What working parents really need from workplaces The Way We Work a TED series
Transcriber: Leslie Gauthier
Reviewer:
Every parent is a working parent,
whether they have a job
outside of the home or not.
[The Way We Work]
When Angela shows up at the office,
know that Angela has been up
for at least three hours,
had her hand covered in human excrement,
unwedged a small person
who has become lodged in between
the washing machine and the wall,
gotten down on her hands and knees
and picked up oatmeal off the carpet.
Domestic labor,
which is what parenting is and everything
that goes along with parenting,
it’s not just taking care of a child;
it’s keeping a household running,
washing dishes,
doing laundry,
it’s keeping the schedule tight.
We again assume that that work
will be done by a wife who’s at home.
The reality has progressed
beyond where we’re at policy-wise.
Most people need
multiple sources of income,
women want to work outside of the home –
we’re still expected to do
all of the same things.
And so now we outsource
a lot of that parenting work
to other women,
and mainly women of color.
We don’t give it financial,
cultural value,
and so we don’t see it as real work.
Care is really the backbone
of our society.
That work is what makes
all other work possible.
So how should we support parents
in the workplace?
[Support family leave]
There are only two industrialized
countries in the entire world
that don’t guarantee
some paid family leave,
and the United States is one of them.
We should be envying Ghana,
Brazil, Turkey, Serbia, Japan,
the United Kingdom,
Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden –
we’re lagging behind the world on this.
When I say paid family leave,
I’m not talking about necessarily
just newborn maternity leave.
That includes paternity leave,
all genders,
families that are adopting
and welcoming a new child into their home,
people bringing foster children
into their home,
taking care of aging parents.
You know, at some point in your life,
someone that you love and care about
is going to need help.
You should have the right
to take time to take care of them.
People do their best work
when they feel seen and supported
by the people that they work for.
It’s pretty simple.
[Listen to parents]
Being a parent is often seen
as a weakness in the workplace.
You come back and people make
a lot of assumptions about you.
You’re not invited to go on work trips
because assumptions are made
that you don’t want to do that,
or you can’t.
And that can be really
disempowering to people,
and it’s really discouraging
and it makes them –
in a period of time
that’s already stressful –
can make you feel even worse.
[Talk to parents]
Asking a coworker
about how things are going at home
or with their kid,
making people feel like
they don’t have to hide that.
“What’s up with your two-year-old?”
Ask to see a picture of their child.
[Be flexible]
For parents, the hours between 5-8pm
are really crucial.
It’s sometimes the only time
you really have with your kids.
You’re often running
to pick them up somewhere
or to relieve someone
from doing childcare.
I would much rather send a few emails
at 8:30pm than be on a call at 5pm.
And so I think emphasizing
and creating a culture of work
where it’s the work that gets done,
the work is what matters,
the end result is what matters,
as opposed to tracking time
in a traditional way,
and opening up the lines of communication
around that can be really beneficial.
Letting a coworker know
that you have their back
if they want to say that 4:45 doesn’t work
for them as a meeting time,
that you’ll step in and say
that you can’t do it either, right?
Just something to show solidarity.
[Oh yeah … ]
One other thing,
as a former breastfeeding
mother in an office place –
a pumping mother –
I should say that if you want to clean out
your office fridge every now and then,
that is a really beautiful thing
to do for a pumping mother,
because I used to do that in my office.
I would put my little cooler
that had breast milk amid like
year-old bottles of salad dressing,
pad thai that had become petrified,
just gross stuff.
And no one should have to do that, right?
Again, a very, very small thing
that makes a big difference
in someone’s life.
In striving to be
as efficient as possible,
as achieving,
as productive as possible,
we’ve drifted away
from this notion of care
and parenting being important work.
But we need to talk
about these things
and bring parenting and family life
out into the open,
because we can’t fix problems
that we don’t see.
We can’t fix problems
that we don’t talk about.
It really doesn’t have to be this hard
and we can do much more
to support people.