keep your handcuffs in the bedroom

• Fully 1 of 5 families are led by a single parent.
• Only 1 of 5 families have a full-time parent at home.
• 77% agree that businesses should be required to provide paid family and medical leave.
• 75% agree that employers should be required to give workers more flexibility in their work schedules.

Really?! If my friends took this Center for American Progress (CAP) survey, I’m fairly certain those percentages would be closer to 100.

June Cleaver doesn't work here any more

I attended a CAP lunch forum this week on the work-family conflict. It’s no secret that we have “the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world.” Everyone has a sob story about how overworked and stressed they are, and how they don’t have enough time to devote to their kids and other loved ones.

i work out of my kitchen, too

Here’s mine. When I was pregnant with my first kid, I asked my employer (a progressive organization) if I could work part time after my maternity leave was up. The answer was no, so I quit because I didn’t want to stay in the usual full time (FT) professional job, which too often means working more than 40 hours/week. I was lucky to find a part time job a year later.

CAP’s “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict” profiles another person with a similar story. A TV news anchor (and mom) asked her employer if she could change her schedule to 40 hours/week, instead of the 50-60 hours she was currently putting in. The answer was no. She…that’s right, quit.

Ironically, the same all-or-nothing [full time or no time] employer soon hired her…to report part time. But now she had no job security, no pension, no health insurance, and no chance for advancement.

Employers are most likely to offer paid leave and workplace flexibility to [FT] workers, yet require long hours that make achieving a workable balance impossible for many. Conservatives and progressives alike fall for the false notion that women in these families who “opt out” of the workforce are voluntarily doing so for the sake of their kids.

I’m lucky as hell that we can live on my spouse’s income. But I can see a not-too-distant future when it may not be enough. (Of course, you could always argue that I could choose a simpler, cheaper life… Have you heard about the guy who lives with less than 50 things and blogs about the “Minimalist Lifestyle”?)

In February, the number of employees voluntarily quitting their jobs outpaced the number fired or discharged for the first time in a year and a half. Hmm, could it be that these quitters are beginning to chafe at the golden handcuffs around their wrists?

that's my spouse telecommuting. (i wish.)

In order to stem the bleeding from their ranks, the director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business says companies might try to do things like improve work-life balance for their employees.

That’s one of the things CAP’s white paper, “Resolving Work-Life Conflicts,” pushes. Families in every tax bracket need “short-term and extended paid leave and new workplace flexibility rules, as well as high-quality, affordable childcare and eldercare and freedom from discrimination based on family responsibilities.”

This past Monday, the US Senate passed a bill (S. 707) expanding the ability of federal workers to telecommute. My spouse has been trying to persuade his company to allow telecommuting. Sadly, no luck yet…

How are your handcuffs feeling?

i’m ok, you probably aren’t

You may or may not recall a New York Times best seller, I’m OK, You’re OK, published first in 1969. It’s among the top-selling self-help books of all time.

So, I’m OK, but you probably aren’t. That’s right: chances are, you probably need a bit of psychological fine-tuning. Sort of like when I said to my mother-in-law, who denied needing it, “You don’t need counseling like I need a bullet in the head.” (Yup, I said that.) (To my mother-in-law.) I know – confusing; what I meant was that she could use some counseling.

Of course, I say this out of love. For you, for my mom-in-law, for most every person I’ve ever met. Because let’s face it, who couldn’t use some professional help? Who doesn’t come armed with a swank piece of baggage or two? That’s part of what makes each of us so unique, so “lovable.”

I sent round to a small contingent of friends and family an article from the New York Times Magazine, “Married (Happily) With Issues.” Billing it as a Must Read, I added that due to its length, it should be printed out for enjoying on public transport or the loo.

The author and her spouse go through a similar counseling process as I did with mine. While her story focuses on the marital relationship, I want to write here about how crazy useful it is to learn about oneself and how to relate to others, anyone. They should teach this stuff in school! How about a “How to Win Friends” class before lunch, after Home Ec.?

In this Harvard Business Review interview, renown psychologist Daniel Goleman talks about how important emotional and social intelligence are in business settings. Of course, they’re equally important in personal life.

Emotional intelligence has to do with self-mastery…it makes for outstanding individual performers. When it comes to leadership, your success depends on everyone else’s effectiveness. So you need to be successful in influencing, persuading, growing, inspiring other people. That’s the social intelligence ability.

Emotional intelligence governs how we handle our emotions. In order to exert control over them, Goleman says you need to know what makes yourself “tick.” On the other hand, “Social intelligence is being able to tune in to other people, to read them…and to use that [knowledge] to communicate effectively with them. One of the sure signs of social intelligence is rapport. You feel [the other person is] really listening and empathizing. You feel felt.”

Professional counseling is expensive and time-consuming, but well worth the investment. Or, check out some books and seminars. Whatever you do, at least think about it. Be it on a one-on-one basis, or in league with your partner. All sorts of stuff gets discovered amongst your bags. Unpacking is hell, but you’ll feel so much more at home once you start.

And God bless her soul: my mom-in-law, she still speaks to me. And yes, I’m still unpacking bags over here.

if you liked “hot tub time machine,” you may be having a mid-life crisis

A couple weeks ago I participated in a workshop run by a life coach called “What is My Work and How Is It Working For Me?” I think I know the current answer, but suspect I need a bit more time to fully accept and embrace it. (I’ve recently devoted more time to parenting and managing the household, and less to working for pay.)

Here’s a snapshot of the “work wheel” (also referred to as a wheel of life) I created at the workshop. Each slice of the pie represents each category of my life’s “work.” The size of each slice represents the amount of time spent on each type of work. The P’s denote which activities I regard as fulfilling a life Purpose; the N’s denote activities that are dictated by Necessity. (Disregard the shaded-out slice: I made a error is slice-sizing. Or maybe that was my unconscious mind telling me my priorities are screwed up…)

The life coach led us through a series of activities designed to tease out things like our values and our vision for our lives. Then, we threw them up next to our work wheel, trying to figure out where we might need more or less of something, or if something was missing all together.

Or not. Try it out: make yourself a work wheel. Perhaps you’re one of the lucky few whose slices are all perfectly aligned with your values and vision. Bully for you! (Really.)

Or perhaps you, like many Generation X’ers, feel dissatisfied with life. A. O. Scott took a look at Sam Lipsyte’s novel “The Ask” in a New York Times article last week. He says it’s “the definitive literary treatment of a hugely important social phenomenon… the onset of the Generation X midlife crisis.” He also says that “Hot Tub Time Machine” is Gen X’s answer to “The Big Chill.”

Hold up: maybe I’m going through a mid-life crisis and that’s why I’ve been so busy navel-gazing of late.

At a certain point, Dad buys a sports car, or starts a rock band, or has an affair or walks out on Mom or quits the law firm to make goat cheese. When this kind of thing happens to Mom, it’s not a crisis but an awakening.

The wheel of life exercise should prove useful to anyone of any age, and needs re-jiggering from time to time as your life changes. Sitting here at my perch under the banyan tree (at least that’s my goal – to become as enlightened as possible), I bid you well in your search for meaning.

raising racist kids

It’s Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. It may come off as yet another one of those made-up holidays, but I’ll take what I can get with respect to my efforts to raise conscious, bi-racial kids who don’t make judgments about people based on skin color.

“What are you?” I asked my then 4-year-old.

“Chinese?” he says quizzically.

That was when I decided I should do a Lunar New Year presentation for his class, emphasizing that there’s Chinese New Year and then there’s Lunar New Year. The latter term acknowledges the fact that Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese folk all celebrate the new year on the same day, according to the cycle of the moon. (And the fact that Koreans and Vietnamese don’t call it “Chinese New Year.”)

I had posed the question as we’d been talking about how people come in different colors, sizes, shapes. I think our conversations about race have been useful. He displays no signs of feeling superior or inferior to people of other races.  Perhaps that’s helped by the fact that he lives in a bi-racial household. (His dad is white.) (Nearly translucent.) His friends are black, brown, white and yellow; and like himself, his best friend is bi-racial (black/white).

But, the fact that he didn’t know he’s half Korean was a bit of a wake-up call. While I don’t want him to make judgments based on skin color, I do want him to know about where his people come from. My action plan thus far: annual Lunar New Year presentations at school; he’s in his second year of Tae Kwon Do; he and his sister will go to Korean culture camp in Minneapolis this summer.

Then, there’s my current 4-year-old. “She doesn’t like her because her skin is brown,” she says, referring to the drama occurring between two dolls yesterday at breakfast. “It doesn’t matter what color her skin is – we’re all the same,” says I.

Really? Perhaps I should have said, “Yes, their skin color is different, but that doesn’t mean one is better than the other;” then followed up with a discussion about race and race relations. And about country of origin and personal identity. And then perhaps nuclear physics and Vermeer’s use of light…

Research shows that not talking explicitly about race, efforts to affect a “color blind” attitude and relying only on vague statements like “we’re all the same,” may do more harm than good. Authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman sort through the evidence in NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. They find that most white parents don’t talk to their kids about race. They write:

It is tempting to believe that because their generation is so diverse, today’s children grow up knowing how to get along with people of every race. But numerous studies suggest that this is more of a fantasy than a fact.

Then they go on to detail a litany of fateful facts like that the more diverse a school is, the less likely kids will form cross-cultural friendships; and that only 8% of white high schoolers have a different-race best friend.

The current 4-year-old often colors the princesses in her coloring books brown. What a relief. I suppose at four, she’s still trying to sort things out. I’ll help as best I can.