Why Can’t All Parents Have More?

When Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” for The Atlantic, many (online and off) responded with an objection to the phrase. Men don’t have it “all,” either. We all make choices. Professor Slaughter responded, in The Atlantic online, that in some ways, she agrees: Rebecca Traister has convinced me to stop using the term “having it all,” in a thoughtful and quite brilliant piece she wrote for Salon arguing that the term makes women seem “piggy” and elitist. For my generation, women who came of age in the 1970s and entered the workforce in the 1980s, “having it all” simply meant that women should be able to have both careers and families in the same measure and to the same degree that men do. But what if “having it all” in this context means that both mothers and fathers should be able to have careers and families in the same measure and to the same degree — in the same family? Call it “having more.” Yes, parents of both sexes make choices. What’s troubling is the degree to which those choices still tend to be mutually exclusive (one career parent, one sidelined); the way those choices still tend to shake out by gender; and the way societal assumptions we never question support that shakeout. We make “choices” to accommodate those assumptions, and those are the choices we shouldn’t have to make. Consider the most basic  problem for working parents: school. Even ignoring sick days and vacation, there’s a disconnect between school hours and work hours in any full-time job. We’ve accepted, and even internalized, the need to paper over that disconnect because having children is a choice (we ignore the fact that it’s a choice society needs some people to embrace). Having made their bed, parents are expected to lie in it — or at least toss in it, sleepless, and struggling with the next level of choices: who is on duty from 3 on, how, and for how much? To call it ridiculous that millions of parents struggle silently with that “choice” and even make career decisions based on its demands isn’t to argue that we need state-sponsored child care for all or that we need a longer school day, or to argue  in favor of any particular solution. What we need is more willingness to recognize that behind every working parent of a school-aged child, mothers and fathers, lies some need to resolve that gap, and to resolve it well, in a way that leaves families feeling secure and connected. Imagine a workplace that never assumes that Donna Reed is waiting to go pick up the kids in the station wagon, and you’ve imagined a whole different world — and one in which we can also talk about caring for our parents, our preschoolers and infants, and even ourselves. A workplace that allows for more overall autonomy — one where shift workers work together to schedule around family needs (without forcing people to lose health care or benefits) and law firms don’t blink at an arrangement that allows a parent to leave in time for pick-up  two to three  times a week for a year or a decade — may be a distant dream, but it’s far from impossible. To get there, we need more willingness to talk about what works (like The New York Times assistant managing editor Susan Chira’s story of juggling a powerful career in journalism with raising two children) and what doesn’t (Professor Slaughter’s experience with commuting to Washington) and how parents and employers can create career arcs that accommodate family life’s ebbs and flows whether that career is in politics or in retail. Can it really benefit anyone that many hourly workers find flexibility only by quitting, and finding another hourly job when family pressure eases up? Every one of Working Mother magazine’s Best Companies for Hourly Workers 2012 offers at least child-care referrals, and half offer their own back-ups. The real disconnect isn’t between school hours and work hours, or between “having it all” and “staying home.” It’s not between what men and women stereotypically prioritize, or even between people with and without children (as Kate Bolick writes, Single People Deserve Work-Life Balance, Too) or “having a career” versus “having a job.” It’s between what’s really possible, and the choices we’ve given ourselves.