On Friday and Saturday, my Twitter feed was full of anger and frustration over a blog post on the ALSC (Association for Library Services to Children) Blog. Entitled “How Motherhood Has Influenced Me as a Children’s Librarian,” the post was problematic because it suggested (probably unintentionally) that childless children’s librarians could not connect with patrons as much or have the level of insight about babies that the author got from having a baby. Many of these so-called insights seemed like things anyone should know (I’m not a children’s librarian, but even I didn’t try reading Corduroy to my son until he was 2 or 3!), but many librarians without kids felt that the message of the piece was that they would never be as good a children’s librarian because they don’t (or can’t) have kids.
I wish the author had considered how writing something like “the children seem to know a mommy when they see one, and relationships are forged quicker” would impact a children’s librarian who desperately wanted to be a parent but couldn’t. Or devoted children’s librarians who have decided not to have children. To make childless librarians feel like they could never have the level of passion for the work, the insights, and the relationships you do with patrons because they don’t have children is wrong-headed (even if it wasn’t her intent). I 100% believe that the author did not intend to make anyone feel excluded, but the simple fact is, she did. If something you write makes people feel hurt and excluded — especially on the official blog of your membership organization — the right thing to do is apologize. I hope she will and I hope ALSC will address this issue on the blog.
Even as a mother, I get annoyed by the “transformed by having a child” trope. It promotes the idea that a woman isn’t truly whole and fulfilled until she has had children. I had a wonderful and fulfilling life before my son was in it and I have a wonderful and fulfilling life now. Sure, having a baby changed me. So did moving in with my partner. So did college. So did working in a toxic environment. So did working with fantastic colleagues. So did every episode of depression I’ve had. So did having migraines. Every major experience I’ve had in my life has altered me and made me who I am today. It was, undoubtedly, a HUGE change in my life and one that enriches and challenges me every day, but I’m still me.
I get especially frustrated when I hear from men that having a baby made them more empathetic or that having a daughter made them a feminist. What the fuck is up with that? If you couldn’t imagine another person’s struggles or couldn’t care about women having equal rights before you had a child, there is something seriously wrong with you.
I think if you just read the article without an understanding of the culture we live in, the blog post would seem innocuous. However, if you haven’t spent your life living under a rock, you couldn’t help but see the intense societal pressure placed on women to have children. It’s relentless and women without children are frequently portrayed as selfish and/or incomplete. Women who do not fit the mold are not only pressured, but are often excluded. Even I, as a mother, have encountered this. In my community, we are literally the only people we know (of all the families we have known over 6 years of schooling) who have one child. Every other family has two or more. And I’ve seen how we’re sometimes treated like oddities for having one child, like there’s something deficient about our family. Whatever…
The funny thing is, for all the pressure women receive to have children, the minute they do, that fact is suddenly a liability in their worklife. You realize the world is still designed under the assumption that women will stay home with their kids, even though most mothers now work. Any mom who has had to pump breastmilk in a public restroom can tell you that the world isn’t set up to support working moms. And that’s never been more obvious than right now. My son came home from school on March 13th and never went back. But somehow my husband and I were expected to work the same amount as we did before. At my job, it wasn’t even discussed. No one asked how they could help those of us with kids (a surprisingly small number of people at my place of work actually). My boss didn’t ask me how I was balancing work and schooling my child. And in Spring I did work my usual hours (and then some). I just gave up doing anything other than my job and supporting my child’s emotional well-being and schooling. And I didn’t spend nearly as much time with my son as I should have. I put work first as if we were living our pre-pandemic lives because I didn’t feel supported to do anything else. I worked myself to the bone and short-changed my son and for what?
For all that pressure we get for having kids, the minute a woman seeks support because their children’s needs are interfering with their ability to work, the message becomes “you chose to have kids.” I’ve covered for colleagues who had to be out for so many different reasons. And yet I feel shame if I want to flex my time so I can see my son perform in his play. Or if I can’t teach a class because my son is sick. Because women are supposed to be both 100% devoted mothers at home and 100% unencumbered devoted workers at work and those two paradigms should never meet. We can never be our full authentic selves as mothers at work if we want to be taken seriously. I’ll never forget when a library dean told me that people who want to have families and spend time with them shouldn’t take tenure track jobs. That was in my first week in a tenure-track job when my son had just turned two. Wow, ok.
But now we’re in a situation where these roles that were supposed to magically be hermetically sealed off from each other are colliding in epic fashion and in most cases, we have no safety net. No one with kids under high school-aged (and many with high schoolers too) will be able to work a full-time job at full capacity and adequately support their kid(s) without help. And most places of work I’ve heard about are either being extremely insensitive/terrible about caregiving or aren’t mentioning the issue at all (which honestly feels worse). Are any workplaces doing this well? I’d love to hear about them. I’m incredibly lucky that my place of work is still going to be remote at least through Fall, but I’m still expected to work a full-time job.
Please know that your colleagues with children are extremely stressed right now and for good reason. And it’s more than just the time it takes to help students with school. It’s stressing about your kid’s socio-emotional well-being and finding ways to keep them safe and emotionally well. It’s a million little decisions that always feel terrifying. Many parents have faced decisions this summer that no parents have faced before. My husband and I had to choose between sending our son to school half-time (with half the time online) or committing to fully online learning for at least half the year while coronavirus cases were steadily increasing. We had to think about logistics, safety, our son’s socialization and mental health, and our ability to visit my husband’s elderly parents who live nearby. And it’s not like any of the options were good — we were ultimately just choosing the best of the worst. And it was work! I was listening to every school board meeting and writing letters to the Superintendent, school board members, and other parents when their original plan was to outsource online schooling to a sketchy company. And when my advocacy work succeeded and we finally decided to have him learn online and felt ok-ish about our decision, the governor declared that K-12 schools couldn’t open until counties met pretty stringent benchmarks, so most of that agonizing had been for nothing.
Now, we have to figure out how we’re going to do our jobs while helping our son (who needs a lot of support getting a handle on what needs to be done, staying on-task, and getting organized) with fully online school. And, in the grand scheme of things, I recognize that my job is less important for our family than my husband’s. I know I’m the one who is going to have to do the bulk of the support when it comes to my son’s schooling and I’ll do it gladly. But as someone who is struggling to recover from work addiction, I’m worried about my ability to set boundaries on my work and time. And at a college where no one seems to have given thought to supporting working parents (or at least no one is talking about it beyond HR sending out the boilerplate about the Families First Coronavirus Response Act), I’m worried about whether I will get the support I need. If I’m asked to go back to work before my son is back in school face-to-face, I don’t know what I’ll do. And I think many mothers (and some fathers too) will be in the same situation, but this could have a significant and long-term impact on women’s careers and that is really fucking scary. Here are some bleak stories/studies from the New York Times, Fast Company, The Atlantic and USC on the subject.
This pandemic has been hard for everyone, but I think it’s been uniquely difficult for people who are caregivers, whether that is for a child, an elderly relative, or someone with a life-threatening or chronic illness. Making decisions for another human being who is dependent on you is daunting at any time, but particularly now when there is no history to rely on in making these decisions. My mental bandwidth is so maxed out right now. And I’d like to hope that people will recognize that it’s in the best interests of our society to have emotionally-healthy and well-educated children (and sane long-term colleagues) and will support working parents. If you have colleagues with kids (especially those with very young kids — I honestly don’t know how people with babies and toddlers are even working at all with them at home), try checking in with them. Try to help lighten their load at work. Working moms often have a hard time asking for help because we’re traditionally supposed to pretend our kids don’t make demands on our work time. If you’re a supervisor of people with kids or other caregivers, have open and frank conversations with them about their situation, their needs, and how you can support them. Make it clear that you believe their family should come first (in word and deed). And absolutely cut people, all people, slack right now. This is a time for maximum flexibility and humanity.
This crisis will eventually (hopefully) end and those working parents will (hopefully) still be at your place of work. How loyal will they feel and how much of a team player will they be if they were forced to make a choice between their job and their kid(s)? We are seeing people’s and companies’ true colors now. We’re seeing the very best and the very worst of humanity. Which side of that do you want to be on? Let’s be the village that working parents and other caregivers need right now. The last thing any organization should want right now is for their employees who are parents to take all of the 12 weeks of leave guaranteed by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act come Fall, so try to find other ways to proactively support them in finding a balance.
Image credit: Working mom by Ran Zwigenberg on Flickr. CC-BY 2.0 License
I empathize with women who are working full-time and caretaking loved ones. I would like to share the costs to workers who do not have children, some of whom caretake sisters, brothers, parents, spouses, and others while almost universally, in my experience, being expected to be “flexible” for staff who have children. “Flexible” means taking schedules that coworkers with children find difficult for their morning and evening family routines. It means coming to the physical building while coworkers with children are often granted generous remote working hours. It means putting in countless more hours to complete projects that keep to the employers’ timeline–and that timeline can be strict because it’s a matter of survival for the organization because it means revenue. We are constantly reminded how hard our parenting coworkers have it, while very little consideration goes into what many single, married without children, and living-alone employees are going through. As morale “boosters,” we are bombarded with photos of our coworkers’ children, and normally this would be welcome and uplifting, but in these times, especially to those who are childless not by design, this feels aggressive and coercive. You absolutely must comment on how cute someone’s child is. At my place of work, we are treated to a weekly morale booster that showcases a few coworkers’ children having fun at the park or in their backyards, and the childless majority in my department dutifully praise the children and the parents and lie about how this is uplifting to all of us. It’s not. I know because we talk about it, and I talk about it with friends at other organizations and places of work. It’s one thing to work extras hours and the least coveted schedules so that you can raise your children, but to be forced to slavishly admire your lifestyle that our extra work and hardship is helping to subsidize can be salt in the wound. And then to hear your constant complaints about how hard your ideal-looking life is. I know this sounds harsh, but this is a real phenomenon, and from my anecdotal view, it has been an experience for me in most of my years of work and has only been intensified by the pandemic. Our society is broken in so many ways. All of my childless colleagues wish there was affordable and safe childcare available in this country. We wish that workers weren’t forced to work ourselves sick to make ends meet. We wish our jobs and healthcare weren’t precarious. And some of us wish that our circumstances, which also involve a great deal of hardship, did not involve taking up that slack without even being acknowledged for it. Please don’t assume childless workers have it easy and are automatically available to make up for the ills of our society. There is a privilege in the workplace that comes with having children; “family” providers are often first in line for promotions, the last to be let go, and the beneficiaries of their coworkers’ extra hours and “flexibility.”
I’m sorry Lilah that you feel like you’ve been coerced and leaned on too heavily by colleagues with children at your workplace. It has to be so frustrating. It sounds like you might want to address this with your supervisor because you should not have to cover the workloads of others beyond unique, time-limited situations. It sounds like your administration is expecting a level of work that is untenable right now. I definitely did not have that experience when I was childless and I worked with lots of parents with young kids. But I’ve also never worked anywhere like you described where people constantly share pictures of their kids (other than having them on the desk); most parents I know feel like they have to keep work and their kids totally separate (as I mentioned in the post). It’s nice to know that some workplaces are supportive of working parents, because it has not been my experience nor the experience of many other librarians I know. But that support shouldn’t mean that people without kids are expected to do so much more, especially under normal circumstances.
I completely understand your resentment if you’re being taken advantage of. I was long someone who would do other people’s work when we were working on projects and they couldn’t get their part done, but I realized that it was burning me out and making me resentful. I decided to set boundaries (which it sounds like you might need to do as well) and while it’s been hard to let things go, I recognize that it’s not my job to carry everything. It’s not your job either.
Of course, parents, like any caregivers or workers with chronic illnesses/disabilities, occasionally need flexibility, but in those situations when I had to cover for others I never felt resentful or like I was being taken advantage of. Throughout my career, I’ve frequently been the person who has had to cover for others who were dealing with mental health crises, family illnesses, etc. and I’ve done it gladly because I believe it’s part of the social contract and that if I needed support, I’d get it too. But I’ve never experienced what you described here.
I’m also curious about the info you shared about people with children being less likely to be fired and more likely to be promoted. Can you share the data on that? Is that specifically about men? All the things I’ve read suggest the opposite for women (that it actually makes them less likely to be promoted and more likely to be laid off — in fact, this just happened to a friend who is a mother recently just after she took some leave to care for her son), so if you could share citations or links, they’d be much appreciated.
Hi Meredith. I’m wondering why my second comment has been removed. There was certainly nothing abusive or inappropriate about it. Information Want to Be Free is the name of this blog after all. Lilah
Hi again. It looks like your second one got caught in my spam filter. I have a couple running on the blog because I’ve had a lot of problems with spam and I didn’t notice there was one in pending until you mentioned it. It often flags multiple posts close together by the same IP because that’s what spammers frequently do. It’s up now.
The answer to your questions is, we’re your village. Your childless “flexible” coworkers. Please acknowledge us.
Fantastic post, Meredith. I take the lack of comments not as a reflection of the low impact of your words, but of their unqualified accuracy. I cannot fathom how parents (especially mothers) of young children are coping with work, schooling their children, maintaining their physical and mental health, all while be expected to maintain pre-pandemic productivity. Yes, all caregivers are experiencing increased burdens and anxiety, but the fallout from this surreal time will definitely affect mothers–and especially mothers of color–more than others.
You’re absolutely right. I recently read an article that showed that submissions to scholarly journals from women had basically fallen off a cliff since the start of the pandemic, but that the same isn’t true of men. I think this is going to have long-lasting impacts on the careers of many women across industries. It’s heartbreaking.
This is my first comment, but I wanted to leave a note because I’ve enjoyed reading your blog for about a year. I’m so sorry to hear that you’re struggling.
As someone who is single and childless, I have experienced a similar phenomenon to the one Lilah describes, where colleagues with children and caregiving responsibilities, are granted more flexibility and understanding with working from home (before the pandemic, and in managing during it) and leaving early / later. I am trying to reach out and help out where I can.
On the bright side, since you asked about good experiences, and our library has been generally great about telling employees to do what they can, when they can, and not feel like they have to stick to full time hours if that’s not possible. Our university as a whole (we’re not in the US) has also repeatedly sent out institution-wide messages encouraging employees to take time off to rest and recover, and recently changed its policies to enable us to carry over any remaining days of leave to next year, which we hadn’t been able to do before. Plus, there is little shame or questioning around taking leave, which seems very different from the situation where you are. Best wishes to your friend after her redundancy, how horrible, and I hope she and her family will be okay.
I hope you have felt able to take the wonderful advice you gave Lilah, and speak to your line manager and colleagues about needing support and flexibility.
Thanks Hope for the kind words! I’m pleased to hear that your place of work has normalized being a whole person. I think it means so much to all workers when that sort of communication comes from the top. We’re our best when we can bring our whole selves to work and flexibility and humanity are key.
I did end up talking to my boss and I’m going to be taking some leave this Fall to focus on my son, his schooling, and his well-being. It went very much against my instincts to do this, but I’m glad I did. I’m grateful that I have the option to do it, but it’s frustrating that not every parent in the U.S. does.