Strollerderby : sahds

How Much Would It Cost You to Take a Career Break?

Miriam Axel-Lute — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The New York Times (h/t Creative Class blog) has an interesting report on the financial penalties sustained in different fields by people who take some time out of the workforce. Apparently, although medicine has the most grueling training, once you get there, it's a lot easier on work/life balance than, say, finance, business consulting, or law. Or even academia.

Of course by "people who take time off for family" we still mean mostly (but not entirely) women (it used to be called the Mommy track, remember?), and I'm surprised that the research didn't explore whether women and men experienced different financial penalties when they do take time. (And I'm surprised that the Creative Class blog post didn't even acknowledge that gender is still a huge factor in this.)

It's also, perhaps, a little hard for me to get too worked up about the relatively lower salaries of highly paid MBAs and PhDs who've taken a few years off when there are so many other people for whom work-life balance means being able to get paid time off or support their family without taking on a second job. Ok, so perhaps that's a little too harsh. Work-family balance is important for everyone, for the kids, and because people who've been forced to work 70-hour weeks when their kids are young often have a I-did-it-so-you-should-too attitude toward their own subordinates, not to mention about efforts to improve work-life balance for everyone.

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Judgment Day: Sending Sick Kids to School

Karen Murphy — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:03:00 GMT

My younger son has been sick all week. Croup. The middle-of-the-night sound of him hoarsely fighting for breath wakes one instantly to a state of full alert. We've been down this road seven times now (Down syndrome awarded him tiny respiratory passages that are overly susceptible to infection), so it, like everything else, was weathered with only a modicum of whining.

On my part, the whining. But my point: he brought this home from school (no one else in the house is sick), and therein lies my quandary. When do you keep a sick kid home and when do you send him off to school?

I can count on several fingers, toes, and other appendages how many things I culd have/would have accomplished this week had Eric been well enough to attend school. Lost work, lost sleep, lost sanity. Not that I haven't cherished every second with a boy who yells "No!" to every suggestion, but hello, I could have done a whole lot of things that I didn't. It goes without saying, and when a single-parent-who-worked-outside-of-the-home it was even worse. At least I can sit here and chat with you on my laptop, which is more than a lot of parents are abe to do when wth a sick child.

But when do you keep your kids home? And do some of us fudge a bit and send our kids to school when maybe we shouldn't?

I know as a kid I had to be at death's door to stay home, so that happened very seldom. I tend to err on the other side as a parent, though, since I'm home anyway. Not every parent has that luxury (??), but when my kids seem too uncomforable to sit at a desk all day or seem contagious, they stay home. No matter what. So I was surprised to read this list of keeping-sick-kids-home criteria that says it's okay to send kids with colds to school.

Ummm..hello? It is? I'm pretty sure it's an upper respiratory infection that's kept my kid home all week. I know kids have perpetual runny noses all wnter long, but...where do you draw the line? When is it a cold that will infect the class and when is it just...a cold?

I was hoping for something more definitive here, but it seems that except for the obvious (fevers, typhoid, TB, Hep B, etc) and the other obvious (vomiting, diarrhea, blah blah blah), there's a huge gray area between please-let-my-kid-be-well-enough-to-go-to-school and oh-fuck-another-personal-day-at-work-gone.

So where do you draw the line? When and for what do you say, "Should they stay or should they go?"

Photo: www.bbc.co.uk

Sure I'm A Sad Wad But I'd Much Rather Be A SAHD WAHD

makeitadouble — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:32:00 GMT

Every morning when I leave the house, I put on my fedora, tuck a newspaper under my arm, grab my briefcase the kiss my sons goodbye. Every morning my 5 year old pleads with me to stay home and not to go to work, hugging my leg and asking why I can’t work from the house. Every morning I back out of the driveway and honk the horn at my sons as they plaster their faces against the living room window and wave madly until I’m out of view.

I’m a working Dad, but here’s a newsflash: I’m not the only Dad whose heart breaks every morning when he has to leave his children for those 9-10 hours stretches that feel like an eternity. Want another newsflash or how about a just headline in the scrolling news ticker at the bottom of this blog? (It’s not there? You may need to upgrade your software) Dad’s aren’t the only one’s who work fulltime jobs and miss out on time with their children. Admittedly the SAHM/WAHM is still more common than the SAHD/WAHD, but it’s not like Working Moms are fictitious cultural myths like Bigfoot, The Loch Ness monster and Decaffeinated Coffee; which is why I hate when studies like this come out framed to only include fathers.

A Government-commissioned report in Great Britain found that fathers who work long hours miss out on spending a month a year with their children. So, you mean if I spend more time at work I’ll spend less time at home? This is groundbreaking stuff. But again, my problem with studies like this is that that do not take into account 1) Working mothers who are equally affected by the hours they spend at work 2) the lost time the family gets to spend together as a FAMILY and not just Dad’s lost time with the kids. I was dreamin' when I wrote this so forgive me if it goes astray, but it’s 2008 researchers, let’s stop conducting studies like it’s 1959.

Am I jealous of SAHM? I Am. Do I envy WAHM? I envy their Freedom. Does not being a SAHD make me Sad? It does. Would I rather be a WAHD? Some people tell me I’ve been one all my life, but I’d do just about anything to make it official. The question of choice and creating a work-life balance is an individual one that each family, father and mother has to work through, but let’s all stop pretending that Dad’s are the only ones who get choked up when they look at the pictures of their children on their desk at work. OK?

And this coming from a guy with only 11 months on his calendar.

Achtung! German Hausfraus are Actually Men

Madeline Holler — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 18:02:00 GMT

The big news in this report is supposed to be that way more fathers are becoming temporary stay-at-home dads in Germany than officials expected. By the third quarter of a new maternity leave incentive program -- which is intended to encourage more Germans to procreate and reverse their declining population -- nearly 10 percent of the applicants were fathers.

That's great, love to see it, equal time, blah, blah.

But what I'm sitting in a depressed puddle of my own ruggedly independent, red, white and blue urine about is the program. Get this:

Whichever parent takes advantage of it, they get a subsidy of up to a little more than $36,000 for a year. The parent taking the year off gets two-thirds of his or her salary for 12 months up to $2,600 per month. Another parent can take an additional two months also getting two-thirds pay. Tax free for both.

And I know someone's going to write in and say something to the effect that people have to be responsible for their own children, etc., and go head and make your case, whoever you are. But also keep reading, because you're going to love what one German guy who took advantage of the program said:

"The politicians act as if it's a huge gift, but actually it's not -- it's an improvement, but I think even more would stay at home if they could afford it," said Dommer, from Berlin.

Damn, culture shock! Here I felt grateful to cobble together vacation time, sick days and some shitty 50 percent pay for six weeks deal at my employer to get three months of maternity leave. And this German guy thinks up to nearly $37,000 in a year is not enough! God I love Europeans!

And sure, even the full 36,000 doesn't go so far in Germany, especially in the cities. And I can't help but wonder whether single parents even bother with this, or if there's something else out there to help support them. But you just know that after babyhood, there are all kinds of playgroups and childcare centers and Kindergartens and all that, probably pretty cheap, probably pretty good.

386,000 people signed up for the 1.4 billion Euro program, so officials have had to cook the books a little to come out on budget. Next year, they're allotting 4 billion Euros. I think Americans spend that much in a weekend of light-fighting with insurgents in Iraq.

Photo: Bilderbox

Are Dads the New Moms?

Jessica Ashley (Sassafrass) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:31:00 GMT

And if so, when do I get all my retroactive paid vacation and Christmas office parties? Oh, and Post-It notes. I could really use a big drawer-full of free Post-It notes for all those little mommy (I mean PARENTAL) love notes in preschool lunches and reminders to order a Costco cake for the birthday party, send seven birthday gifts to other people's kids, pick up soy butter and little containers of applesauce (red NOT blue or orange) from the grocery store and copy playdates from email correspondence to the family calendar, call my mother/mother-in-law and all those little but imperative things mothers do. Errr, I mean, fathers.

Dads of today, columnist Lenore Skenazy writes, are picking up on the tenets of modern motherhood. In fact, she says, trophy husbands have replaced trophy wives by opting to spend more time with their offspring and putting the business of driving to soccer practice and searching the house, car and seven errand stops for a lost woobie ahead of the income-earning kinds of business. The big golden, gleaming trophy's no longer the Harry Winston tennis bracelet, Jag in the driveway or private lessons with an Olympian kayaker. Instead, its the privilege of being with and there for your kids.

I guess if I'm following these new guidelines, I have a trophy hubs of my own. After some grueling and marriage-altering months when my husband worked 70+ hours a week, we made a choice that he'd take a pay cut to reduce his hours so he could be home more and I could have a reasonable chance at avoiding institutionalization. Our budget's tight but Thursdays are now Men Only days and I can always count on my husband to be our family's parent of the day at preschool. He's also a faithful laundry-doer (even if I have to remind him that sheets need to be changed at least monthly) and dishes-doer (even if he actively avoids the sippy cup valves). While the "dads are the new moms" is catchy, I just think of us as having as equitable a partnership as we can. But I might just change my tune if he remembered to buy a card for his own sister's birthday and stopped dressing the boy in those goofy mismatched outfits.

SAHDs Worth Less Than SAHMs

Karen Murphy — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:24:00 GMT

Um, sorry, stay-at-home dads. Apparently not only are you unmanly, but the work you do just doesn't cut it. In fact, according to a new stupid study by Salary.com, you deserve less phantom money than do the reviled-but-evidently-harder-working-than-you stay-at-home-moms.

See, the thing is, you're not working enough overtime. You're only putting in some 80 hours a week at this Dad Thing, while the stay-at-home moms put in more than 90. It could be that you're more efficient at your work, couldn't it? Why yes, and it also could be that you're watching too much Scott Baio. So you only don't get $128,755, while SAHMs don't get $138,000.

However, dads with jobs also deserve an additional $72,000 for the work they do around the house. That's a LOT of lawn-mowing.

I don't know why calculating your worth as a dad in terms of salary (that you'll never see) is useful, but if you want to do it, go ahead. And then give yourself a hug, for being you.

Family Leave: Two Dads Tell Their Stories

Jessica Ashley (Sassafrass) — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:23:00 GMT

I hope all of you out there enjoying your lattes and tuning out Dragon Tales are ready to hear this: Some states in our fair union are actually granting paid family leave. And get this, even men can get it.

I know, I know. It's all a bit much, isn't it? Validating men who actually want to stay home to feed babies pumped breastmilk, answering a thousand or more questions an hour and experience the wonderment of child-rearing in its purist, poopiest and sweetest moments. Giving them a portion of their paycheck so the family doesn't have to subsist on grandparent handouts or college tuition savings accounts for papa to be in the picture. Or even (and this might be sort of a stretch) wiggling out the bricks of the big old wall of the patriarchy (and some playgroups) where women return to work after becoming mothers or parents actually equitably share the primary caregiving responsibilities. It's a crazy world, or at least left coast.

This inside view of how dads in two families in California are making it work during family leave time is sweet and honest and a damn good appendix to my long list of reasons why I hope Obama works his charm on parenting issues here in Illinois before heading to the big house. Seriously, I want my husband home when we (eventually) have a second child and I don't think he should suck up his sick time or vacation time or our savings to be there. And if by some Democratic miracle it ever does happen, the only thing I'll worry about is what kind of clothes he's picked out for the defenseless child to wear all day.

Paid Family Leave: Two Dads Tell Their Stories

Jessica Ashley (Sassafrass) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:03:00 GMT

Attention Dads: Harlequin Seeking Models

Sarah, Goon Squad Sarah — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 22:11:00 GMT

Here is an idea for all of you stay-at-home-dads to pick up some extra money. Are you sexy, sensitive, beautiful and fit? If so, Harlequin Enterprises - the one with the soft-core romance novels is looking for men to model for the covers of their books.

Apparently, their core audience (the average reader is 42 and female) isn't buying the 19 year old Guess model as the hero of a novel who is the CEO of a mutli-million dollar corporation. Go figure. Just because someone likes to read trashy novels doesn't automatically make them stupid enough to believe that the billionaire investment banker has the time to spend 20 hours a week in the gym and has worked his way up the corporate ladder without getting any grey hairs.

Harlequin is looking for non-model models*. They are in search of regular sexy men.

Think about it guys. It pays about $250 an hour. You could pay the babysitter and still have money left over to buy a new Xbox.

* Regular looking man not pictured here.

K-Fed Cleans Up, Steps Up

Alisyn — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 13:01:00 GMT

Kevin Federline is joining the ranks of America dads who are cleaning up their acts, stepping up to the plate, and raising the children they helped bring into this world. And from what I've been hearing, he's doing a pretty admirable job, too.

While his estranged wife exorcises her demons in rehab, Kevin has been caring for Sean, 18 months, and Jayden, 6 months, with the help of a nanny and his mom. The l'il Feds even tagged along with Dad to a paid Vegas gig over the weekend, where sources told People he was subdued, "not the wild, crazy Kevin who used to come to Vegas," even arriving late for dinner with friends, because he wanted to tuck his boys into bed for the night.

People around him are saying that Britney's breakdown has helped the father of 4 prioritize his life, and that he now "wakes up with a purpose each morning."

When I'm wrong, I am willing to admit it. And I admit - I think I was wrong about you, Kevin Federline. Your music sucks, there's no two ways about that. But as a dad, and a human being, you seem pretty cool. You keep on keepin' on, and those little boys may grow up to be very fine people, indeed. As a Dad, you clean up real nice, K-Fed.

Now, about those clothes/shoes/jewelry/hair/facial hair/bad tattoos....