9 percent of corporations offer paternity leave.

The happiest two-job marriages I saw were between men and women who did not load the former role of the housewife-mother onto the woman, and did not devalue it as one would a bygone “peasant” way of life. They shared that role between them. What couples called “good communication” often meant that they were good at saying thanks for one tiny form or another of taking care of life at home. Making it to the school play, helping a child read, cooking dinner in good spirit, remembering the grocery list, taking responsibility for the “upstairs.” These were the silver and gold of the marital exchange. Up until now, the woman married to the “new man” has been one of the lucky few. But as the government and society shape a new gender strategy, as the young learn from example, many more women and men will be able to enjoy the leisurely bodily rhythms and freer laughter that arise when family life is family life and not a second shift.

Since the publication of
The Second Shift
, Greg Alston no longer plays scary jokes on his son, Daryl, to toughen him up. But the Livingstons have separated and the Judsons have divorced. Cary Livingston lives mainly with her mother, though her father wants desperately to remain involved. Ray Judson sees Erik and the baby every two weeks, and Ruby if she’s around. As the twins grew older, the Shermans plunged back into their careers from which they’ve now retired—Michael to become an ardent activist in human rights.

Afterword

The movement of millions of women into paid jobs constituted the major revolution in the twentieth-century American family. But the stories I heard told of “stalls” in that revolution. An old-fashioned view of fatherhood—that was one stall. No family-friendly policies at work—that was another stall. Too little value on the importance of the small acts of paying attention that constitute care or appreciation for others—yet another stall. I began to realize I was talking to couples trapped within the stalled gender revolution of the 1980s.

But are working parents in America today better off? A 2010 online post by Katrina Alcorn on the
Huffington Post
Web site, both hilarious and serious, gives one woman’s answer and points to a misguided search for answers.
¹
Alcorn describes how she balanced a demanding job, a daily commute, and care for her young children. Then just before the first birthday of her youngest child, she collapsed with insomnia and panic attacks. For these problems, she goes to a psychiatrist who prescribes an antidepressant. The antidepressant caused her to undergo night sweats, headaches, cotton mouth, and further sleeplessness, for which the psychiatrist then prescribes sleeping pills. Alcorn still can’t sleep and now suffers an eye twitch.

For her sleeplessness, she is now sent to a “sleep lab,” where specialists diagnose her with apnea and outfit her with the latest artificial breathing machine. This she describes as “the size of a lunch-box…
with a corrugated hose that looped over my head and three slim black straps that held rubber nose plugs snug to my face …. Oxygen flowed up the vacuum cleaner hose on top of my head and through the nose plugs. When I opened my mouth, air came whooshing out like I was some kind of human leaf blower.” After two weeks, Alcorn finds herself with a fierce headache, unable to breathe through her nose, and on the verge of a cold. Finally a sensible pulmonary specialist points out that long-term use of sleeping pills can hinder breathing, antidepressants can cause insomnia, and artificial breathing machines can dry out nasal passages and so induce colds.

In the end, Katrina Alcorn quits her pills, gives up her Darth Vader breathing machine, feels better, and wisely concludes: “It is crazy to put working parents in impossible situations where they are bound to go crazy, and then act like there’s something wrong with them for going crazy.” Many working parents look fine on the outside, smiling, well-groomed, bright-eyed, she argues, but I feel close to an inner, emotional edge doing what Tina Fey describes as “a tap-dance recital in a minefield.”
²
Indeed, just as many Americans live with great financial debt—unpaid school loans, heavily mortgaged homes, a drive-now-pay-later car—so many may be overloaded with emotional debt. In these times of a stalled revolution, the cultural ideal of the breezily confident woman with the flying hair may be leading many to live beyond their emotional means. So it is to the ultimate causes—the larger “stall”—that we must look.

And how far
have
we come since 1989? To begin with, more American couples are doing the Tina Fey tap dance. In 1975, for example, half of mothers with kids under age eighteen were working. But by 2009, that had risen to nearly three-quarters. In 1975, a third of moms with children under age three were in the labor force; in 2009 it was nearly two-thirds—of whom 73 percent worked full time.
³
And for many, the workday also stretches longer.
⁴

So if more mothers are working outside the home, are more men picking up the workload at home? Compared to the 1980s, more American men believe in sharing the second shift and fewer men hold to traditional roles. In the 1970s, 70 percent of men born before the baby boom agreed: “It’s better for everyone if the man works and the woman cares for home and family.” But by the 1990s, half of those same men agreed and among post—baby boom men, a quarter did.
⁵
Fewer men also disapproved of high-earning wives.

Still, many couples also feel that however much a dad helped at home, his job came before his wife’s. Then came the Great Recession of 2008. The higher-paying jobs of welders, machinists, auto assembly-line workers—all jobs usually filled by men—proved more vulnerable to cost-cutting automation and offshoring than the lower-paid but steadier jobs women held as health aides, administrators, or day-care workers. So while over the past twenty-five years more men have come to believe in sharing the second shift, economic trends caused them to keep an anxious eye on their potentially runaway jobs.

So do the husbands of working moms actually share the second shift more than the men of the 1980s I describe in this book? Since the publication of
The Second Shift
in 1989, a startling two hundred studies published in the decade between 1989 and 1999 provide some answers.
⁶
The most recent, careful, and detailed study by Melissa Milkie, Sara Raley, and Suzanne Bianchi—based on two nationwide surveys—reported the present-day story of married two-job parents of preschool children, just like those in this book.
⁷
In one survey conducted in 2003-5, 3,500 mothers and 3,000 fathers agreed to receive periodic telephone calls during a twenty-four-hour day. During each call parents were asked what they were doing, how long it took, where they were, and who they were with. A second survey, conducted in 2000, simply asked parents how they used their time, including such activities as taking naps.

Compared to working dads, researchers found, full-time working moms with preschool kids put in an extra five hours a week (in the first study) and seven hours a week at home (in the second). This created a weekly leisure gap of five to seven hours, or an extra
two weeks
a year of twenty-four-hour days.
⁸
In my 1980s study, I’d found that compared to their husbands, working moms put in an
extra four weeks a year.
So twenty-five years didn’t rid women of an extra shift. But it did cut the length of it in half.

In 1989, I had found that working moms felt more rushed than working dads. And that’s what the new research found to be still true: half of moms (52 percent) and a third of dads (34 percent) “always felt rushed.” I had also found that women did two or three things at once more often. Women still feel that way more than men but don’t actually do it more than men. I had found that women slept fewer hours than their husbands and did fewer things for “pure fun” with the kids. Their counterparts today sleep as long as their husbands and do fun things with their kids as often too. But husbands watch 2.7 more hours of television a week and get 7.5 more hours a week of adults-only leisure.

So are couples happier as a result of these changes? This matters, of course, for if couples aren’t enjoying life at home, we haven’t
really
unstalled this stalled revolution. The Milkie et al. findings on this issue are unsettling. The researchers compared mothers with full-time jobs (thirty-five hours or more) with those who worked part time or stayed home. Moms with full-time jobs reported laughing with their children less often than anyone else in the study—part-time moms, unemployed moms, and all of the fathers. Surprisingly, fathers married to full-time workers— fathers whose help was most needed—read to, laughed with, and praised their children
less
often than fathers married to part-time or stay-at-home moms. And mothers in full-time jobs (25 percent) were less likely to say they were “completely satisfied with how well their children are doing in life” than were part-time (35 percent) or nonworking (58 percent) moms. About a third of dads were “satisfied,” a proportion that did not vary with the hours
their wives worked. Overall, most parents—59 percent of mothers, 66 percent of fathers—were not “completely satisfied with how their children were doing.”

So why would that be? Could such worried parents be responding to a more widespread reality of American life? One clue lies in a 2007 UNESCO report comparing American children with those in twenty other advanced nations. The report focuses on the health, schooling, social relationships, and self-reported happiness of children ages eleven to fifteen, and it offers sobering news:
⁹
out of twenty-one countries, the United States ranked twentieth. It was at or near the bottom, researchers found, in rankings on children’s health, poverty, family and peer relations, chances of risky behavior (drinking alcohol, drugs, fighting, for example), and personal relationships.
¹⁰

Children were also given a picture and told, “Here is a picture of a ladder. The top of the ladder, 10, is the best possible life for you and the bottom is the worse possible life for you. In general where on the ladder do you feel you stand at the moment? Tick the box next to the number that best describes where you stand.” In terms of the proportion of children marking a box above the middle rung, the United States—the world’s richest country— ranked eighteen out of twenty-one countries.
¹¹

So why, in the welfare of its children, does the United States rank so far lower than most other advanced nations? Could it be that so many American mothers work? It is, after all, common for guilty American parents to worry that a mother’s job itself makes for unhappy children. But if so, we couldn’t understand Norway, which boasts
both
the world’s highest rates of maternal employment
and
one of the world’s highest rates of child well-being. Seventy-five percent of all working-age Norwegian women work for pay while Norway also ranks seventh out of twenty-one nations in the overall welfare of its children. In short, Norway has undergone a gender revolution, but avoided a
stalled
revolution. Norwegian parents of new or newly adopted babies enjoy an eleven-month paid leave, and new fathers are offered a month’s paid leave, exclusive to them,
to be forfeited if they decline.
¹²
Parents receive cash benefits for children ages one to three who lack a full-time place at a public daycare center. Should an elderly parent fall ill, a person with a job can sign up at the local municipality for a “care salary,” and take leave from work to care for the parent. And to top it off, a full-time workweek in Norway is thirty-five hours.

Americans shake their heads in disbelief at Norway’s wonderland of limited hours and family-friendly benefits. The country is so small, detractors point out. And its economy is thriving, blessed as it is with the well-spent revenue from North Sea oil. But larger surrounding countries—Sweden, Denmark, and Finland—have no such oil, yet enjoy both thriving economies and family-friendly state policies. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and other European nations are not far behind. In short, women can both work and raise thriving children in societies determined to remove the “stall” from a stalled revolution.

For the United States to catch up with its more successful neighbors, we’d need to reconsider some of our beliefs about community and government. Many Americans resist the idea of government help in the abstract: they want to fix the stalled revolution
privately.
But when you get down to specifics, a light appears in their eyes. Paid family and medical leave for new parents or those coping with family illness? Good idea. Affordable subsidized child care? Good idea. A neighborhood toy exchange, or a skill bank that allows neighbors to exchange unpaid services—computer help for mowing a lawn, math tutoring for fresh lasagna? Good idea. Government incentives for companies offering flexible hours and job shares? Sure. But no one of us can accomplish all these reforms alone.