Meet the hosts of Why Care? who are parents first, influencers second and ready to lead a care revolution. Care affects everyone…and everything. It matters. So why is America’s care system such a mess? And more importantly, how do we fix it?
Why Care? with Reshma Saujani and Tim Allen is investigative journalism meets parents who also happen to be on the frontlines. But is it Reshma’s roles as founder of Marshall Plan for Moms and Girls Who Code that have her so fired up? Is it because Tim is CEO of Care.com? In this inaugural episode, Welcome to Why Care? (And why you should care), they’ll tell you it’s because, like you, they’re parents first. And, like you, they’re tired—and fed up—and want more for their families and themselves. What are they going to do about it? What are you? Why Care?
Episode 1: Welcome to Why Care? (And why you should care)
Full Transcript:
Reshma Saujani:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Why Care Podcast. I’m Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms.
Tim Allen:
And I’m Tim Allen, the CEO of Care.com.
Reshma Saujani:
Hey, Tim, how’s it going?
Tim Allen:
Hey Reshma, it’s great to be with you. I love that we get some dedicated time to talk over always running around doing our work life and our parenting life. It’s great just seeing you and having dedicated time one on one.
Reshma Saujani:
It’s great seeing you today, too, especially with like, from my end with three hours of sleep. But I know that this is what happens with parents, and I love that we’re having this conversation because I was just drawn to you immediately. I have met so many CEOs in my life, and very few of them are as real and as authentic, and you don’t sugarcoat things. And I think with so much of what parents are going through, what moms are going through today; I think we need corporate leaders that are willing to have an authentic, unbarred, no holds barred conversation.
Today, whether you’re a caregiver or not, the care structure infrastructure in America is so broken, and it’s not just my problem or your problem, it’s like everyone’s problem, whether you have a kid or not. I’m really excited about this podcast because it affects everyone, and I think people are going to be excited about what we have to say, I think we’re going to learn a lot. Because this issue is fundamental to the economy, to economic security, to competitiveness, to joy, it matters.
Tim Allen:
Yeah, I really appreciate that you say that one of the things you and I bonded over is we are parents, we are parents first. We have a lot of work ahead of us in the corporate structure, especially. And the thing I’ve always loved about our conversations, and I think I love that am always in awe of when you and I are around, is not only are you this visionary ideation person, but you are a change agent like you roll up your sleeves, you dig in, and you are the catalysts for change.
As I’ve read your books, and as you and I have talked, I’ve been so thoroughly impressed with all of the work you’ve done, and there’s an authenticity in it, that you look at it, you go, if we are not going to actually call the structures, what they are, if we’re not going to look at these structures authentically and really say the truth of the matter, there’s no way we can either dismantle them or rebuild them, or actually have or inspire something new. And I always feel so lucky to be in the space of that with you. So this podcast, for me is a dream come true. I really do get to have incredible conversations with you, but also incredible conversations with the people around us who are influencing that change. This weekend, I was spending time with the kids that summer, we were playing and having a good time and doing the fun stuff, and I had this just introspective moment where it’s like, ‘I get to record the podcast tomorrow, and I really actually get to play some small voice in this matter with someone I consider a friend and then also someone who inspires me.’ So I’m really looking forward to this podcast, really excited.
Reshma Saujani:
Oh my God! Thank you. Last night was getting ready to study for what we’re going to talk about, and of course, it was like bedtime, and the kids don’t want to go to bed. It’s like, ‘Mama Mama sleep with me.’ I fall asleep on my notes, and then I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m just going to get up early.’ And then my son’s side has been having these night terrors. So of course, he decides to have one last night, and I’m like, urg! But I woke up and I’m like this is the real reality of every single parent. You think you have something really important that you want to do on Monday, you’re going to get a good night’s rest, you plan everything, and then you show up and invariably it blows up. And so it’s even more of a reason why if you have childcare, if you have a company that supports your childcare, if you can afford it, if all these things make it easier for you, when those moments come, which are unexpected, and your kids need you when things don’t work the way that you thought they were, you at least can show up like I can with you today with understanding and compassion and it’s easier. That’s kind of the world that we want for people
Tim Allen:
Absolutely! Access to care is so vital to the success of individuals, right? People for them to be able to have the careers, they dream of, the life they dream of; and access to care is not universal, and that’s something that is really missing. It starts to create the gap which I know we’ll explore and go into. But I’m struck by what you said is really it universal to all parents. I don’t know if you have this experience. I think I have it figured out or I feel like I have to perceive to my child I have it all figured out; when underneath the surface I have nothing figured out and I’m just trying to make it work.
I have literally to say where you are I have the experience too like, my twin boys, seven years old, the light of my life, it was the most fortunate thing for my partner and I to be able to have our kids and make them a piece of our family. And they have amplified my life in ways I never would have thought. But one of them wakes up on the dot, at 5:15 every morning. And no matter how many times and similar to you, I was like, ‘I’m going to get up early, I’m going to look at my notes. I’m going to like study, I’m going to do the thing.’ No matter how many times of course corrected, or I’ve had the conversation with him or we sit down and talk, the child does not understand being quiet at seven years old. So every light of the house is turned on- every light.
Reshma Saujani:
And they wake it up.
Tim Allen:
That’s exactly it. So I learned to embrace it. I laugh a lot about it, but like, I’m groggy and tired of making cereal, like I’m half of a shell of a human being, and 5:15 deboarding and like the similar views. I just look at it, and I go, ‘Wow, all of my plans get thrown out so often,’ and I am really good at Plan C and D like figuring it out at the moment as a parent.
Reshma Saujani:
Totally. It’s like you convince yourself it’s so funny. This past week, my husband and I Nihal went on Vacation by ourselves, we do this every year, we go once a week. Thank God, my mom will take the kids so we don’t go with them. And the entire vacation I slept like 10, 11, 12 hours, and I had for so long convinced myself that I just like to sleep seven hours a day, you know what I mean, but I’m just a morning person. No, I’m not, and it’s because you love them, and it’s because you have to. But you realize and when you have these moments I do on vacation. I was like, ‘Oh, I am sleep deprived, I am exhausted, I am tired, and I have a two-year-old and a seven-year-old. I’m not sleeping right now I did in this part of my life. And so I think part of it, I hope in this podcast, too, that we give people moments and opportunities to not just learn about the state of care, but to learn something about themselves.
Tim Allen:
Yeah, I’m interested to completely agree, this is the opportunity to really pull back the covers, have the conversation about care, the industry, there’ll be the business facets of it, there’ll be the human facets of it with caregivers in the world. But also it is an exploration for parents. And what you shared is so right it’s I know on vacation, I very similar will be like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to set, I’m not up at 5:15, I get to sleep in till a luxurious seven or eight, right?’ And you’re like, ‘Okay, this is great.’ Do you think as parents, we convince ourselves, and then it becomes normalized, so it becomes numb that you just kind of don’t realize your needs underneath some of it?
Reshma Saujani:
Yeah, we talk a lot about this at Marshall Plan for Moms when we’re like taking a step back and examining motherhood in America. And I think so much about what it means to be a mom in America, it means to be a martyr. We had done this ad for Mother’s Day about mom’s guilt, and we did a survey afterward and most people if you were a dad, a childless person, whatever, you watched the video and you’re like, ‘Wow, moms deserve more.’ And moms watched this video but Mom’s got guilt and like, ‘Oh, I don’t deserve anything.’ It’s so interesting, right? So I do think as parents so much of, maybe why change isn’t happening as fast enough is because we are actually not advocating for the things we need. Because we kind of like well, this is just the way it is. This is what it means to be a parent in America today, and I think part of what I think we have the opportunity to do right just tells people, when we talk about what’s happening in other countries, what is possible? It doesn’t have to actually be this way. It can be different. I think that’s going to go back to this whole like, our kids and they’re sleeping in the night terrors. I think that we know at certain stages of your kid’s life, you sign up for IRS can be sleep deprived, right till they’re eight or nine and then they start like sleeping on their own or in their own bed and like or they can wake up and make breakfast by themselves. But I think what’s happening with care in America, it is like this sustained, prolonged trauma, where you never actually feel like you get a break, or that anything actually changes and that’s when you realize, wow, this is like something more fundamental. Tell me about you because I love you and I love everything that you’ve done, and I think it’d be such a gift to tell our listeners who is Tim Allen, who are you?
Tim Allen:
So grew up overseas. I’m a child of military parents. I was there until I was in high school, and then my parents semi-retired. They had grown up in the Chicago area. So I had family respect for the Chicago area, and my dad decided to move to Oklahoma. So Oklahoma was the first United States I’d ever lived in, it was my experience in the United States. So I walk in this, growing up in Europe, you go on military bases, you have a picture of what America is like, but just so you know, the context, everything was about a year delayed from what was going on in America. So as American movies came out, we would get them about a year later. So I walk into Oklahoma, and I’m like, ‘This is America,’ and by the way, in many ways, it is this central Americana through and through. But I walked in as this awkward, tall lanky kid who was referencing movies about a year old. So immediately, they’re like, ‘Who’s the strange foreign kid?’ Like, even though I grew up on military bases in America, they were like, ‘Who’s the weird kid?’ So it was great. I grew up in Oklahoma, my mother is still there. My parents divorced, and my mom ended up– my mom was a nurse by trade, and so I became kind of a single-parent child in high school.
Reshma Saujani:
Was that hard?
Tim Allen:
It was. The hardest part about it was for so many years of my life, it was my mom and my dad, and then there was the break that was really about their relationship, and had nothing to do with the kids. But as a kid, it’s really hard to distinguish, there’s something about me, or it becomes a kind of like that self-centered world as your child, right? Because you wonder what went wrong, or what you could have done differently, even though you had no control over the situation.
Like two adults making your decision to no longer be in love. And, the other hard part about it was just, my dad stepped away, and my dad stepped away and really didn’t participate in the family. I think I conject her, we haven’t really talked about it. But I assume he really decided that there was shame built into it or something built into it for him, that was all of his issues, that he stepped away from the relationship, but he also stepped away from the family. So I became a single-parent kid, kind of overnight. So not only am I adjusting to a new society, like a new world, and understanding what America is about, I’m then adjusting to a new family structure. And my mom went into a pretty deep depression during that period of time. And so then I also became the high school therapist for a parent who was also having to figure out how to put it all back together. Not only put herself back together to find love in her 40s, but she was also figuring out; I have children I need to take care of and provide for. And so I had to play that therapist in high school in a lot of ways to really be there for her and help her piece things back together.
There were days when she didn’t want to go to bed. And, as a 16-year-old you go, it’s just such a night and day from what had been there previously, and so you look at it, and you go, okay, and you power through my sister’s at university. And so I was like alone, in a lot of ways during that, and that was very informative of like, what parents struggle with behind the scenes for me. It taught me a lot of early lessons, and it also taught me the power of community.
My mom really relied on people who she’d worked with, the nurses she worked with, and the other members around the community to help take care of me if she had a working overnight shift, or they were checking him. No one wants to leave his 16-year-old home alone, trust me. I know she would have probably right. But it was a very interesting and developmental time where I learned the power of community. And there was all of that I went to the University of Oklahoma; Computer Science is my degree. It was the early years of the internet time period,
I was one of those kids who had a Commodore 64 and loved prodigy if anyone remembers that. And I went to San Diego to join a startup and was working there and then interviewing during the late 90s and came across a company that I fell in love with the management team. And on the spot, they offered me a job in New York. I never wanted to live in New York. I had no dreams of that. I was a California surf kid. And I was like oh winter, I don’t know if I can.
I took the job, went to New York, and fell in love like fell in love hard for the city. I had that quintessential moment where you’re looking up the streets in the avenues, and it’s the fall day and the leaves are coming down, and I was like, ‘Oh God, I love this place.’ And that company got acquired by another company by another company, and I’ve been with that company ever since. And so I’ve done stints at CEO Vimeo within the company called IAC, and have done since then other companies.
And then a couple of years ago, care.com came across our desk as a potential acquisition, and I was established on my career, I was happy with the company I was running at that time. I loved the people, I built it from scratch. But the draw of making a difference in the world to disrupt what is in essence, a dinosaur, in all intents and purposes, was just too powerful, and I knew this required real love and nurturing, and taking to it. And so I was drawn to it, having had two kids and struggling with hiring, care giving help, and finding quality help, and I knew that there had to be a better way. There just had to be a better way.
Reshma Saujani:
You became the CEO of care.com before the pandemic, right?
Tim Allen:
Right, it was two weeks before the pandemic, and we’d finished the acquisition. So February of 2020, mid-February 2020, we closed the acquisition, and two weeks later, the world went into disarray, and everything shut down.
Reshma Saujani:
And care became the conversations?
Tim Allen:
Yes. So you have all these big plans, as you know, or any organization that literally just got thrown out the door, like there’s gone, and it became how do I connect with people and people in the organization through zoom and through, you know, these digital and electronic means, and how do I connect with our customers? How do we connect with caregivers, and so it really took a conscious effort, it was it was extremely challenging, but I think the world is better for it. To be frank with you or not, not to, this doesn’t. It’s not to glorify the pandemic, by any means it’s traveled. It’s a travesty in so many ways. But I think the world got to really evaluate certain things that were really important to itself. So I was really thankful for that piece of it. I’m never thankful for the pandemic. And really just, you know, it’s heartbreaking. A lot of the stories are heard, but it was really thankful for the opportunity to be able to connect with people on a level I don’t think would have been possible.
Reshma Saujani:
Yeah. Well, they always say like, don’t waste a good crisis. And I do think that caregiving generally, if we were I was having a conversation with someone the other day about, like the mommy wars between stay-at-home moms and working women, and I think that divide, that tension really shifted in the pandemic, because everybody was working. Everyone was a stay-at-home mom, everyone saw, you know, all of this unpaid labor. That’s, that’s so interesting. So funny how it’s so funny how life works that way, in that, like, you were meant to be leading this organization at this moment.
Tim Allen:
Yeah, I completely agree. It’s like, there’s this Kismat thing that happens in the world where, no matter what I think, you can be intentional, right? But life has a way of crafting you to the right space in the right spot at the right time. So, yeah, that’s a little about me. I’m sure there’s a lot more to unfold inside of that. But let’s talk about you. I want to hear about you to take the spot off me.
Reshma Saujani:
I like the direction you went into. So, my parents came here as refugees in 1973. A lot of people don’t know this but there’s these huge populations of Indians in Africa that were brought over by the British. There was just crazy Decoteau; my father, my mother, and my grandparents were born in Uganda. And then one day this dictator Idi Amin just had a dream that he should expel all of the Ugandan Asians from the country, and my father was just watching television and there goes Idi Amin saying, “Well, you got 90 days to leave the country, or else you’re shot on spot.” And they all had a pretty entrenched family network in Uganda.
So talk about like how their care giving situation shifted from Uganda where you had this almost like village of aunties and uncles and grandparents and all the kids were together and taken care of, and now they have to scramble and figure out where they’re going to get refugee status. And so both of my parents had pretty large families; several brothers and sisters on both sides. Most of our family ended up getting refugee status in the UK, so people really split like in the 70s UK actually had refugee camps all across the country of Ugandan nation that were looking to be resettled.
My father was fortunate to get him and my mom a visa to come to the United States, because they were both engineers, and it was the 70s, and the country was desperately seeking engineers. So they show up, the early 20s, my mother is pregnant with my sister. They don’t speak the language. They are wearing shorts and T-shirts in the middle of Chicago in January. They’re taken in by the Catholic Charities, they found a one-room apartment. Even though they have engineering degrees, my dad works as a machinist in a plant, my mother sells cosmetics until they’re able to get engineering degrees, they finally save up money to buy a small house in Schaumburg, Illinois, and they’re so happy.
Again, for immigrants, it’s like, they wanted the things that they lost in their homes they were situated; they had businesses, they had homes, they had resources, and here they come and they have nothing, they’ve lost all their money, they have no family, they don’t have any friends, and so getting established. And so I think very much my father’s I think the position was like to become American, he go to toastmasters every week and get rid of his accent, we never spoke Indian. At home, we just looked for ways to quote because back then in the 70s was all about assimilation, and so I got an Americanized. My children and I think- I very much my sister and I think very much fell into that too, because we were growing up in this working-class family that just didn’t have a lot of Indian families and back then it wasn’t how it is now, right? Where you have Bridgeton, back then, the 80s was very blonde, very white, very middle of the country in, like every representation of from beauty to intelligence, you just weren’t a part of it, and so all you wanted to do as a kid was just fit in.
So there’s always a lot of tension at home between money and jobs, and how to balance things and kids and feeling isolated. And, again, now their parents are back in England, they don’t have a relationship with them, they’re trying to get a relationship with them. They’re trying to find their own community, and so there’s always homeless tents. And then here I am, as a girl named Reshma Saujani in Schaumburg, Illinois, trying to fit in and so middle school was rough. In high school, I think I started really finding my own identity, I found other Indian kids that lived in other neighborhoods, and we would have this community of Indian kids, where we had our own prom, and we had our own parties, and we listen to hip hop, and went to like Bollywood hip hop parties, and had a crew of best friends that’s where I found my own acceptance and, but it wasn’t in Schaumburg High School and part of my community, it was outside.
I was always an activist. I love my first March when I was 13. I was always trying to understand and unpack identity and race and poverty and equality. And that was really a thorough line from high school to college, to law school. I graduated with $300,000 in student loan debt. So unlike you, which you have felt you kind of found your thing quickly, I zigzagged. I was in jobs I hated because I needed to pay off my student loans. I was lost. Even though I knew I think from the time I was little who I wanted to be, I just didn’t know how to get there. And it wasn’t until my early 30s; I’m a late bloomer, as all my psychics tell me. It wasn’t until my early 30s that I was like, oh, no, I need to just live the life that I want to live and I want to be an activist. I want to be in politics, so I just quit.
I ran for a United States Congress as the first South Asian American woman to ever run for US Congress. I ran against like Carolyn Maloney, who was like an 18-year incumbent. I thought I could like shake every hand, and meet every voter, but I got my ass kicked, it was not even close, and I was shocked when I didn’t know it. I didn’t even have it like a concession speech in my purse. I was completely persona non grata in the Democratic Party because I did not wait my turn. Ocasio did it years later; she was celebrated for thank God, but it was like, ‘Who is this woman? What is she doing?’
But the best thing about losing that race was I was like, oh, I want to make a difference. I want to make the change, whether it’s in politics, or it became engrossed with code, which is a nonprofit that I started to teach now 450,000 girls to code and half a billion through our work. I was always chasing equality, chasing opportunity, fighting for those who I think had been wronged, and whether that was girls, and now moms, being in that position, as we say, in Hinduism of being a warrior, and being a fighter, and using my voice or creating movements to bring about change is the place where I feel the most at home, and where I feel like I am kind of giving back to this nation that literally saved my parents life.
Tim Allen:
I love that. There’s so much written richness in everything like your story. I’m interested to do your parents reflect back now; there clearly were like very hard times and creating a new life for themselves and really started from nothing, so to speak, like zero, showing up in Chicago. And do they look back now and go, it was probably one of the best things that happened to them, do they reflect back on that and know that coming to America and then having this disruption that was completely thrust upon them, do they look back now and think. Do they see the life you’ve been able to create to see the lives that they’ve been able to create and reflect back on that?
Reshma Saujani:
I probably like you haven’t had enough of these conversations with my dad, because I feel like in our culture, it’s like, you don’t talk about these. But they come out in different ways. But I know, you just said that when you’re talking about your mom that it gave you an opportunity to see her almost as a human and her experience. And so I think there are a lot of things that happened to my parents, the discrimination that they felt they faced at work, the opportunities that they didn’t get, the things that people said to them on the street, the indignities that they had to face on a constant basis, knowing that you were–
In some ways, I think my father sometimes looks at me, I gave a commencement speech at Yale, and my dad was there with me. And I just remember watching him while I was kind of standing up there, and I know that there are like moments where he has where he says God, it was all worth it when I look at him here because I’ve struggled, but not in the same way. I think for them, it was just true that they weren’t. My father wasn’t going to be giving Yale’s commencement speech. It took time to get to that place, and so I think that that is hard because he was 25 when he was here, too. He was young, and they were young.
But not knowing that you couldn’t reach your fullest potential because the country wasn’t ready yet, I think it’s hard. But I think when he looks at me, and he looks at my sister, who’s an amazing OB/GYN doctor in Georgia, I think we are the embodiment of the American dream. I think this was what the struggle was about. And I do think for many immigrants, feel like that was their tax that they had to pay, and we’re going to talk about our assignment later. But it was interesting when I was talking to him about it. It’s like, there’s a lot of gratitude, rather than a lot of anger, which is interesting.
Tim Allen:
That’s incredible. You talk about the American dream; I also think it’s a parental dream, in a lot of instances, right? You want to see your children exceed and succeed. And I think some of your parents, though, not Akin, your parents clearly faced a lot of systemic issues that the country wasn’t ready to tackle head-on and we’re still tackling. To say we’ve scratched the surface is a vast, dramatic overstatement, right? There’s still a lot to unpack inside of that. But knowing that your father looks at you and gets to say, ‘Wow, that’s my daughter,’ and the choices that may lead to this,’ and then same thing with my mom, I look at it, and I go, I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone. Having to deal with that depression and having to deal with a moment and introspection of what occurs at that point in time. But I know, she looks at me now, and she goes, you’ve completely lost them to this human that, like, I’m so proud of. And that in and of itself, even when I think about my kids, I want whatever that looks like for them, I don’t have the traditional my kids have to do XYZ. I want them just to be great in the world, and really make a difference.
Reshma Saujani:
I don’t know, I look at you, and I feel this way about myself. It’s like, I just feel so lucky that I get to do what I want to do, and I don’t feel like anything is put upon me or I’m forced in. That’s all I want. Right? That’s all we want for our kids, a voice to always feel that way, for my voice to feel that way. But it’s interesting even going back to both of our families, we talk a lot about the structural breakdowns, but even if we’re talking about a system of care, sometimes the only breakdown is the marriage. I was reading somewhere like 1/3 of divorces are about chores. Even think about what the lack of a system of care has done to marriages in our country. It’s enormous.
Tim Allen:
Oh, yeah. It’s compounding pressure to the study; you read that 1/3 are about chores. It’s the subscription of kind of the normalities that people should share the roles they should take inside of a relationship. And then on top of that, you’ve got kids who are demanding it, it’s like, who else are going to do it. It’s just compounding so often in relationships, and it really does influence the care giving community, right? It influences how people define care. The one thing I’ve learned, if anything over the last few years, and to be frank with you, I’m constantly going I know, as little as possible at this time, I keep discovering new things inside the world of care
But the one thing I’ve learned is care is so deeply personal to the individual family, right? No, two care infrastructures look the same way. The tactics whether it’s a home nanny, or a daycare, or a babysitter or a development childcare center, or a school could be common. But the needs of the family are so unique, whether a family is going through a divorce, and they need the mom is going back to work, or the mom is actually working full time to try to provide now for the full family all the way through to dual households with mothers and fathers. It’s the expectations of who’s managing care, who’s triaging the care, and who’s on first. Similarly, you’ve talked about night cares. A year ago, we experienced something similar, and the person who had to get up was the person my son was calling, which happened to be me. He’s like, “Daddy Tim, daddy Tim,” and I’m like, ‘This one’s on me.’ It’s like the expectation setting is so dynamic and fluid inside a family. It’s just so unique to them.
Reshma Saujani:
This is a good place to talk about our parents, right? So both of us were given the assignment to go talk to our– I talked to my dad about what it was like, how they managed care with us. So I think you talked to your mom? It says
Tim Allen:
Yeah, I talked to my mom. I enjoyed this habit so much. I talked to my mom, and I also talked to my sister who’s the mother of five, and she’s an early educator. She’s a preschool teacher. And I’ll give you a blended perspective because it was very common, right? My mom said the hardest part about care was not losing herself. Like her identity. She said, “I loved you more than you will ever know, and there would be nothing I wouldn’t do for you.” But it was very hard for me to speak as my mom. It’s what she said for me to determine where that stopped and where I began. And it was really rich as we were digging into it, and this was like an hour long, like tears were shed and you go through memories and it took her back, right?
Usually, my mom’s interactions are like, how are you doing and what’s going on, high five, how are the kids? All the good stuff you would normally get through. So I have a question for you. I didn’t prep her for it. I kind of took her by surprise. So she was taken aback, and she said, it took a few minutes to think about it, and she goes, “I really do think the most difficult part for me was as you age, it’s your ambitions, your goals, your dreams, your perspective, and how do you support your children and their dreams, their goals, their perspective, while also pursuing their own and not have it be self-centered or self natured?” Because as a parent, we want to do everything for our children, and she said, the thing she learned the most out of that experience was she said, “Sometimes it’s okay for you to fail, and it’s not my fault.” And I was like, wow. That’s why you did it.
Reshma Saujani:
That’s why those things happened.
Tim Allen:
Exactly. Exactly, and it was really good. It was a good reflection. She’s very conscious of where she is at this point in her life. My mom’s now in her late 70s, and it’s incredible for me to become friends with my mom and see her so comfortable in her skin if that makes sense, and I really love her.
Reshma Saujani:
That’s really beautiful, and we should have both of them on the show.
Tim Allen:
Oh my Gosh, I don’t think you’re ready for Susan.
Reshma Saujani:
Trust me you haven’t met mine. But I guess my dad likes thumbs up. Yeah, he was very excited about this. Like I said to him, like the email and then I was supposed to come on Saturday and then I got like, busy and he’s like, “I’m ready when you’re ready.” So it was very interesting. We still kind of had this general conversation like what was care like, what did it look like? Because I don’t know about you but sometimes I’ve learned like, we oftentimes have our own narratives that we tell ourselves. So I’ve always, in my mind, see my father as the primary caretaker in our relationship, and so when we talk about that, he confirms that. My mother, her job, she worked in a factory had to wake up, she was working in a plant. So she was out the door by like, 7:15 or 7:30, and she wasn’t home till six. Now my dad was, because of his job he had to visit construction sites. So he had a much more flexible job. So he was the one that did drop off and pick up, and I think that has to do with a lot of, especially in my own marriage. A lot of my own expectations of like, we weren’t you doing that, why am I doing the laundry? Why am I doing the dishes, I very much grew up in a home where my father did that. So he was the one that was making or negotiating it, finding the babysitter, deciding what to do. So basically, they made about $600. $500 to $600 a week and they paid about $50 a week for childcare. So he was saying, I think so was childcare your biggest expense. He’s like, it’s funny when you besides the mortgage, and so that was a big, seeing for the family of how do we negotiate this? How do we trim this down? Can I cut it up?
There’s this woman named Barbara that had a house across the street from the school, and so she had three kids of her own. So, my dad, I don’t know, he doesn’t remember how he found her. But she was our babysitter, and he would drop us off in the morning, and sometimes we would go there after school, and then he would pick us up when he was done. He reminded me though also, he was in charge of packing our lunch or making us eat in the morning. And of course, he would forget sometimes, and so we would just, like take food from her refrigerator, and this one time, like, I got attacked by the dog and had to get stitches in my head because and he of course, after our conversation, he texts me is like, ‘All right, I gotta confess, the reason why you’re attacked by that dog is I forgot to feed you that day, and you were stealing something with a refrigerator. And like the dog basically came out you.’ I was like, ‘All right, thanks, Dad, for one of the most dramatic moments of my life was a care giving fail.’
We talked a little bit about how we were latchkey when we were little, and my dad would, like, hide the key underneath the brick. And there were times he confessed that he had to just take us to the construction site because he wanted to save money. And he would just, like, leave us in the car and like, lock the door. And I’m like you can’t do that anymore. It’s a guy who probably couldn’t do that back then either. But so it’s funny, I think you look back and you laugh about these, we kind of make fun of. I think for them at that point, it was definitely a big stressor, and even then, care giving was a big concern for my parents,
Tim Allen:
It goes back to what we talked about earlier in regard to parents figuring it out as well. It’s great to hear your dad share that story. I’d be vulnerable in that way. It’s tough, bringing you to the construction site, putting you in the car locking the door, making sure that the intention is safety but at the same time, it’s like can’t afford or don’t have the means or the person was available whatever it is that the care giving wasn’t there. Parents are trying to figure it out as well. They’re trying to make life work, so to speak. Many times my mom would be at the hospital and I would have to walk to the hospital after school, and I just remember one night she just didn’t have anyone overnight, so I had to sleep in an empty hospital bed like one of the gurneys, and it was okay, it’s normalized, right? But it’s just in that moment I, of course, was not present to like; they’re figuring it out too.
Reshma Saujani:
How stressful is that for her? Where she’s trying to do her job and like his team okay. Like, yeah, no, and I think it feels like back then they had a lot more grace. And I think one of the things, the pandemic, I think we’re starting to give parents a little more grace. I don’t know if we’re back to where it was before, which is like, that’s your personal problem or your private problem. Don’t bring that to work. But they also like the other members; this must be interesting for you, given what you do with care.com. It’s also like, they had a lot more trust. They had to, they had to trust Barbara, right? Like, I’m sure he didn’t like vet and they had to trust that we could like walk home, they had to trust while he was in his construction site doing his job that his two kids were not being kidnapped? I think a lot of parents are negotiating so many of those same things, both of our parents.
Tim Allen:
The mechanisms of being able to validate that; there weren’t cell phones, there was no check-in point where I’m texting my parents and saying, I’m safe. I’m home. Like, to your point. It’s like, they’re kind of hope and prayer that I got home safe walking home from school, right? They have a belief system you did, right? They trust you to be able to do it. Again, it goes back to parents who had to make life work for them. But it is a stressful situation for them to be back near your father, I’m sure it was stressful going to the construction sites with you, it’s not that it was misbehaving or anything to that effect. But it’s like, not what he had probably envisioned, right? Not probably what he was like, ‘All right, and we go to work and my daughters are coming along with me.’ This is how life presents itself. And as you touched upon it, I think it’s so important to underscore, employers have to show empathy and compassion. That’s one of the things that I think really is important.
And to your point, I think the pandemic really kicked open those doors in a lot of ways. You had little ones running around in the backyard of zooms or you had parents going, ‘I can’t go do this in-person job, because I don’t want to suppose my family.’ There were a lot of conversations that got forced into the forefront of society saying, ‘I do have a family, I do have obligations, they are the priority.’ When a lot times we’ve been trained, I know myself as a corporate worker, I did an article on this for Harvard Business Review, that you’re trained to put the company first, and it’s not even like you do, it’s almost like you’re trained to give the perception that, ‘What family? I don’t have a family, it’s taboo, I’m here, I’ve got a job.’ That’s exactly right. They’ll take care of themselves, they’ll figure it all out, right? It’s that whole thing, and even to the place where I was like walking into the delivery room, and I was on a work call that I hung up and I was like, I don’t get this moment again and I think society got to take that breath and see that.
Reshma Saujani:
Yeah, that’s right. And it’s like what the other part, as we’re talking about this podcast is going to be I would say it’s like between investigative journalist meets pissed-off mom, right? It’s like, in talking to my dad, and then hearing you talk to Susan, it’s like, not much has changed in 40-plus years. It’s kind of like what our parents were doing now; you’ve amazing services like care.com where now Dad doesn’t find out from Barbara talking to somebody in the supermarket, he can actually go online, and maybe there’s a little bit more vetting. But the basics haven’t really changed. That’s true. And I want to understand why. Why is it so fundamentally American for us to feel like this is our own personal problem that we have to figure out? And what can we do to change it? It feels like to me, I don’t know if you feel this way that like change is possible. That we can fix the structure of care that there are a lot of amazing entrepreneurs that are doing interesting things or opportunities for government solutions. It feels like there’s some bipartisan support for this. The time is now for this.
Tim Allen:
Yeah, absolutely. I think also, there is a space now that didn’t exist in my parent’s generation of people who are vocal and advocates and stand up and are change agents such as yourself. You stand up in front of the look at the impact you have made with Girls Who Code. You are giving possibilities and futures to girls who didn’t have a seat at the table in a lot of instances and weren’t necessarily present to their greatness, and I think that happens with parents now too. I think the parents are now going well. The entire infrastructure failed me at a certain point in time, in terms of schools were closed and not falling to the schools, daycares were closed, and things weren’t present that I was really reliant upon. And what do I want to advocate for moms who are actually having to do this 24/7, and having to pick up all the slack and doing the things that you want? And it’s not just moms; dads do a lot of the work too. But in the primary instance, moms are the ones who are taking on the additional hours of work which you’ve advocated with Marshall Plan for Moms eloquently, that how is this society can we reshape government programs, and institutions to really support moms to be able to be successful, and know that they have an infrastructure of support that doesn’t fail them.
Reshma Saujani:
And it goes back to I think, how we started this podcast, which is like, I love my kids. The hardest thing I fought for was to be a mom, and I know that there are moments where I feel like the memories are robbed from me, or my memories, or my moments with them, because I’m trying to balance work. And if there ever been a way to reimagine a different way to do things to live and to work? I think that that moment is now. And so I think pushing people along, when they take this journey with us to say, this is something you should be advocating for, this is something that actually more maybe more so than any other issue in the immediacy can really fundamentally change your life and your children’s lives.
Tim Allen:
For parents, for even people who are parents today, who potentially want to have kids in the future, those who don’t want to have kids, it actually has a societal impact as a whole you’re pointing to, which is we shape the policies, we shape the conversation, we start to advocate, we get the right things in place, it has societal ramifications for generations to come, that will impact everyone’s quality of life. I’m looking forward to this exploration with you. I really do think that that’s going to be the game changer, and I’m glad I get to be with you to do a small part in that.
Reshma Saujani:
Me too. So everyone buckles up. It’s going to be a fun ride, and thank you for joining us.
Tim Allen:
Thank you so much. Talk soon.
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