Work-life Balance Is Impossible When You’re A Work-from-home Mom 

It’s January, 1999—1 am. With my three-week-old son finally down for the night, I’m dialing in. Pushing away dinner crumbs, stacks of bills and partially folded onesies to make room on the worn kitchen table for my laptop, I reach down, yank the phone cord from the receiver, plug it into my computer and I’m ready to work. I open the grant application that’s due in 18 hours, aware I have about 6 to work on it before my colicky baby starts screaming. Staring at the digital boxes I need to fill in, I flash back to how quickly work has changed. Back in 1995, I called offices to ask for applications, printed them out and then drove across town to hand the finished product—neatly stapled in triplicate—to a receptionist. I used to break tasks down into days; now I parcel out hours. At 4 am, I finish a decent enough draft to justify a two hour nap before my son wakes up needing food. At 9 am—after three hours of diaper changing, laundry and coffee—I plug the phone cord back into the receiver and wait for my boss to call with line edits, which I enter while nursing the baby on my lap. The internet allowed me to blur the lines between family, mothering, housekeeping and professional work—every minute of every day and night. No boundaries. No hard stops. I started a freelance business before the birthing stitches had even healed. I avoided day care because I could—combining work life and motherhood into one seamless, multi-tasking mess. My career and my kids grew without day care, but I suffered. Alone in the house with babies and deadlines and laundry, with meals to cook and client demands to meet, I got sick a lot: breast infections, strep throat, bronchitis, walking pneumonia, pulled back muscles. One night, I lay beside my snoring husband while my body shook with fever and infection. I willed myself to make it through the night because going to the hospital wasn’t an option—who would nurse the baby if I left? As the kids grew, the pattern solidified and normalized a constant, dual purpose. Too often I bribed my kids with cartoons and a box of Cheerios so I could participate in a video call. I once cleaned up an exploded diaper while on a conference call with a phone cord (when I still had a landline) that stretched just far enough to reach the changing table. Chaos doesn’t even begin to describe it: poop on the phone, poop on my clothes and wipes everywhere. Those first few years were a blur of desperate, questionable decisions. I laughed out loud when a fellow mom told me the television shouldn’t be used as a babysitter. The internet gives us choices—maybe too many. It deludes us into believing that opening one more tab—children, home, marriage, another client—won’t break us.  But for me, the price was too high. When boundaries disappear between work and home, when nothing shuts down, when no one turns off the lights and places a closed sign on the door, then the burden is always on us to say enough—and setting boundaries was never my forte. In 2001, the internet felt new and empowering, especially with a newborn and a toddler. I did a lot of writing in the middle of the night while the house and my family slept, and I made it work for a long time before I recognized how exhausted and lonely I felt, before I acknowledged that every muscle in my body was clenched against the weight of the tasks. Every 15 minutes I required myself to accomplish at least two: a load of laundry and a quick email, breastfeeding my infant daughter while writing an invoice, talking to a client on the phone while pushing trains on toy tracks to keep my 2-year-old occupied. I lost myself under the heaping mounds of it all. I never looked in the mirror. I never looked down at my own body. I just kept going. I would stand on the second floor at the top of the stairs, balancing my two-year-old on one hip and cradling my newborn in the other arm, and I would think about how I was going to make it down all those stairs. If I fell, no one would be there to pick us up. Twenty years later, the pandemic sent most everyone home. Parents worked online with young children beside them and older kids in virtual school. As I watched them juggle during our zoom meetings, I felt a mix of condescension and relief. Parents could turn away from the screen to help a child with a math problem, pour a glass of milk or scoop a toddler off the dining table where they had climbed.  All this in full view of a professional work meeting. No clandestine bags of Oreos hurled at the preschooler to stave off an impending tantrum,or so I assumed as I watched mothers and fathers turn from the screen to visibly soothe a child or offer a snack—all in plain sight. Part of me would get annoyed when young parents complained about working from home with kids because I had lived through it so alone. Why were they complaining? They didn’t have to hide their kids from the screen’s view. They knew their coworkers were doing the same and so had a community, albeit a cyber one. They had an entire nation in tandem to empathize. But then I realized that real progress was being made here. It took a life-threatening plague and widespread physical isolation to expose the façade and impossibility of separating work-life and parent-life. That the mess of it all flows into each other, and that we all have, by necessity, multiple tabs open all the time. View comments


Dads Are Work-from-home Winners — But Ditching The Office Has Downsides 

The work-from-home revolution has transformed family life, encouraging and allowing many fathers to spend more time with their children. But the seismic shift has come with downsides. Not commuting to work has freed more dads to have meals with their kids, pick them up and drop them off at day care or school, and enjoy some pre-dinner playtime. Working fathers who were once oblivious to what their partners did all day, from running the house to raising the kids, had their eyes opened during pandemic lockdowns. Some are now more understanding and able to help, with those in heterosexual couples no longer defaulting to moms taking care of everything. "Having fathers work remotely is generally good for families," Daniel Carlson, the interim chair of the University of Utah's department of family and consumer studies, told Business Insider. "Most dads want to be engaged with their home and children and so it offers them the opportunity to do so. For those not inclined to be engaged at home, it can expose them to all the demands of home they may otherwise miss. It sensitizes them to how much their partners have to do and leads them to want to share the load." Carlson noted that many families have two working partners, but the female partners "often shoulder a second shift of domestic labor and childcare. So, if dads can work from home, even if it's just occasionally, then this can lead to a more equitable division of labor in families." Pluses and minuses Yet Carlson noted that a WFH father isn't a magical cure for families. "Remote work is not a panacea. While it has benefits, it can also have costs," he said. "Remote work can solve work-family conflicts as well as create them," he continued. "The question is how remote work fits into your life. It's not so much whether people work remotely, it's whether they have the option to do so, and the support to make it work for them." Having two people share a typically small space can lead to feelings of claustrophobia and spark arguments over who does more chores or more childcare. Work can also creep into the home (think logging on after dinner or checking emails in bed), which can fuel stress and resentment, and make it harder for people to switch off. On the other hand, some people may feel pressure to complete household tasks during the working day. They might also feel obliged to run errands, such as mailing a package or picking up food for dinner. "The parent who's working from home becomes the housewife," Jennifer Glass, a sociology professor at the University of Texas, Austin, told Vox last year. She said that was especially true for mothers but applied to fathers too. There's also a risk of isolation and loneliness among the WFH crowd if they miss out on water-cooler conversations, after-work drinks, and office sports. They can become detached from their teams as longtime colleagues leave and new faces join, particularly if they only ever communicate virtually. Childcare concerns The lack of a commute and reduced presence in society could also mean people get less exercise each day and develop unhealthy habits. They might also fear they're less likely to be promoted, or at greater risk of being laid off, if they're never in the office. There's also a heightened chance of distraction or disruption when parents are in the same room as children or just a door knock away. They might be asked to watch the baby, pick up a sick toddler from day care and look after them for the rest of the day, or take their child to a doctor's appointment. "Both mums and dads can get pulled into childcare when they WFH, so for both genders this is definitely an issue," Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor, told BI. He noted that studies show that moms are far more likely to be called upon in childcare emergencies than dads. He also suggested disruption might be necessary if there's no alternative. It's easy to see how having children can magnify the downsides of WFH. Sleep deprivation from staying up all night with a newborn can stoke arguments between partners. More people in the house mean more dishes and tidying up to do. The demands of childcare can also make it harder to finish work tasks during the working day, or to find time to meet friends, fueling stress and loneliness. Finding the right balance There's significant variance in how much WFH is best for a particular employee's health, Bloom told BI. Bloom, who's part of the WFH Research team behind the US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA), said about a quarter of respondents "love fully remote as they might live near a park or a gym, or just having the time and peace to WFH is great for exercise." Close to half of people like a hybrid model or mix of in-person and home working. The final quarter prefers going to work every day, perhaps because of the social benefits and ease of joining team activities, Bloom said. "I do find WFH saves on the commute, about one hour per day for the typical person, and that's a lot of time," he said. Bloom noted that he clocks a 50-minute run during the time saved from commuting most days. "So my sense is the best WFH for employees' health is the one they choose." If he's correct, dads experiencing some of the challenges of staying home might consider going to work more. But that's not always feasible if they're needed at home to care for a child or other relative.


SEPTA Is Cutting Back On Remote Work For Its Administrative Workers 

SEPTA will curtail the number of remote work days that its nonunion office workers can take beginning Nov. 4. Starting then, only one remote work day will be allowed per week, CEO and general manager Leslie Richards informed staff on Friday. “We love the increase in activity we’re seeing throughout our system,” Richards said in a Friday interview. “With the city employees coming back, with Comcast coming back, we want to support that trend and support Philadelphia responding in a positive way. So it was time for us to revise our teleworking policy.” The order would apply to 2,109 office workers. Most of SEPTA’s employees — 9,300 — were never eligible for remote work. It is impossible to drive a bus or patrol a subway station from home. But so-called SAM employees — supervisory, administrative, and management — have been able to work remotely at least two days a week. Most of the affected employees work out of SEPTA’s headquarters at 1234 Market St. In Center City. Some workers who spoke with The Inquirer said they were blindsided by the decision and expressed frustration at the reduced flexibility. In some cases, employees had taken positions with SEPTA because of the hybrid work flexibility. But some said they appreciated that remote work wasn’t being eliminated, as Mayor Cherelle L. Parker has done for the municipal workforce, and that SEPTA is giving two months’ notice before the change takes effect. “I have had a remote working schedule the majority of my career, and I know how important it has been at times throughout my life,” Richards said. “That’s why we gave a two-month time period for employees to figure things out and talk with their families.” In her email Richards informed employees that some positions could still be allowed additional flexibility, especially “to address recruitment and retention goals.” Like many public agencies, SEPTA is suffering from a vacancy crisis although data was not immediately available about how many in-office positions remain unfilled. But Richards decided that more in-person days would boost collaboration in the office and improve services for the public. The decision also comes as SEPTA faces a funding crisis and watchful Republicans in Harrisburg, who recently praised a small SEPTA fare increase. “We understand the value of a flexible work environment to our team and did not come to this decision lightly,” Richards said in her Friday email to staff. “A stronger in-office presence allows SEPTA to continue to serve our riders, and it is vital to our core spirit value of putting safety first.”