Kids are not widgets - Women's Agenda

Kids are not widgets

It’s been more than a year since Anne-Marie Slaughter penned her prolific and ground-breaking missive Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. The piece wasn’t ground-breaking in its subject matter; it covered territory familiar to any parent who has combined work and family. But it was ground-breaking in the way it struck a chord with working women. It garnered a million page views within days, generated thousands of comment pieces, sparked conversations in workplaces around the world and paved the way for a really detailed discussion about the challenges working parents face.

Not the hypothetical or theoretical challenges about working or not working but the practical challenges that are unavoidable with children. Challenges that exist whether you work as a nurse in an emergency department of a busy hospital or as a senior policy adviser in the upper echelons of government. There are countless variables but, ultimately, the task for any working parent is dividing their time and energy between two competing responsibilities, their family and their job.

Whether it is met and how well it is met is a moving target. Slaughter’s epiphany was that there is no guarantee that the combination will always succeed. There is no failsafe method to follow. For every parent who makes it work there is another who can’t and another who perseveres but feels it’s not working. Slaughter grew up believing it was absolutely possible only to discover it wasn’t quite that simple.

It’s one of the shades of grey that our former prime minister Julie Gillard urged us to give sophisticated thought to in her final press conference as PM. The fact this topic is coloured with more grey than black and white is the most likely reason Slaughter’s words piqued interest in the way they did.

One of the lessons I related to immediately, and come back to often, is the fact that kids are not widgets. It’s simple and obvious but it is one of the realities that can, and does, regularly throw a spanner in the works for parents at work. Regardless of their age or stage children are not like staff that can be managed with predictability or processes that can be streamlined. There are only so many efficiencies to achieve with kids. What they require, and when they require it, changes often and is not always within a parent’s control.

Kids get sick, they have accidents, they get into trouble, they need check-ups, they have learning difficulties. Even from a small age they have emotional needs that can’t always be resolved before or after school. There are all sorts of things that pop up with kids that can’t always be delegated or managed with forward planning.

Discussions about juggling career and family often focus on young children but older children place just as many legitimate, and unpredictable, demands on their parents’ time and energy. Some parents say the demands actually grow as their children get older. It was Slaughter’s son’s teenage years that actually stopped her in her tracks and triggered her career change.

I have no experience with older children but I’m closely acquainted with the realities of small children and can attest the myriad of ways in which they have the potential to, quite innocently, disrupt, and even sabotage, their parents’ work. This has been blatantly apparent to me even though I have only been back at work for a matter of weeks.

Having spent several angst-ridden weeks arranging affordable childcare for both of our daughters I completed a single day in the office before illness struck our youngest. She was then unable to attend her childcare centre so we had to make alternate arrangements at considerable cost. Since then it has been a steady comedy of errors and a roundabout of illness and arriving at work has felt nothing short of miraculous.

None of this is out of the ordinary. It’s a scenario that will no doubt be familiar to other working parents; just as you think your balls are lined up ready to juggle, you’re are thrown another and you need to start again. Enlightened employers and managers know these things pop up with all employees (not just parents) and that they can be accommodated with flexibility. But the truth is we need as much flexibility at home as we do at work.

Managing work and childcare with our daughters both being sick prompted my own mini Slaughter-type realisation that what might have worked on paper doesn’t work in reality. Having children at two different day-care centres, like we had, is not sustainable. There are too many variables that can and will go wrong. And so despite the fact it’s not particularly affordable employing a nanny is the only option that gives my husband and I enough flexibility at home to make our jobs, work. (It’s also worth noting that a nanny becomes more affordable when you’ve spent a few days paying for two separate day care centres and a nanny because your children were not well enough to attend the centres.)

I won’t pretend there is a definitive answer to the ‘Having it all’ question but I do know this: without flexibility on the home-front there’s no point even trying to answer the first question because you won’t even get out the door. Just three weeks without it taught me that.

How have you built flexibility into your life?

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