With schools and day care programs closed, working parents are starting to crack. In an attempt to ease that pressure, there have been a number of essays telling parents to go easy on themselves. “Now Is the Perfect Time to Lower the Parenting Bar,” Kimberly Harrington wrote at The Cut. “Quarantine Parenting Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect,” the New York Times writer Elizabeth Bruenig reassured her fellow parents.
You’re doing the best you can, these essays tell us — our children will come out healthy and whole on the other end of this, whenever that will be.
It’s true. Our children will survive without a well-orchestrated activity for every spare moment, or with a couple of extra hours of screen time each week (or, let’s face it, a couple of extra hours a day). But amid all the articles reminding us that we don’t have to be perfect parents during lockdown, where are the essays letting us know that we don’t have to be perfect employees? Why are so many of us still maintaining the fiction that we are all as competent at our jobs as we were before the virus hit our shores?
It’s extremely telling where we’ve decided it’s OK to cut ourselves some slack, and where we seem to be continuing as if there weren’t a global crisis of historic proportions.
Family and personal life always takes second place to work in this country. It’s untenable most of the time, but it’s absolutely unreasonable right now. We are still somehow expected to get the same amount of work done as when we spent eight or more hours in an office without homebound children and a pandemic to distract us.
This is lunacy. Keeping output steady while maintaining our physical and mental health just cannot be done. We have to work less, and employers have to get on board.
Both parents work in the case of two-thirds of married couples with children under the age of 18; so do the vast majority of single parents. Right now 46 states and the District of Columbia have closed public schools, sending nearly 50 million students home, most through the rest of the school year. Sixty percent of child care programs have ceased operations. You do the math.
Yes, some parents have lost their jobs, or been furloughed, and may have more time for watching over children, even as their budgets wear thin and financial stress spikes. Others are essential employees still trying to find care for their kids so they can tend to the sick and keep the rest of us fed and healthy.
But that still leaves a huge number of us balancing jobs we are lucky enough to be able to do from home while caring for — and, in some cases, home schooling — our children.
In two-parent households where both have salaries, the adults may have worked out a schedule where they split child care and meetings. But there are only so many hours in the day. Those hours do not add up to enough time for both adults to put in a normal workday while also parenting (and eating and sleeping every once in a while). Those without guaranteed salaries — freelancers, contractors, gig workers — will simply lose income for every hour spent on a lesson plan and not at a laptop. And what, exactly, are single parents supposed to do right now?
It’s worth noting that it’s not just parents who need to chill out. The childless are similarly living through a disruption unlike anything they have likely experienced. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have died and many more deaths are still to come.
This is not just a mere distraction that we can compartmentalize during the workday. No one should be expected to be able to focus on work as if everything were normal during a completely abnormal time. None of us can be ideal workers right now.
Yet for many of us, there is little choice but to put together a Rubik’s cube of a schedule that allows us to keep working as much as we did before. Nearly 40 percent of Americans say they had no money saved up before the crisis.
If you’re lucky enough to still have a job you can perform under social distancing, you may rightly fear that cutting back at work will put much needed income at risk. Take it from Stephanie Jones, a single mother who repeatedly asked her employer, Eastern Airlines, for just two hours off a day to care for her 11-year-old son stuck at home after schools closed.
First, she says, the company rebuffed her, telling her it “was not in the interest of the company or yourself.” Then it fired her. Ms. Jones is suing her employer, because many parents should, at least on paper, be able to take paid leave if their children’s schools or day care centers are closed, thanks to the Families First Coronavirus Response Act passed by Congress. But that clearly doesn’t mean employers will follow the new rules.
But even those lucky enough to have understanding employers and paid time off may still be feeling the pressure to put in a full day. The line between being forced by a boss to stick to the same hours and voluntarily pouring ourselves into work is not always clear.
Where do bosses’ expectations — either explicitly stated or implied by their own 24/7 availability or late-night emails — end and the internalized pressure to keep working begin? Americans have long had a penchant for working too much; we typically put in 19 percent more hours than Europeans while still being less productive than many of our peer countries. Not all of those useless extra hours are compelled by workplace policy. We fuel one another’s culture of overwork.
Too many employers, it seems, are happy to take advantage of our economic precarity, shaky legal protections and workaholic culture right now. Americans are actually working more hours, not fewer, during the pandemic, according to NordVPN, which tracks when users connect and disconnect from the virtual private networks it provides. We’re logging three more hours per day, answering emails earlier than we did before and logging back on late at night (after, presumably, the kids are asleep, or at least dinner is cooked and eaten).
Far too often, employers are acting as if little has changed. Their employees are responding to their expectations by working themselves even harder. Enough.
The first coronavirus-related school closures started on March 11. We’ve been living through this crisis for nearly two months. The end is not in sight; most school districts plan to stay closed for the rest of the year, and some are even questioning whether they can reopen in the fall. It’s hard to imagine when we’ll feel safe going back to offices and crowding together to get work done away from our beds and kitchen tables.
The reality is that we simply cannot function the same way in our work lives as we did before. Now is the perfect time to lower the bar — the one employers hold us to, and the one we hold ourselves to, too.
Bryce Covert is a contributor at The Nation and a contributing opinion writer.
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