Week 7 Discussion: Work-Life Balance for Modern Parents
does work-life balance really exist? And is it attainable by mere mortals? Real Simple asked
10 influential journalists, pundits, and thought leaders to weigh in. PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN GOLLMER
32 JANUARY 2014 | RE AL SIMPLE.COM
life lessons GOOD READ
Anna Quindlen The author of Still Life With Breadcrumbs, out this month; A Short Guide to a Happy Life; and 14 other books.
D iscussions about life balance always plumb the outer limits of perfection: Are the
kids’ packed lunches homemade and perfectly nutritious? Did the client meeting go off without a single hitch? The assumption that everything must be right with the world or your life is out of balance is silly and, frankly, impossible.
When my children were little, here’s what I asked myself to discern whether my life was in balance:
Was anyone bleeding? Did the sentences in my columns contain verbs?
That’s silly, too, but you take my point. The psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott will always hold a special place in my heart for coining the term “the good-enough mother.” I am a believer in the good- enough work-life balance, in which people try to show up in both the office and the kitchen with a sense of reason- ably flexible commitment.
The story I like to tell about work-life balance goes like this: My son, Christo- pher, then eight, comes downstairs and says, “Some man just called on your work phone, but I told him you couldn’t talk because you were making dinner.”
That man was the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Twenty years have passed since that moment, and here’s the bottom line: I did make dinner, and I did talk to Jesse Jackson. Just not at the same time. No one was bleeding. There were verbs.
Anne-Marie Slaughter The president and CEO of the New America Foundation, in Washington, D.C., and the author of the much-discussed 2012 essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in The Atlantic.
I think of balance as a seesaw, and you’re either up or down. So in my personal life I don’t consider balance. I think about fit: how to fit my caring self, the part of me that is a mother, a sister, a daughter, and a wife, with my independent self, the part of me that is a foreign-policy expert, a scholar, and an entrepreneur.
It used to be that men were expected to be the competitors and their wives were the caregivers. What happened was that, as women entered the workforce, they were ready to compete but were not prepared to leave their caring selves behind. So they started to wonder: Wait—how much do I give to my work, and how much do I give to my family?
The word balance implies that the different parts of your life have some kind of mechanical regularity. But at times I might be working intensely, and then I will be off and very much with my kids. When I can put in a full day of work and then spend the evening watch- ing a baseball game on TV with my two sons, both sides of me feel fulfilled.
Martha MacCallum A coanchor of America’s Newsroom, on the Fox News Channel.
I lost my mom last year, and that made me try to slow down in my mind and be present for my kids. (I have three—ages 12, 15, and 17.) To me, balance is possible. It’s really about living in the moment. I try to achieve it at home by putting my phone down and looking my children in the eye and listening to them. I love it when our family is in our house, everyone is doing homework, everyone is physically present at dinnertime. For example, I still hang out in my kids’ rooms before
they go to bed. And then I feel balanced. I’m in the exact place I’m supposed to be.
But I can feel in the moment when thinking about work, too. While I’m on my way to the studio in the early morning—in my car in the dark, listen- ing to the news on the radio and getting my head in the game—it’s very peaceful. It helps a lot that I can find ways to feel balanced both personally and professionally.
Eleanor Clift A panelist on the syndicated television program The McLaughlin Group and a contributor to The Daily Beast.
Most people probably don’t chart their days in terms of allocating time for this thing and time for that, but they do know when their overall lives get out of balance. Feeling guilty, in over their heads: That’s how they know some- thing is wrong. It’s part of the human condition. We are always questioning what we do with this limited amount of time we have. And no one is immune.
Fathers now want more of a connec- tion with kids and home life, and that requires putting in the time; now younger men are not willing to work around the clock. Women who stay at home with children worry that they are losing ground or that they are not keeping up with their aspirations.
Personally, I had three children and always worked. And I would say that home was therapy for the office, and the office was therapy for home. I also credit jogging with keeping me sane.
JANUARY 2014 | REAL SIMPLE.COM 33
For others, having fewer choices may help them feel less stressed. A pediatri- cian once told me that the happiest mothers he knew were those with six children or more; they didn’t have the time to consider doing anything else.
Ellen Galinsky The president and a cofounder of the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, in New York City, and the author of Mind in the Making.
I hate the term “work-life balance.” Balance implies a scale where if you put something on one side, it takes away from the other side and there’s a zero-sum game. In reality, work can enhance your personal life and your personal life can enhance your work; one is not necessarily taking away from the other. The term also induces guilt because it suggests that there’s some nirvana you must achieve where every- thing is equal and you’re feeling like it’s all working. Angels should be singing; bells should be ringing.
I prefer to say “work-life fit,” a term coined by Cali Williams Yost, a flexible- workplace strategist. It means that you’re putting everything together in a way that works for you right now. There’s no ideal 50-50. Moment by moment, we’re figuring it all out, and what works is constantly changing.
Back when I wrote my book, I asked children if they could change one thing about how their parents’ work affected them. They said that they wished their parents could be less stressed and less tired. What that told me was that it’s not necessarily about how many hours you spend either at work or at home, but what your relationship with your children is like when you’re with them.
Jessica Grose A journalist and commentator for the Slate column XX Factor and the author of Sad Desk Salad.
On weekdays, the baby is our 7 a.m. alarm clock. My husband feeds her and changes her, and we both play with her until he leaves for work. I take her until our nanny comes at 9:30. Then I leave for my office, return- ing at 5:30 p.m., when our nanny leaves. I give the baby dinner and a bath and put her to bed. If my husband gets home in time, he helps out. This is our defini- tion of balance: We work reasonable hours and have quality time with the kiddo. And I’m thrilled with it.
Before we had our daughter, I fretted about finding space in our harried lives. Then I realized we had the two keys to balance: money and flexibility. While Face- book’s Sheryl Sandberg represents the public face of the American work-life con- versation via her book, Lean In, and the movement it has inspired, many parents are struggling to support their families and spend a modicum of time with them. For balance to be available to most women, we need more supportive family policies: paid parental leave, affordable child care, paid sick days. The discussion needs to move away from people like Sandberg and, yes, reasonably well-off two- income families like mine, for a sem- blance of balance to exist on a wide scale.
Chris Duchesne The vice president of global workplace solutions for Care.com, a site with more than 8 million members that connects families to caregivers in 16 countries.
T here’s no point at which you have perfect balance. As a father of three young kids, I know that there are certain events that are sacred, that I will never miss out on. But there are other occasions when I will have to sacrifice time with my children for work.
Instead of determining whether you have everything in balance, ask yourself, What does success look like for me at this point in time and going forward? Then reflect on that each week or each month and evaluate how you’re doing. Maybe you need to focus more on a project at the office. Or maybe there is something at home demanding more attention.
When it comes to balance, what works for one person doesn’t work for all. You have to try different tactics, and over time you learn what works for you and your employer. Nobody comes out of the gate and has it all figured out.
Jennifer Senior The author of All Joy and No Fun, out this month, and a contributor to New York magazine.
I think life balance is worth striving for, but it’s a pretty high-class problem. If you have the luxury of thinking about balance, you’re ahead of the game almost by definition. It probably means that you’re not working two jobs, for instance. This is also, I think, largely a question for cultures where we feel entitled to be happy, not just clothed and fed. So it’s a historical and a class phenomenon.
Most people are out of balance most of the time. We lead lopsided lives. And unless the United States becomes a very different place—where we all keep bankers’ hours and where child care is available in every office—I can’t see how real balance, at least as we fantasize about it, is achievable.
I am skeptical about the need for balance anyway. People who lead mean- ingful lives are often monomaniacal in their focus. I’m guessing Margaret Sanger didn’t have great life balance, you know?
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life lessons GOOD READ
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Personally, I have a steady job and a baby- sitter for my child, and if I get home and have a few hours with my kid before bedtime, I can be just fine. It’s not about the literal amount of time I spend working or at home. Really, it’s the ticker tape of crap (about things I have to do, e-mails I need to return) running through my head that makes me feel overwhelmed.
Jeremy Adam Smith The author of The Daddy Shift and a former stay-at-home dad.
Balance (or imbalance) is some-thing that happens over time. You can’t look at one specific moment and determine whether you have it or not. There will be times when many of us have to work a lot or spend a lot of time caring for a baby. Demands will be put on you that you can’t control, and the question is, How do you respond to those factors? It’s not so much about balancing external things in your life and allocating a certain amount of time to work or to playing with your kids, but about finding homeostasis within yourself.
Mindfulness meditation is getting a lot of attention right now, and there are many studies on the efficacy of the practice. It’s about cultivating awareness of yourself and your surroundings with- out judgment. You can sit with and be aware of the existence of your anxiety and use that awareness to turn the spotlight onto something positive.
If you’re a mother who works outside the home, you can take the focus away from what you’re not doing and instead think about all the things you are doing to support your family. You also have to think about societal pressures. If you feel beleaguered, there’s usually a social cause, and it indicates a culture out of balance. But you can help change that. You don’t have to be at the barricades protesting every day, but you can vote. The effects aren’t immediate, but it’s a healthy way to respond to the pressures you feel.
Judith Warner A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, in Washington, D.C., and the author of Perfect Madness and We’ve Got Issues.
Work-life balance—finding a point of equilibrium between the pulls of two unpredictable forces—always seemed impossible to me. Then I discovered the dancer’s pose in yoga.
In the pose, you stand on one leg while bending the other at the knee, drawing your leg behind you and gripping the top of your raised foot in the palm of your same-side hand. Then, while pressing hand into foot and foot into hand, you lengthen your leg behind you while stretching your opposite arm up and out.
If you do it right, you create an arc of motion that sends an enormous feeling of power and grace through your body. Doing it right is a rare achievement for me. But every now and then I can. On the very first day that I succeeded, I kept in the forefront of my mind something that my teacher had told our class: It’s the pull of the opposing forces that keeps you balanced.
Suddenly, in a flash that took all my self-control not to shout out to the room, I had a bolt of insight: Work-life balance was the same. I would never achieve it by trying to resolve its forever changing tensions into a point of stasis. But I could find strength and stability by harnessing and feeding off the energy that those tensions generated.
That sounds very loosey-goosey, I realize. But if you can get into the dancer’s pose and think about it, you’ll see what I mean. Then we can use that energy to work for progress beyond the yoga mat. n
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