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Economix Blog: Working Parents, Wanting Fewer Hours

July 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

CATHERINE RAMPELL

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

On Monday I wrote an article (the first in a series about work-life balance) profiling a middle-class working mother who persuaded her employer to give her a more flexible schedule. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about why the article focused on mothers and not fathers.

The main reason is that, for this first article, we were interested in exploring the ways that the advice offered by high-profile books and articles aimed at women, like “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” and “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” translates to the situations of middle-class women, who have fewer resources and less bargaining power than the high-powered women who have been most vocal about these issues. We were also interested in whether the assumptions underlying the public conversation about the challenges for working mothers — about what women actually want from their careers — held up.

Much of the public conversation has been about the barriers, both internal and external, that women face in getting to leadership positions. But after interviewing dozens of middle-class women and mothers around the country and looking at survey data about women’s desired work arrangements, I found that a lot of mothers were yearning for more flexibility and time at home, not a more direct path up the career ladder. So I decided to shadow a middle-class working mother who had recognized those as her own priorities and who had been proactive about implementing them in her own life.

None of this is to say, of course, that working fathers don’t have their own challenges in juggling work and family responsibilities, especially as gender roles have changed. As I wrote on Monday, men are doing more child care and other household duties than they did in the past, and survey data indicate that men are experiencing more work-family conflict than ever.

A future article about work-family balance, in fact, is likely to focus on the barriers that men face in requesting things like paternity leave and flex time, which may imply to their bosses that they’re not sufficiently “serious” about their careers. (As I have written before, other countries have been more successful in reducing the stigma associated with taking paternity leave.)

Survey data show that there are plenty of men out there who want to work fewer hours than they currently are, after all.

I wrote in Monday’s article that “among all mothers with children under 18, just a quarter say they would choose full-time work if money were no object and they were free to do whatever they wanted, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll. By comparison, about half of mothers in the United States are actually working full time, indicating that there are a lot out there logging many more hours than they want to be.” On Twitter and elsewhere, people have asked me what the results were for fathers, so I’ll share here: Just over half of all fathers with children under 18 say their ideal situation would be to work full time, if money were no object. Another 30 percent of these fathers would prefer to work part time, and 16 percent would stay at home.

Results from New York Times/CBS News poll conducted May 31-June 4, 2013. Results from New York Times/CBS News poll conducted May 31-June 4, 2013.

The share of fathers who would ideally work full time is about twice that for mothers. But on the other hand, if you look at the even larger share of fathers who are actually working full time — about 84 percent, according to 2012 Labor Department data — you’ll notice that a lot of fathers are working more hours than they’d like to.

Here’s a look at how these poll results for desired work status line up with the most directly comparable data we have on actual work status, which are for fathers who share a household with their minor children:

Blue bars show results from New York Times/CBS News poll conducted May 31-June 4, 2013, and refer to share of all survey respondents who are fathers of children under 18. Red bars show 2012 Labor Department data, and refer to share of total civilian noninstitutional population of fathers who live with their own children (including stepchildren and adopted children). Unemployed workers could be looking for part-time work or full-time work. Blue bars show results from New York Times/CBS News poll conducted May 31-June 4, 2013, and refer to share of all survey respondents who are fathers of children under 18. Red bars show 2012 Labor Department data, and refer to share of total civilian noninstitutional population of fathers who live with their own children (including stepchildren and adopted children). Unemployed workers could be looking for part-time work or full-time work.

As you can see nearly a third of surveyed fathers with minor children would like to be working part time, but as of 2012, just 5 percent actually were.

What barriers — financial, cultural, psychological — do you think keep so many fathers from working the shorter hours they say they would ideally like to work?

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/working-parents-wanting-fewer-hours/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Bucks Blog: Managing The Summer Child-Care Scramble

June 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

What happened to the lazy days of summer?Laura Magruder What happened to the lazy days of summer?

Summer evokes images of long afternoons, lounging in a hammock or splashing at the pool. The reality is often less idyllic, especially for working parents — even for those who, like me, work from home.

With school out of session, children’s schedules are theoretically free — but mine are preteens, not quite old enough to spend all day unsupervised. If a friend is available to play, they’ll usually keep themselves occupied for a few of hours. But there’s no guarantee they won’t get in some sort of scrape while I’m doing a telephone interview (“No, I don’t hear a child screaming…do you?”)

That means arranging for child care — or in my case, a series of day camps — so I can work without having my attention constantly diverted. The trick is to pay for enough activities so that I can keep working, but not so much that I’m spending all of my earnings on camps. I want them to keep busy, but not to feel burdened.

This takes some maneuvering since, now that they’re older, my children have developed different interests. One child is an equestrian, so she spent a week at riding camp, as well as a soccer camp. Her sister is a basketball fanatic, so she’ll be working out at a hoops clinic, and is also going to her first weeklong overnight summer camp. There will probably be some swimming lessons, too, since they didn’t spend much time in the water over the winter and need to brush up on their strokes. Most other days, they go to a drop-in camp offered at their school — or stay home, with a promise to stay out of my hair when I’m on the phone.

So far it’s working out, for the most part. I can focus on my work, in between ferrying them to their various activities (car-pooling helps). They get to have fun and improve a skill during the week, and loll about, unscheduled, in the late afternoons and on the weekends. And I manage to get my work done — although not always during normal working hours.

The cost of some camps qualify for a tax credit (specifically, the Child and Dependent Care Credit), if your children are under 13 years of age and the camps allow you to work. (Sleep away camp doesn’t qualify; ditto for the swimming lessons). The credit can be up to 35 percent of your expenses, depending on your income. (The maximum credit is $3,000 if you have one child, and $6,000 if you have two or more).

Still, when I add up the hundreds of dollars paid for these activities each month, I sometimes wonder what my own parents would say about this annual summer scramble.

I recall summers in which we were pretty much left to our own devices, aside from the occasional arts-and-crafts class for me, and perhaps a Little League baseball game for my brothers. My mother worked part-time in the evenings, so she was home during the day, in case an emergency arose. The neighborhood was full of kids, and we were shooed outside to play, often with orders not to return until dinner time. There were periodic mishaps–once a friend sat on a bee’s nest in the woods, and suffered multiple stings–but somehow we all survived to adulthood.

I’m not entirely sure which situation is better for children in the long run. But I suspect the old way was less expensive.

How do you handle the cost and scheduling of summer child care?

A version of this article appeared in print on 06/29/2013, on page B4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Tax Help for Surviving Summer.

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/managing-the-summer-child-care-scramble/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Economix: Rising Family Income: More Work, Not Raises

July 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Traditional families today earn more than they did three decades ago — but primarily because they’re working more hours, a recent paper from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution finds.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Median wages for two-parent families have grown 23 percent since 1975, after adjusting for inflation. The collective number of hours worked by both parents over the course of a year, however, has risen 26 percent. That means their wages haven’t even grown as much as their working hours would imply they should.

DESCRIPTIONThe Hamilton Project Annual hours calculated as the average of the middle 10 percent of families. Source: IPUMS CPS 1976-2010.

The additional hours worked by the median two-parent family — 3,500 hours in 2009, compared to 2,800 hours in 1975 — mostly reflect the fact that more women have joined the work force since the 1970s. Men’s annual working hours have stayed relatively constant; women’s, on the other hand, have more than doubled.

These figures may actually overstate the economic improvements in Americans’ lives over the last three decades, too, since they refer to a family structure that is much less common today. The share of men between age 30 to 50 who are married with children was 70 percent in 1975, and only 47 percent today.

Today, there are many more single-parent families, meaning that just looking at two-parent families over time doesn’t give a full picture of what has happened to family incomes.

The median earnings of single-parent families have risen over time, to $16,500. But this number is still less than one-fourth the earnings of a traditional two-parent family. Not only do these households earn less money, but they most likely have more expenses as well, since they require more spending on child care while the single parent works.

That is one argument supporting Nancy Folbre’s proposal that policy makers should look at the market value of what is traditionally known as “women’s work.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=58ed075652c48cf96b5db8ea99b6e5f8

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,