So much of the child care conversation these last few years has focused on moms…and perhaps that’s part of the problem. Both moms and dads are impacted when child care falls apart, but at the peak of the pandemic child care crisis, they were forced to find ways to share the caregiving load. New York Times journalist Claire Cain Miller talks with Reshma and Tim about how having all parents involved in child care could be a key to lasting change.
We’ve all seen the headlines about the Great Resignation and millions of American moms leaving the workforce in 2020 as the child care they counted on fell apart. But this also created an opportunity for mothers and fathers to recalibrate and redistribute responsibilities around breadwinning and shared caregiving roles, leading to benefits both at home and work. Where do cultural expectations around caregiving fit in with career expectations? And where do they both meet policy? New York Times journalist Claire Cain Miller brings years of expertise covering gender, parenting and work to this fascinating conversation with Reshma and Tim.
Episode 3: The Changing Landscape of Parenting and Work
Full Transcript:
Reshma Saujani
Hey everyone, welcome back to Why Care Podcast. I’m Reshma Saujani, and I am here with Tim Allen, and Tim how was your week?
Tim Allen:
How are you?
Reshma Saujani:
I’m good. I’m good now that I’m seeing you.
Tim Allen:
Me too, it’s been so long.
Reshma Saujani:
I love doing this podcast with you.
Tim Allen:
Me too.
Reshma Saujani:
I know- who loves who more? I don’t know, it’s like a big contest here.
Tim Allen:
I love it.
Reshma Saujani:
Well, we have another amazing guest with us, and before we get to her, how is it going? How’s your week been?
Tim Allen:
It’s good. The boys, two seven-year-olds, for those who are first-time listeners I have two seven-year-old kids, have migrated from Pee Wee soccer to Big Boys soccer. And so what I mean by that is, they are kind of now in the phase of where they’re learning not to use their hands in the game of soccer, and so I’m like, ‘All right.’ It was great. It’s like mass chaos on a Saturday. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. We’re running around. But I also learned I’m that parent. Does that make sense? Like, I’m the parent who’s like, ‘Go for the ball, get the ball!’ They’re seven; they’re not in the Major League Soccer Tournament, but I have become that parent.
Reshma Saujani:
Or like, ‘Hit it harder!’
Tim Allen:
Yeah, exactly. I’m like, ‘Over there. It’s over there, and I’m like, oh, my Lord, like seriously, this is not going to make or break the children. I got to get some rational thought put into this. So it’s good. How about yourself? How did things go with the spin on the law?
Reshma Saujani:
Good; the kid my eight-year-old actually started school last week. So New York City public schools open on Thursdays. I was like; here you please have him because I have had enough over the summer. Everyone’s like, “How was your summer?” I’m like, “Shitty. All I basically did was like drive my kids around.” So I was excited that school started. My second-year-old son is still not sleeping, but like, check this. So basically, around one o’clock in the morning, my son turns literally into Chucky, you remember that movie Chucky with that doll?
Tim Allen:
Yes.
Reshma Saujani:
Yeah, and by day, he’s like the sweetest thing ever. But anyway, he’s a horrible eater, a horrible sleeper, a horrible napper, and so he gets up at like 12 to 5 and 7. And so I’ve been sleeping this way, basically for almost a year, and I am just at my end. So I finally caved in, I got a sleep doctor, and so we’re starting today. But check this Tim; so basically, when he wakes up at one, you call her. And so you put your air pods on, you call her and she basically coaches you through what to say. She says it takes four days, money-back guarantee, never actually had to give anybody their money back before. So I don’t know, my life might be radically changing in a week so we’ll see.
Tim Allen:
I’m fascinated by this. I’m fascinated that she’s on call at 1 AM. So clearly, she’s just disrupting her own sleep pattern. But I got to unpack this for a second. We got to take minute in for the podcast. When he’s chunky is he like standing at the end of the bed? And then you wake up in like a cold sweat and he’s just staring at you? Or is it like he’s active and trying to wake you up when he has night terrors? What’s the deal?
Reshma Saujani:
So what she described to me too is, so basically, he can’t get into REM sleep. So every time he starts REM, he gets terrified, and he wakes up screaming, and so he’s like unconsolable, and then you kind of eventually give him a bottle, and he kind of calms down. I have run into so many parents who are experiencing this right now that like I don’t know if it’s a COVID thing or like what it is, but he just hasn’t learned how to soothe himself. So this is why you’re seeing so many more kids back in the beds with their parents, or not being able to sleep. Essentially, I don’t know, I think she may have some magic words or something, that she’s going to tell me that is going to help him soothe himself.
Tim Allen:
That is incredible! Look I can’t function at 8 AM to 1 AM. So, are you going to have the phone pre-dialed for…
Reshma Saujani:
I guess so. But I’m jarring up…
Tim Allen:
So you’re awake-awake?
Reshma Saujani:
I’m kind of awakened. I think I’ve learned how to like go back to sleep quickly. But here’s the thing; it’s going to be for the next four days a process of trying because he’s going to scream and he’s going to want that bottle. He’s going to want to be in my bed and I’m going to be bringing him back and my husband and I, we’re going to be doing this. So it’s going to be interesting, because the old method used to be that you walk them back, and then you stay in the room and then you slide out over the course of like three weeks, and it’s horrible.
Tim Allen:
It’s horrible.
Reshma Saujani:
This is like some four-day thing that’s going to be magical maybe.
Tim Allen:
I’m so jealous. So I wish I had known this. You got to tell me the results because I’m so jealous.
Reshma Saujani:
Don’t be jealous Tim till we are done.
Tim Allen:
Actually, let’s wait for the results. Let’s see what happens. You got a money-back guarantee there’s nothing you’re going to really lose out on right? I used to take Rider one of the twins. That is bad and if you can imagine me I know people can’t see me visually, but I’m a six-foot man that I’m crawled up into a toddler’s bed and I would wake up and I’m like, ‘Why does my neck hurt, I wonder?’ Because I’m sleeping in this condensed compress bunk bed situation, and then it never actually fix anything. So it’s crazy. By the way, good for you. Do you and your husband trade off on this? Like is it something where you’re consistently waking up every day?
Reshma Saujani:
Well, he does nights and I do mornings. He’s kind of a zombie after two o’clock but he actually insists on both parents doing it. So in this, we’ll conference call her so I don’t know how it’s going to be. It’s going to be really interesting.
Tim Allen:
I love this. We’re going to be conference calling him one day.
Reshma Saujani:
But today we had like a meeting where she basically like, here’s the 10 things; you go get like blackout lights, and I don’t know. And like we live in New York City it isn’t like there’s 20 rooms that we can all like work on. But the lack of sleep Tim is killing me, and you realize how important sleep is fundamental, to everything. In fact, both of us, both me and my husband have kind of been functioning on this weird sleep pattern of sleeping every three hours and waking up. But it’s really starting to kind of get to my mental health. There’s no point of doing anything. I go to bed at 8:30 to have a shot of having seven hours of sleep. So I’m getting that a break.
Tim Allen:
Yeah, and if it’s incongruent sleep, too, it’s like you’re getting woken up in the middle of it, and then you have to go back to it, that’s not healthy for you, that’s not healthy for anyone. It’s a little bit of the thing, I have an issue with the hustle culture situation like you could power through it, like anyone could do it. I’m like that is such a joke for parents. We have humans that we are trying to make functioning, operating good adults, and are the most sleep-deprived segment at this point in terms of trying to get things to work, and it’s like, ‘Oh you could power through it as a parent.’ I’m like, ‘No, that’s crazy talk; I don’t want to do that. I want to find balance.’
Reshma Saujani:
There’s really no empathy for it. Because I feel gracious that I’m my own CEO of my own nonprofit, my team understands, but I can’t imagine going to a workplace where you’re barely functioning, you’re barely sleeping, and then you’re supposed to perform and outperform, and it’s a huge challenge. I do think I want to hear what Claire has to say about this later. But I do think there’s just real kind of things that have happened from a parenting perspective, I either not sleeping or the kids back in the bed, that I think I’m hearing consistently from parents across the spectrum. And that COVID has really just up-ended a lot of like patterns and the ways that families have been operated that that have a huge toll at work and on life.
Tim Allen:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right, even the mechanisms, even in the ways that people used to divide work and home. I was one of those people who was like, oh, there’s this division, there’s a split, but there really was the physical manifestation of going to an office and doing something and then being in your home, I find out that my home is my office, it’s really hard to disconnect and actually get that piece. I know that I’m fortunate to have a room that can make an office. But even that, I’m like, Woohoo! I walk by it when I go to my bedroom, and I’m like, ‘There’s work.’ There’s not enough space,
Reshma Saujani:
But also when I used to go into an office, even the walk to work, I’d listen to a podcast, or I’d catch up with a friend or you had some amount of like separation. Now, there’s none of that. And I think in particular for women, I know Claire writes about this. But it’s like I also do more stuff around the house. Now also, I’m working from home so my husband’s gone back in the office, and so it’s not even like work, so it’s interesting to see now, again, how more things are kind of piling on my plate. I made him start taking the dog to his office because that was like one thing’s got to go. My dog stand is like 13 years old and she goes to the bathroom every hour, and I’m like this is not working. None of this is working right now. So that’s some division of labor now.
Tim Allen:
It’s so right on, the marginal pickup I think people do in terms of being at home right now and working from home. It’s the oh, this won’t take five minutes, or oh, it’s 10 minutes, or oh, you feel the obligation of doing this. It adds up. It really adds up. There’s so many times where I’m like, ‘Oh, I could go pack the kids’ lunch real quick and go do this.’ And it’s like I’m fitting things in, but I’m fitting in a lot more things, especially on that front. So it does compound over time.
Reshma Saujani:
One last thing for you to fix but now you also realize this, now that we’re back at IRL and everybody wants to in person stuff that I started planning my in-person schedule the way I was planning my Zoom schedule, and I turned to look to my calendar and I’m like, ‘Why am I flying next week to DC Orlando, Vegas, and Chicago in five days? How did I do that?’ And it’s like, oh, I have to re-teach myself how I want to live because it’s not on Zoom now. I’m actually having to go in person and go have those conversations and do those talks and have those meetings.
Tim Allen:
Yeah, and there’s a lot of exhaustion that comes like just the social exhaustion, that cognitive exhaustion that comes without doing an in-person is vis-à-vis. I say even habits on Zoom. There’s days I walk out of this office, it’s dark out at seven o’clock, and I’m like, I have no joke, beginning to end was on Zoom calls back to back and it’s just you do get into this fit in more thing with being remote, working from home, zoom culture and in five cities.
Reshma Saujani:
I know, it’s not happening anymore, that’s it. So I want to welcome Claire, Claire Cain Miller, literally, you are my hero, you are most women I know- hero in terms of just speaking the truth. Your coverage at the New York Times on gender, on work, on family recently on abortion has just meant everything I think to women. In fact, I’ve known you- we go way back, early Girls Who Code days as you were taught writing about diversity in Silicon Valley before it became a thing. You’re just an incredible, incredible talent, truth teller, and just a wealth of knowledge. And I think so much of your reporting has led to so much policy change, both in Washington and in workplaces.
Claire Miller:
I’m so excited, thank you.
Reshma Saujani:
We’re so thrilled to have you. So Claire, for years, we’re excited to have you, I’m just so excited to talk to you. I’m like; hopefully, you have six hours to be here with me- probably not the case. So you’ve written on the connection between women, childcare work in the economy and you did that before COVID, and then the pandemic hit. And I would say that you continue to write about it and the complicated relationship between these things. Some of what we saw play out, which had with the division of labor, was expected, given the lack of true infrastructure we have. But some other things were really surprising, and there’s been a lot of debate about; did women actually get pushed out of the workforce. Are we actually back? What happened? What didn’t happen? And I don’t even think that there’s real alignment, in many ways, which is wild to me. We’ll talk about that. But, I’d love for you to just tell us what did actually happen to mothers in the pandemic, and halfway through rebounded?
Claire Miller:
Sure, it’s funny, because when the pandemic started, this was obviously all right, on my beat. It’s all the stuff I had been writing about for years, and all of a sudden, it was in crisis, and I kept having friends text me like, ‘Oh, are you covering this? This is crazy.’ And I’m like, “No!” I have two boys two sounds like both of you do. I’m like, ‘My two kids are home, what?’ This is the most important time on my beat, and I can’t do it. I’m trying to do this weird, remote school thing before it was even set up. Oh, my Gosh!
Anyway, what happened was that at the very beginning, many women left, 5 million mothers left the workforce. In some cases, they were laid off because they worked in restaurants or grocery stores, and those grocery stores had closed, but they were essential worker jobs that closed. In many other cases, they left because their kids were home and someone had to watch her kids and someone had to do school, and it became very clear very fast that that was going to be very hard, and so mothers did what they always do when there’s a crisis with children, and they stepped up and they became the people who made the sacrifices to do that.
What has happened in recent months, and even going back a year is that mothers have totally rebounded. In fact, more mothers are now at work, paid work than a year before the pandemic. So, mothers have more than rebounded. There’s a few things to note here.
One is that I say that a year before the pandemic because right before the pandemic began, and I know it’s really hard for any of us to remember this time, there was a period of very, very low unemployment. And there was a hiring crisis, sort of like the ones we are in right now, but for different reasons, and single mothers were working, people with disabilities were working in greater numbers than before, people who had been in jail were working in greater numbers than before. All these people who had a harder time in the job market, generally, were getting jobs, and employers were offering higher wages, and there were more benefits, like parental leave, there were all these weird things to recruit people. So many more mothers were working than usual. So the drop looked bigger than we might have seen if there weren’t such anomalous time, right before the pandemic.
So the economist who I trust most on women and work is Claudia Goldin, who is just fantastic and has been doing this for her whole career. She’s at Harvard, and the data on this is the data, it just exists. And that’s why it’s sort of funny that there’s a controversy. We know the number of mothers working, that’s data that’s collected by the federal government; we have that information. She makes the point that it’s best to look at a year before the pandemic because it doesn’t include the strange blip, and when you look at that mothers are actually working in larger shares than they had been. That definitely doesn’t take into account the stress that mothers are under. So I don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, it was actually all fine from others in the pandemic, and parents in the pandemic, and women in the pandemic, it was nothing, no big deal. We’re all back to normal.’ Because we all know that we’re not and that women and mothers, in particular parents, all parents, but mothers in particular underwent a lot of stress and still are like, not all the childcare infrastructure is back.
When you guys were talking earlier about the home-related tasks that end up taking time out of your day, I was thinking about how we had child care till 6 PM every day before the pandemic take account for commutes and everything, and then all of a sudden, we had nothing, of course. And then even last year, we had no aftercare at school, they decided that the kids could be in school, but there couldn’t be aftercare for some pandemic logic, and so we were like, ‘Oh, my Gosh, we have kids home at 3:15. How are we going to do this?’ So now this year, there’s this after-school classes that go till 4:30, and I’m like, ‘Awesome, we have till 4:30. That’s huge.’ But before childcare till six, so it’s like all these things you’re eating into your days and the way that the infrastructure is just really not back to the full extent that it was before. So parents are really still experiencing a ton of stress.
Reshma Saujani:
Talk a little bit about like, childcare is a big issue we talked about many daycare centers are shut down, we didn’t have relief. In Washington, we know that most families spend more on child care than any other cost, and also, how is that? How do you see that across wealth and socioeconomic status? What are the other disparities that we’re seeing? Are some mothers functioning better than others or are we all kind of in the same boat?
Claire Miller:
So throughout the pandemic, and Claudia Goldin’s data shows us very clearly, once again, education mattered more than gender or parental status in terms of who lost work, people without college degrees were much more likely to lose their jobs, in large part because they were much more likely to work in the service sector, which is what shut down. When you look at the data on mothers, it’s pretty interesting, because, in a couple of senses, it totally reversed who felt that they needed to leave the workforce or who was sort of pushed out of the workforce.
At the very start of the pandemic, it was mothers of school-aged children, because childcare mostly stayed open at the beginning. I had one kid in school and one kid in childcare at the time, the childcare closed for two months, and then it was allowed to reopen and school stayed closed for a year and a half. So it was mostly parents of school-aged children at first, who left because their kids were home. It was also mostly essential workers because if your kids are home and you work in a restaurant or cleaning a hospital, or doing these things that you can’t do at home, obviously you had to stay home. Later in the pandemic, both of those things completely switched. So schools started to open, school-aged children started to go back but child cares encountered- they were still open, but they encountered this huge hiring crisis that still goes on today, where they’re just really short staffed, and there’s these long waiting lists, and also children under five weren’t vaccinated until very recently.
So some parents didn’t feel comfortable sending their children to childcare, or even if they did, childcare was closed for two weeks at a time constantly. There were constant COVID exposures and everyone had to stay home for two weeks and a lot of childcare is with these unvaccinated kids. If you had any cold symptoms, you had to stay home for two weeks. And as you both know because you’ve both had toddlers, they have colds, like for five years straight, and so they were constantly at home.
It was parents of childcare-aged kids under five who ended up being home, and then it was also the white-collar workers who were working remotely who started to leave. They had not left at first because they could work from home. The theory on this from the researchers I’ve talked to is that there was just complete burnout. It was like, ‘I’ve been doing this for a year, this thing with like, working in my closet, on zoom with like the laundry and my children running around, and I’m done. I can’t do it anymore. It’s impossible. ‘And even though they didn’t leave in huge numbers, all in all, white-collar workers who can work remotely, who have college degrees have mostly been able to keep their jobs, but as essential workers went back to work, it’s the white-collar workers who were working at home with their kids there who started to leave.
Reshma Saujani:
Last question before I turn to Tim. The data about moms- its part of why I think there was “the controversy” is not about whether it was true or not. But what does it mean, and what does it tell us? Because we know that moms are still exhausted and burnt out and are making different choices, or if they’re back at work, they’re back at work at a huge cost to themselves. And so how do we use this experience that we just went through to actually change and make structural change?
Claire Miller:
Yeah, well, I think one thing is it means something kind of positive, the fact that mothers for the most part held on to their jobs, it means that first of all, in many, many families, they’re the primary breadwinner right now. They have been for years, and either they’re a single parent or they earn more than their husbands or partners, or they are on the same and their income is essential, they’re no longer working as like a supplementary income. It also means that they have really hard-earned careers, they went to school, they care about these jobs, and they have a sense of purpose from them. It is something that was part of their identity, they didn’t want to let go of, they wanted to go back, that sort of attachment to the labor market, as economists would say that sort of tie to your career and your job is relatively new for women in America. That’s something that we’ve seen in the only the last 50 years, so that is a pretty remarkable sign I think, and sort of a positive message to take from all this.
The less positive message to take from all this is that this showed very quickly how fragile our entire care infrastructure was. Families had really patched it together, whether it was a nanny and childcare or whether it was relying on neighbors or grandparents. Whether it was that someone works the night shift and someone works the day shift, and they have to be there in this exact five minutes to switch where one person is home for the kids and the other person is leaving, these ways that everyone had figured it out completely individually because there was no societal or structural answer for this. Every family had to work it out on their own, and it was very fragile, and very quickly in March 2020, it was just gone.
I remember taking a walk in that period and thinking I’m really lucky to live in the city that both my husband and my parents live in and we relied on the grandparents a lot and all of a sudden we could not see the grandparents. Not only that, but we are lucky they’ve been in good health so far. So we haven’t had the elder care situations yet. But we were like delivering them groceries. Remember at the very beginning when it was elderly people can’t leave their houses? We don’t know what’s happening, and it was like, wow, that shifted really fast. I have nothing; I have nobody I can rely on. I can’t bring in babysitters, childcare in schools closed. I can’t call the grandparents; I can’t call the neighbors, we can’t enter anyone’s house. And I think it just really quickly exposed how fragile at all is, and what I think we’re seeing now with the fact that so many parents, especially of kids under five, are really still struggling with childcare is that none of that was fixed.
There were a lot of ideas that Democrats put forward in the Build Back Better Bill for subsidized childcare and that did not happen. The bill that was ultimately passed didn’t include any of the family policies at all, and nothing has really changed. In fact, it’s gotten worse because there’s the childcare hiring crisis, there’s unavailability, but I think that what this showed and the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen has said this very clearly, the pandemic showed that childcare was a broken market, something that it was before, but this showed it very clearly, and it still is nothing changed.
Tim Allen:
Yeah. It’s fascinating. I can relate so much to the support structures you’re talking about Claire falling apart. I also relate, by the way to the after school, meaning like we are still struggling with the after-school program. I wake up every day and like, ‘Which job ends at 3 PM?’ Because I kind of need that one right now because my kids come home and they think that it’s just like, Dad time, and I’m like, “Wait, wait, wait, I’m still working,” in that we have to figure it all. It’s just relatable. It did shine the big spotlight on the infrastructure that was just not there. The antiquated old systems were still relying upon from a farming system back in the 30s and 40s. It’s just really interesting. I want to ask you a question on you read a piece you did early on in the pandemic, I think was early 2020, that I found fascinating in terms of how fathers and mothers are taking on the roles differently at home.
One of the pieces that hit me and struck me when I read it back early on in the pandemic- I‘d really have fucked it, haven’t studied it for a while was, it goes probably the wrong word. But how fathers, myself probably included, think we’re doing a lot more than we actually are when it comes to like virtual tutoring. And the other things in terms of teaching the children if you’d asked me I’d be like, ‘Yeah, all the time,’ and I was like, you really made me step back and think, wow, I’m probably guilty of this as well. I would love to hear your thoughts kind of on how that’s playing out, what the data is showing in regards to has that changed, has that shifted; has new norms started to emerge?
Claire Miller:
Yeah, so that was a very fun statement to put on a wrong word. Instead of asking who was in charge of the remote schooling at your house, and I will say that we did not ask if you had a partner who was of the same gender or not, most of the people who answered was a man and a woman, a father and a mother parenting. So 80% of the mothers said they were in charge of remote schooling, and over half of the fathers did. I think it was something like 56%. So that’s impossible because there’s just no way because we asked who did the most in charge. Not like did you do anyway. So 3% of the mothers said that the fathers were in charge of remote schooling. So 55% versus 3% of women agree. And it’s amusing, it shows a couple things, it shows that this generation of fathers, on the whole, does significantly more than your fathers did on the whole.
Of course, these are generalizations, but the time that fathers spend doing child-related activities has increased. It’s a fact and men who are parents of young children now, for the most part, say they want an egalitarian relationship. They say they want to be involved with the children, they say they want to do these things, so there’s both a desire to and in truth, they are doing more. But what the data shows is that women still do an hour more childcare and an hour more housework than men, and that was true when it came to remote schooling as well. It’s true in all parts of life. But then I looked into it a little bit more to find out like why this was happening? Why did women just automatically step up? Because for the most part the vast majority of mothers in this country work for pay, so it’s not that these were like meant to stay-at-home moms, who were doing this.
What I found in research all over the world, not just in the United States. In other countries, fathers play a bigger role in their families. But even in like Scandinavian countries where there’s like this very generous paternity leave, and fathers take it, and it’s different. When there’s a crisis, like a child has a disability or a cancer diagnosis, was hospitalized, the mother becomes the default. She’s the one who sacrifices time and work and does that, it’s sort of like automatically, and I think of what happened at first with COVID is sort of like a crisis. It was like, all of a sudden, the kids are home, they have to go to school, what are we going to do and the mothers just stepped up.
There’s also another reason that this happens in the United States, which is that there is this expectation that men who become fathers work more like they’ve done these great resume studies, where they make fake resumes, and then apply to jobs, and they’ve also looked at who gets pay bumps or pay decreases. When men become fathers, or if they say, their father on a resume, they say like they’re in the PTA, or they coached kids’ soccer team or some way that they imply that they actually benefit from that, and they get paid more. And it’s because of this expectation that once you become a father, now you’re in charge of supporting your family, and you’re going to be much more responsible and diligent at work, and it’s very important to you that you work hard so that you can earn enough to support your family; and for mothers, it’s the opposite. So in these resume studies, if they say that if you’re on the PTA, you’re less likely to get called back for an interview, you’re less likely to get a raise, and it’s because they assume that you’re going to have these like dual priorities and that if a kid gets sick, you’re out and you’re out for the day. You have to go pick them up, you’re going to be the default you’re always going to be leaving right at five and these assumptions are of course not true across the board, for they are baked into American work culture and a lot of really interesting ones.
Reshma Saujani:
And the pandemic really played that out. It’s like we were we did become the default caretakers, we were the ones that said I had to get off to zoom earlier, I can’t do that thing, because I need to home-school my kids, and so that many ways did play out that way. Do you feel like in a non-crisis setting, we can change it? I always talk about this ad in the Philippines where they did this whole campaign about laundry being love, and it was to basically shift the gender ratio of men doing more laundry. I always joke that my dream is to have LeBron James and Snoop Dogg doing the laundry at the next Super Bowl ads really, basically give America a challenge of like, how we’re going to shift the question of care work that men are doing. Is that possible do you think would change, would it change equality? Would it change things for women? Would it give us back more time?
Claire Miller:
It certainly would change things for women if men did, absolutely, and men do more on this generation. So I think it is possible. I don’t know if it will ever be true in the current system that ever things are completely egalitarian. And one reason I say that is because I’ve looked at a bunch of studies for a story because I was trying to find a way to answer the same question, looking at same-sex couples who become parents. And when same-sex couples become parents, one prioritizes earning and the other prioritizes home stuff and care giving. Not meaning that one drops out of the labor force, but one has like a more flexible schedule or is more likely to leave early if there’s a care emergency
The reason the researchers who study this say is because our workplaces are so all demanding that it really makes sense that one person is like, ‘I’m going to double down over here, I’m going to make sure we have this steady income.’ In fact, we are exponentially rewarded in American workplaces for overwork. Like, if you’re willing to work like 12 hours a day, or if you’d be available on a Sunday, you don’t make that much more money you make like exponentially more money, and so it just makes logical sense for one person to prioritize that and the other person to prioritize the kid. So I don’t know that in the current system, it will ever be fully egalitarian. Two people can get flexible jobs and really make that work in their own family system. But there are some ways that I think can change things.
I think one is that family policies, especially paid parental leave, meaning that the father has time alone at the beginning alone with the baby. It’s shown it’s great for baby bonding; it’s great for like indicating at work that I have this other priority, that’s also important. There’s also been studies that show if you had paid maternity leave, you’re changing more diapers at age one, you’re more involved with like school and feeding things at age two. So it does set people on track for that. I think that subsidized childcare would help because, in countries that have that, women are much more likely to be able to work more for obvious reasons, all the things that we’ve been talking about. I think that within corporations modeling can be really important. So there’s a lot of companies that have, say, paid parental leave, that the company offers paid paternity leave, and there’s an unspoken or sometimes spoken expectation that men would never take that or maybe you take that for two days while your baby is literally being born, or maybe you take that for like a week, and then you’re back. And when CEOs talk about that, or when CEOs even say, this meeting has a hard stop at four because I’m taking my kids to the pediatrician or whatever it is when you say why it really makes a difference.
This has been shown in a few small studies. It’s also just been shown in a huge amount of reporting that I’ve done talking to men about — like at my company, the New York Times there’s very generous parental leave, including paternity leave. I’ve had two babies working now. When I first got pregnant I went around saying like so the offer is six months and no one takes that right, and everyone was like, everyone takes that, you take that. [Crosstalk]. Like the senior editors were like, ‘You take that,’ and since then they’ve expanded maternity leave, and it’s the same thing. It’s not just like, okay, but it’s an expectation, and I’ve heard that it’s like that at Google. I’ve heard it’s like that at some other companies.
So I think that that can be really important to set that cultural expectation up high, and then like at a much smaller level. This is like an ongoing frustration but like the soccer teams and the playdates and the school emails, they just reach out to the mother. It’s just like the birthday party invitations go to the mother and it almost will take as much time for me to put it on my husband’s calendar and forward it to them and be like buy the birthday, as I just do the birthday present and take the kid and RSVP myself. And so I think those are like cultural changes that we all can make.
But I will share one funny story is that when we found out school would be remote, all remote the year after the pandemics, the school year after the pandemic started, I started freaking out because I remember the spring before, and there were all these pods and groups forming of how we can do school for working parents, and it felt very sort of cliquish, like who you know, asking your friends and I’m like, ‘No, I’m not in support, what am I going to do?’ And so I decided I would just email my son’s whole class, like all the parents in the class, and say, like, ‘Is anyone looking for this? We need some support here is anyone looking to form a group to do remote school together?’And I specifically emailed both parents of all 28 people in the class, and I got a dozen or more of replies only from the mothers and didn’t any from a single father. So I don’t know how it completely changes. I think there are things we can do. But there’s like a deep cultural thing going on.
Tim Allen:
It’s so true. I am so guilty of it. I know that my partner gets the logistical emails and all the birthday parties and everything else, and he’s like, ‘I’d much rather just deal with this than have to work through you to then deal with it.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, cool.’ But I know that I feel bad because I get the emails, and then I’m like, ‘He got this right?’
Reshma Saujani:
It’s clear like in your marriage is that true?
Tim Allen:
It’s true, it’s very true. So it’s so fascinating to hear you talk because we had to be intentional about who was going to go work could do the whole thing, and who was going to take care of the kids and very promising career or the ABC show has gotten me. He’s done really well. So but it’s also like, your schedule is you have to go travel to a shoot location for four or five weeks. My schedule is like I got to be in the office and do something, and so we had to really be intentional about it. But we also fell into patterns, if that makes sense. Some of it was intentional, and then some of it is, it’s just this societal drive towards like the inevitable if that makes any sense, and I’m with you, I think over time, hopefully, structure will change. I’m a big proponent of normalizing paternity leave. I wrote a whole article about how bad I was at that. Now, I don’t do what I did is basically what it says in the whole thing, and I do think that that could shift over time. But it really is interesting to watch these patterns start to form because, to your point, I get emails sometimes of a birthday party, and I’m like, ‘He got this,’ and I forward it, and I’m like –
Claire Miller:
But it does make sense in some right; a division of labor makes sense. There’s no point in two parents spending that much mental energy RSVP into a birthday party and buying a present, and if one person does the laundry, and the other person is awesome. In my house, it makes sense for the person who likes to cook more, which is me, I hate gardening, I want nothing to do with it. He gardens and I cook. So it also makes sense that I grocery shop, because it doesn’t make sense for him to grocery shop for the food that I’m going to cook. I want to be know what I’m going to cook. So division of labor makes perfect sense. But being intentional about it, I think matters a lot.
This was interesting from the studies that I mentioned earlier of the same-sex parents once a child arrived, is that because there wasn’t like a societal expectation or default, a conversation was forced to be held. One person did prioritize a career and one person did prioritize being the on-call parent. But it was like the result of a conversation like, whether it’s I make more money, or I have a more flexible schedule, or I’m ready to take a break or whatever it is, or I like to fold laundry, I find it relaxing, and I hate to do this, so can you do this? But just having a conversation as opposed to falling into it, and I think that that is something that opposite-sex couples could maybe benefit from because then it feels at least like it was something planned and a choice and not a second choice.
Reshma Saujani:
And it’s not just about gender; I feel this way as the logistical parent and the mom, I sometimes rather work with the dad, right? Because the mom that I’m working with is just not that great about like accepting calendar invites. I think your point clear about and I’d love to know if there are other countries that you have found, that actually don’t have the same cultural norms as we have and are closer to being egalitarian because they’re having these conversations or it’s not just as gendered as it feels here.
Because, it’s the same reason why in America, we have a nursing shortage, and a teacher shortage is because we don’t teach our boys to do care work, all of us have sons. And I know for my family that’s very intentional to making my son, who is a natural caregiver feel comfortable, that that’s what he could do if that’s what he wants to do, and so it is so deeply baked into American DNA that boys, men don’t do that work, even when they want to. And I wonder to my second part of this is like, what do you feel like is the biggest lever if you could maybe wave your magic wand; is it culture, is it corporate policy? Or is it government policy that would make the quickest amount of change when it comes to this?
Claire Miller:
That’s interesting. So one of my favorite piece that I’ve done in my entire career is called how to raise a feminist son, and it was exactly what you’re talking about, just like we starting from in utero when we start, what are you having? And it’s like, I get it, it’s the only information you have about this creature you haven’t met that you end up assigning so much meaning to that, if it’s a boy or a girl, and parents have baby girls who are bald to put like bows on their head just to signify it’s a girl, not a boy. We do so much gendering early on, and I think that a big part of that is teaching that girls are very caring, and the girls do care work, and the boys like gravitate in other directions. There are gender differences. I used to before I had kids think that you could like totally avoid that, and it is not true. There are gender differences. But a lot of them are really heavily driven by society and culture, and I think that addressing that with boys early on would make a big difference.
To answer your other question, I think that in other countries, we’ve seen that public policy drives culture and that that can be a really important element. Corporate policy is very helpful to the people who work at those companies. But all in all, it’s inequitable, because the people who have the best benefits family benefits like subsidized childcare, and long paid parental leaves are people earning a lot of money working at like salaried white-collar jobs. And there’s been a recent movement among companies like Walmart and Starbucks to extend parental leave to hourly workers, but it’s much less common, and also like health insurance means that it’s tied to you having that job, which you don’t know when your care needs are going to arise over the course of your life or career.
So public policy is more effective, because it’s generally universal, and in other countries, it does end up affecting culture. For example, what I mentioned earlier is in Scandinavia, it’s very common to see men out with strollers and out during the daytime taking care of kids, because they have these extremely long parental leaves, and they take them. I think that has sort of like a filter-down effect. But I don’t want to idealize Scandinavia or Europe that has these better policies because we also find that that woman’s careers are really stunted there compared to the United States. So many more women work, a much larger share of mothers work in European countries that have these generous family policies and economics research has showed that that’s directly tied because there’s these long leaves and there’s the subsidized childcare and public school essentially starts at three with like, free preschool that everybody goes to.
More women work, more mothers work, but they do not reach as high levels, it’s much less likely for a woman to be in a senior position in European companies. And one of the reasons is, it’s hard to know, but probably employers know that these long parental leaves might be taken, and so they might not promote people at the same level. Also, there’s like a right to part-time work in many European countries. So women take it, they take part-time work so that they can spend more time with their children, which then like slows their career. So you can debate whether that’s a pro or a con. I think many people in the United States would advocate for a right to part-time work here. It would really alleviate much of the care giving burden at certain phases of life when it’s larger and you don’t want to quit your job, but you’d love to like maintain an income and a connection to your job, but work fewer hours part-time and then expand again. That sounds amazing, and it really doesn’t exist in a lot of jobs here but it does end up having longer-term effects on people’s careers.
Tim Allen:
Claire, I feel like I could talk to you all day. It’s just fascinating the amount of information. It’s just even hearing about it. We talk about the United States; we talked about the forum and talked about Build Back Better. We talked about the plans that have been proposed, that didn’t really get it, they got traction with the DC, they got traction within the Democrats, but they didn’t make it to the light of day, and so I know, when I talk to parents out there, there is this just level of exhaustion.
So waiting on governmental policy, corporate policy, any advice you have for parents at this moment in time on just the exhaustion in which they’re feeling, the stress of working from home, the gender roles in which we play. I know that a lot of mothers are sitting out there even fathers are sitting out there going like, ‘What do I do?’ You’re right, the system is against us, the governments are stepping up, I have to work the right company in order to get this going. What’s the haul? What’s the prospects here that we can move into?
Claire Miller:
Yeah, I get it, and so I would say like, you are not alone, and take it easy on yourself. But you’re not alone, I think speaks to something else. We have always left family life, we’ve not always left. In recent decades, we have left family life, up to individual families to figure out and that was a very conscientious choice made by the federal government at a point in time that has now just become the expectation. So once you have a baby, you’re sort of on your own. You figure out starting with postpartum care for the mother, there isn’t any, and you figure out childcare and you figure out, are you going to do a nanny? Or are you going to get on a waitlist, and then you go on Google and you research this and you figure it out? In school, you figure out what you’re going to do at 3 PM.
It’s just all up to individual people and like I said earlier, I think the pandemic really highlighted how much we each had these completely different sorts of patched-together systems for ourselves, and I think what it’s going to take is a more societal approach because raising children has never actually been an individual endeavor. It’s always been a community endeavor, and we all knew that because we all have these communities, we had to create them ourselves. But we have them; we had these communities, and they disappeared in March 2020, and we all felt that, and now we’ve worked hard to rebuild them.
I guess what I would say is, I don’t want to put any of the onus on parents who are already overloaded. But what I would say is remember that we’re in this together and as much as we can, build those communities. Trade a day with your neighbor, where you pick up the kids, and they pick up the kids and you watch them after school if aftercare is your problem right now. Or if someone’s sick, like get on your app and send them delivery dinner, if they have three sick kids at home and can’t let cook that night. That’s all we have is this community, and it’s not anyone’s fault. It is hard, I think that is my biggest message to parents is it is feeling really hard, and it’s not your fault. This is a systemic structural problem that we are all feeling individually right now. And apart from public policy, apart from changing the way that work works, doing all these things, all we can do is sort of help each other build communities to lean on for support.
Reshma Saujani:
Yeah, I love that. I think it’s so powerful and so important because I think that that is part of the problem is like; this is your personal problem, and the government, your partner, or your employer, you don’t get anything from them. And I think that’s why allyship is really important, even in the march toward changing corporate policy change. I want single people to basically be leading that charge who don’t actually benefit from the policy say, this is what we want. And I think even as we talk about the broken business model of childcare, as Tim, I’m sure you could talk about all day long. But even as we’re encouraging entrepreneurs to think about how this could look differently, what does a communal model look like? What does it look like when I realize I got to run out at six, and I can’t find a sitter on care.com and I know though, other people in my neighborhood who also have childcare that I could go drop my kid off, and that becomes normal, or the way that we take care of families in our neighborhood, and in our community.
I just think that we have to start looking at, in many ways that the link starts with childcare and looking at that differently. The other one thing I want to ask you, Claire is does the model of advocacy have to change? I think a lot about this for Marshall Plan for Moms, just like most mothers’ movements have been about our children; mothers against drunk driving, mothers demand action, climate change, etc. But we have not had a movement of moms fighting for issues for moms, because in many ways that has felt like it’s selfish, right? Is that part of it too? Could we have gotten this bill passed, if a million moms marched on Washington and demanded it? In this moment, post jobs where Republicans are pretending to be the party of women and children, is this the moment you could get a bipartisan bill passed on childcare or unpaid leave. What is the opportunity there do you think?
Claire Miller:
It’s interesting because a lot of Republican governors that have banned abortion in their states are now saying that they’re talking about what sounds like a very progressive family policy agenda of like pay leave and childcare and we want to help people want to raise families, and we did a deep dive into the policies in all 50 states. It doesn’t line up. The states that have banned abortion have absolutely the worst support for families, for poor families, for single mothers, they also have the highest infant mortality and maternal mortality rates, Mississippi is the prime example here, which is the state that of course, sent off to the Supreme Court. So that’s one piece.
In terms of mothers advocating, I would just say parents, because I think relegating it to mothers is a challenge for all these reasons that we’ve been discussing. I think that men doing more in the house, in your own household, and then on a corporate level, and then on a policy level makes a really big difference. I’ve written a fair amount about how Joe Biden talked about care a lot in his campaign, he talked about being a single father unexpectedly early on, he talked about caring for his adult son when he was dying of cancer, and then he made care giving an agenda, and I do wonder if having an older man, or any man talk about it made a difference. Of course, it wasn’t passed, but it became a bigger part of the Democratic agenda and the congressional agenda than it had in a very long time. So I think that men getting involved in all aspects of this is a key to making a big difference in women. Mothers have a lot on their plates already.
Reshma Saujani:
Hear-hear! Thank you Claire; it’s been an amazing conversation.
Claire Miller:
Thank you so much for having me.
Tim Allen:
Thanks, Claire. Really appreciate that.
Reshma Saujani:
Yes, and I think the next couple of years are going to be really interesting because I do think that so much of what you’ve written about, I think the activists have taken that, and I know I have it, and, okay, now, what are we going to do about it? And so there’s just a moment, I think, for real change, and I think part of it is because you’ve helped educate us, and link the dots. But I think a lot of what you have written about over there, people knew they felt it, but they didn’t know. They didn’t have the data, and I think having the data is really important to really making change.
Claire Miller:
Thank you very much. I do think the data matters a lot to this beat, making it less anecdotal and less sort of wishy-washy. I also think that it’s just that a lot of people felt like they were doing this alone. This is really hard for my family; everyone else clearly has it figured out.
Reshma Saujani:
It’s just me. I’m the mess. I’m the one who can’t make it…
Claire Miller:
Yeah, true.
Tim Allen:
I was going to even say, I know a lot of parents who have read your articles, Claire, and it’s been, oh, not me, oh, other people out there. It really is a sense of community when you know, just even touching back on what you’re talking about in that the real change is going to come in terms of societal for community. So as the network of committees we’re going to build with parents helping parents. This is an incredible place where your materials, your data, are bringing people together and going. Good. It’s not just me, I’m not the mess over here, and everyone else is awesome which I think we get into as parents a lot of time. There’s just no normalization of like, oh, shoot, everyone has to kind of deal with this. Everyone’s gone through it in the first place.
Claire Miller:
I think you guys are overstating my contribution to this discussion. But yes, I totally agree with everything else you’re saying.
Reshma Saujani:
No, we’re not. We’re are definitely overstated. I do think too, in all seriousness, though, this could have been a topic that just wasn’t written about, and that wasn’t talked about, and you were central to basically elevating that and making people, parents, women, mothers feel seen and heard, but also making again the business case, which I think is really critical to policy change. So thank you.
Claire Miller:
Thank you.
Tim Allen:
Awesome!
Reshma Saujani:
All right, Claire. Well, thanks for being here, and Tim, thanks for another great conversation. Wish me luck; having a child that’s sleeping through the night.
Tim Allen:
I want to hear all about it. I just
Claire Miller:
I just talked to my sister to sleep train her new baby and we’ve decided that it’s my plan B
Reshma Saujani:
You want to come to my house?
Claire Miller:
I’m not so far from you; I’m going to be available on text. It’s going to be like $500 a text.
Tim Allen:
I was going to say, Claire, are you doing at 1 AM too? [CROSSTALK]
Reshma Saujani:
I feel like you’re just like whispering the basics to the baby to like get them to sleep, that’s how it works.
Claire Miller:
Yeah.
Reshma Saujani:
All right thanks. Thank you everyone see you next time.
Claire Miller:
Thank you!
Tim Allen:
Thank you!
Reshma Saujani:
Bye!
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