Opinion | The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals
It’s because there’s still a widespread reverence for the “ideal worker.” We commonly define the ideal worker as someone who starts working in early adulthood and continues, full-time and full force, for 40 years straight. The concept reflects a breadwinner-homemaker model that dates back to the Industrial Revolution and functioned fairly well thr
... See moreJoan C. Williams • The Pandemic Has Exposed the Fallacy of the “Ideal Worker”
Ilana Ettinger added
Ilana Ettinger added
The system itself — which, like so many corners of the American labor market, still assumes the support of a partner that does not work full-time outside of the home. If you have that support, you will excel. If you don’t, you either have to make enough money to buy it, or you will (perhaps in slow motion, but inevitably) drown.
Anne Helen Petersen • The Expanding Job
Danielle Vermeer added
This growing decline in familial support for raising children—and college-educated women becoming the lynchpin for knowledge work in America— meant that demand for paid family services has increased dramatically. In the 1990s and 2000s, this question of how to support working parents became another front in the culture war.
Katherine Boyle • Can Zoom Save the American Family?
sari added
To be sure, we’re seeing the erosion of the ideal of an employee whose family responsibilities are kept tastefully out of sight.
Joan C. Williams • The Pandemic Has Exposed the Fallacy of the “Ideal Worker”
Ilana Ettinger added
Overemployment is more than just a style of work. It’s an ideology of individualism and self-reliance held by many who feel that corporations have turned their backs on workers.
Fadeke Adegbuyi • The Unlikely Cure for Burnout? A Second Job
Ilana Ettinger added
The more money you make, the less likely you are to place ‘being a parent’ at the center of your identity. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that middle and upper-income people are more likely to understand their identity as their job, but even that doesn’t fully explain this stat. Instead, I’d argue that bourgeois parents
... See moreAnne Helen Petersen • The Anxious Style of American Parenting
Not long ago, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied life at Amerco, an unusually worker-friendly Fortune 500 company. In her 1997 book The Time Bind, she reported that workers had grown so entranced with life in their workplace that they’d started avoiding their less well-tended-to personal lives. To maximize the time spent in the office or on t
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