{"id":12227,"date":"2023-08-01T10:05:38","date_gmt":"2023-08-01T10:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/expressnewsghana.com\/?p=12227"},"modified":"2023-08-01T10:05:38","modified_gmt":"2023-08-01T10:05:38","slug":"the-unexpected-pitfalls-of-work-from-home-parenthood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/expressnewsghana.com\/?p=12227","title":{"rendered":"The unexpected pitfalls of work-from-home parenthood"},"content":{"rendered":"

In March 2020, millions of American parents turned kitchen tables into desks, closets into boardrooms, and Zoom meetings into\u00a0opportunities for impromptu dance performances<\/a>\u00a0when they started working from home to\u00a0care for their kids<\/a>\u00a0during the pandemic.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course, some parents worked from home before the pandemic began, but by making the practice far more common, the lockdowns helped entrench a new role in American families and society at large: that of the work-from-home parent. Now, more than three years after the pandemic began, it looks like that role is here to stay.<\/p>\n

Despite company attempts to call workers\u00a0back to the office<\/a>, remote work has stabilized at\u00a0about 25 percent<\/a>\u00a0of total days worked, up from 5 percent of days in 2019, said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and a co-founder of the project\u00a0WFH Research<\/a>. Parents, especially mothers, are more likely to take advantage of remote policies when they\u2019re available: in 2022, moms worked an average of 33.6 percent of their days from home, compared with 32.4 percent for dads and 27.7 percent for men with no kids, according to WFH Research. And what started out as an emergency measure when schools and many workplaces were closed has become, at this point, the only way many parents (again,\u00a0especially moms<\/a>) can imagine balancing their many competing responsibilities.<\/p>\n

The setup has a lot of perks. Tonya Abari, a Nashville-based writer and editor who works from home alongside her husband and two kids, 8 and almost 2, says she loves being there for milestones and more quotidian moments alike: \u201cwhen they start walking or when my daughter has a concert or a soccer game.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a family person,\u201d she said. \u201cHome is the epicenter for everything for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But working from home is also a double-edged sword for parents, who can find themselves taking on a disproportionate share of household and child care responsibilities on top of their paid work. The effect is more pronounced for parents whose partners work outside the home, and for moms,\u00a0who still do the majority of child care<\/a>\u00a0in American families. Research conducted during the period of pandemic lockdowns found that when just one parent worked remotely, \u201cthe parent who\u2019s working from home becomes the housewife,\u201d said Jennifer Glass, a family demographer at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. That was true to some degree when the father was the one working remotely, but \u201cit was way more true when it was Mom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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The ability to work from home is, in many ways, a privilege \u2014 those who never have the option to work remotely, like many service-sector workers, tend to\u00a0earn less<\/a>\u00a0and have less control over their time. Still, the rise in work-from-home parenthood threatens to deepen inequities in families and workplaces. To remedy these inequities, work-from-home parents need what, to some degree, all parents need: fair work schedules, affordable and flexible child care options, and a society that values care and domestic work as the necessities that they are. \u201cAppreciation and respect for parents, and caregivers in general, will make things easier,\u201d Abari said. \u201cI think it starts there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working from home has real benefits for parents\u2026<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not hard to see why working from home is appealing for parents. At the most basic level, most work schedules\u00a0do not match up<\/a>\u00a0with children\u2019s school calendars, leaving parents scrambling to figure out care for kids during\u00a0summer<\/a>\u00a0and other school breaks, as well as\u00a0every afternoon<\/a>. There\u2019s also the need to take care of\u00a0sick kids<\/a>\u00a0(a near-weekly reality for many families even in non-pandemic times), attend parent-teacher conferences and other school events, and manage the innumerable tiny tasks that tend to crop up when you are responsible for young people who cannot reliably feed or clothe themselves. Paid child care can fill in some of these gaps \u2014 and is the only option for many families with babies and toddlers \u2014 but it\u2019s\u00a0expensive<\/a>\u00a0and often difficult or impossible to find, especially after school and in the summer.<\/p>\n

Remote work offers parents the same thing it offers everybody else: time. A\u00a02023 study<\/a>\u00a0found that getting rid of the commute to the office saved American workers an average of 72 minutes a day, time parents can use to pick up their kids at school or camp, help them with homework, or just hang out with them.<\/p>\n

Working from home \u201callows me to both do the really mundane shit of going to doctor\u2019s appointments and being able to take care of a sick child, but also being able to insert little moments with my kids throughout the day,\u201d said Jo Piazza, host of the podcast\u00a0Under the Influence<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and a mother of three. With her older kids home for summer vacation right now, she can choose to take an hour in the middle of her day and go on a hike with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoms often have tremendous mom guilt being away from their kids all the time,\u201d Piazza said. \u201cMy answer to it is that I can pop in and out for little things, and I feel like we\u2019re getting to spend some meaningful moments together.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Abari, remote work is a necessity at this point in her family\u2019s life. They don\u2019t have family nearby to help, and with the cost of formal child care, \u201cit\u2019s cheaper and easier for us just not to have it,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are the child care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working from home also allows Abari, who is Black, to avoid the racism, sexism, and microaggressions that have been \u201cvery present in my life from school all the way up through my professional life,\u201d she said. \u201cI just wouldn\u2019t consider returning to a place of business because I don\u2019t want to deal with those things.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a common theme for workers of color \u2014 in\u00a0one 2021 survey<\/a>, 97 percent of Black workers said they preferred a remote or hybrid workplace. Remote work has also allowed\u00a0pregnant people<\/a>\u00a0to sidestep some of the\u00a0pregnancy discrimination<\/a>\u00a0that remains a stubborn problem in the American workplace, because no one can see their bellies growing over Zoom.<\/p>\n

For all these reasons, many parents have embraced remote work, even after the Covid restrictions lessened and children returned to in-person school. As lockdowns eased, parents returned to in-person work, but at lower levels than non-parents.<\/p>\n

Employers are continuing to try to get their workers\u00a0back into the office<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 Citigroup, for example,\u00a0announced in June<\/a>\u00a0that its employees would face consequences for a lack of attendance. But workers with the power to choose are resisting, with one in two finance professionals\u00a0saying in a June survey<\/a>\u00a0that they\u2019d quit rather than go back in full-time.<\/p>\n

\u201cHybrid work is here to stay,\u201d Glass said. The past few years have been a \u201cgiant experiment,\u201d and mostly a successful one \u2014 \u201cproductivity didn\u2019t plummet, and people liked it,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be very difficult to dial that back.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026But being a work-from-home parent comes with its own problems<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Remote work doesn\u2019t solve all the problems of working parenthood. With younger children especially, sick days are still sick days \u2014 it\u2019s nearly impossible to get work done while taking care of a toddler who\u2019s home from day care. Even if you have in-home child care or another parent doing the heavy lifting, working from home with kids around is still difficult. \u201cYou are much more accessible to inevitably get pulled into more child care, often with no warning, such as during a Zoom call,\u201d said Bloom, the WFH Research co-founder and a father of four.<\/p>\n

Working where you live can also make it easy for household tasks to encroach on work time. \u201cThere\u2019s a complete mishmash of work with house responsibilities,\u201d said Piazza, who has worked from home for six years. \u201cBecause I\u2019m here, I feel obligated to do home things as I\u2019m working.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the inequality factor. During lockdown, moms tended to shoulder the burden of child care and remote school in heterosexual two-parent families, even when both parents were working from home. In\u00a0an April 2020 survey<\/a>, 64 percent of moms in such families said they were responsible for the majority of child care, compared with 35 percent of dads.<\/p>\n

Glass, the family demographer, and her team also studied parents during lockdown, and found that when a father worked from home, \u201che managed to protect his time, and wives would talk about ways that they attempted to protect his time.\u201d For example, if both parents worked remotely, \u201cMom\u2019s desk was the counter or the kitchen or the dining room table, whereas Dad got a room with a closed door.\u201d<\/p>\n

With children back in school, child care, and camp, the pressures on working parents have eased up somewhat since 2020. But some of those inequalities remain. Piazza\u2019s husband also works from home, she said, but he doesn\u2019t feel the same obligation to do housework and child care during the day. \u201cHe is not rushing downstairs to pick up a crying baby,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Indeed, there\u2019s a risk that the ability of some moms to work from home will become simply a Band-Aid imperfectly slapped on America\u2019s crumbling care infrastructure. If a mom works from home, she can quickly become the family\u2019s caregiving backup plan, as\u00a0Anne Helen Petersen writes at Bloomberg<\/a>: \u201cWhen the day care shuts down because it\u2019s short-staffed or one of the kids is sick, she can cover.\u201d But the more that happens, the more the family further entrenches the\u00a0unequal division of labor<\/a>\u00a0that already exists in most heterosexual partnerships.<\/p>\n

And of course, one mom working from home may be able to take care of her own kid when the day care is closed, but her individual flexibility (or her workplace\u2019s) does nothing for the many parents who can\u2019t work from home: people who work in hospitality, health care, warehouses, and other sectors where reporting in person is a requirement. People in jobs that can\u2019t be remote are more likely to be low-income, to be people of color, and to be recent immigrants, Glass said. When schools were closed in 2020 and 2021, they reported the most work-family conflict.<\/p>\n

These workers struggle with \u201coverwork, and inflexibility, and the inability to predict when you\u2019re going to be called into work,\u201d as well as with \u201cthe fact that we don\u2019t have a child care system that is suitable for people who have odd weekend or evening shifts,\u201d Glass said.<\/p>\n

The increase in remote and hybrid work over the last two years has done nothing for this group, even though they have the same parenting needs and concerns as everybody else. And even for those who\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0work from home, there\u2019s a risk of a vicious cycle, in which moms have more caregiving responsibilities, so they spend more time at home, so they pay a career penalty, so they end up picking up even more caregiving responsibilities (and suffer a worsening\u00a0motherhood penalty<\/a>\u00a0when it comes to their earnings and future financial security).<\/p>\n

Mothers are already\u00a0less likely to be hired<\/a>\u00a0and are paid less than men with similar qualifications, and some experts fear that remote work could worsen the penalty moms already pay. In\u00a0a 2021 study<\/a>\u00a0by consulting firm Egon Zehnder, more than 7 in 10 C-suite professionals said that remote workers might be passed over for leadership roles because they weren\u2019t in the office. Unless implemented very intentionally, remote work could end up leading to career dead ends for women, Brigid Schulte\u00a0told Politico<\/a>\u00a0the same year: \u201cYou are mommy tracked to the billionth degree.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many work-from-home parents are clear that they like the flexibility the setup offers, as Petersen notes. But they never signed up to be, as she puts it, \u201cone-woman safety nets.\u201d If American work and family cultures get too reliant on the work-from-home mom, then nothing substantive has to change.<\/p>\n

Work-from-home parents need more child care options and better schedules \u2014 just like everyone else<\/p>\n

Indeed, what families really need now, experts say, is a shift in employer expectations, policy priorities, and larger cultural attitudes \u2014 one that would benefit both work-from-home parents and those who go to work in person.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of assumptions that no matter what kind of job you have, if you\u2019re working in the home, it is somehow less-than than being in an office\u201d and that \u201cyou can take on all of the burden of parenting because you\u2019re the one that\u2019s at home,\u201d Piazza said. \u201cThose kinds of attitudes just have to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Employers can do their part by setting boundaries around work hours and meeting times so as not to disadvantage remote employees, Erin Grau, COO of the consulting company Charter,\u00a0told Politico<\/a>. Companies like Etsy have also embraced hybrid work for everyone \u2014 including executives \u2014 to avoid penalizing parents or others who prefer remote work.<\/p>\n

Improving the accessibility of child care is also part of the equation. \u201cIf I had assistance with child care, I could even do more work and I could be more of a contribution to society,\u201d Abari said. Reducing costs is important, she said. In April, Democrats in Congress\u00a0introduced a bill<\/a>\u00a0to make child care more affordable for working- and middle-class families, but it is unlikely to pass.<\/p>\n

Flexibility and quality, though, are also crucial. \u201cThere has to be a trust factor,\u201d Abari said. She\u2019d like to see a kind of coworking space for remote-working parents that allows them to bring their kids and check on them periodically throughout the day. \u201cWhere are those places?\u201d she asks. \u201cThere are none here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parents also need reasonable working hours and predictable work schedules, experts say, regardless of how their jobs are structured.\u00a0Fair workweek laws<\/a>\u00a0that aim to guarantee predictable schedules, for example, could result in a\u00a0more just economy for all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Finally, parents and experts alike are calling for a cultural shift toward actually valuing the work of caregiving and setting up workplaces and communities with parents in mind, rather than forcing them to figure everything out on their own. \u201cWe\u2019re ushering in the next generation of leaders and change makers,\u201d Abari said. \u201cIn order for us to be able to do that, we need support.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By\u00a0Anna North<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anna North<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of three novels, including the New York Times bestseller Outlawed.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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